Tanya Busse is a visual artist working across moving-image, installation, and photography mediums. Her practice boasts the synthesis of nature often combined with an industrial, post-human presence. Busse is interested in deep-time, invisible architecture and how power is produced and articulated through materials, relationships and geographies. Currently based in Tromsø, Norway, much of her work is informed by the matrix of local-meeting-global flows, shimmering forward together.

The area where Busse lives is many things: a land for reindeer calving grounds and migratory routes on land and sea, and of oil plants and refineries, military bases, radar stations, and testing sites. Such dark activity suggests the need for some possible counter future to the apocalyptic one that these extractivisms are leading us to. This is where she situates her practice; it is an attempt to propose alternatives to the military-industrial complex, extractive industries, and larger colonial narratives through personal and collective projects.

As with her other projects, Busse’s exhibition Secretary of the Invisible records what lies hidden and out-of-view, and grounds these things in the material force of images. Her photographs and moving-images digest cycles of organic growth and death, the production and consumption of power, and the mechanisms of energy distribution – both fabricated and naturally occurring. There is a suggestion of an excess of materials: the blood, sweat and tears of the body, the tailings and waste from large-scale infrastructural projects – all traces of labor, love, and lived life.

The exhibition Secretary of the Invisible is specifically produced to be presented alongside the arrival of Tanya Busse on the island of São Miguel. With this selection of both existing and new works, the exhibition aims to act as a multilayered reference point and gentle support structure accompanying her upcoming research in the Azores. A generous introduction to her work and a physical meeting ground for sharing and establishing connections with Busse and her topics of interest, as she enters TEMPORADA #1 as the first artist in residence.

During this residency, the relationship between Busse’s two primary points of reference – Atlantic Canada and Northern Norway – and now the Azores, will be the triangular departure point for her research, with a special focus on the ocean, as a key geographic space where tensions are regularly played out. In and along the rugged coasts, Busse will gather material, geological characteristics, and social traces of intangible political and economic processes, such as maritime zones, migration routes, military land development, and other abstract realities that exist within the islands.