For his museum debut in the United States, Anton Ginzburg will present At the Back of the North Wind and Walking the Sea, part one and two of a trilogy of works in film, photography, sculpture and painting developed around historical and cultural conceptions of mythical or legendary landscapes and places that have conquered popular imagination and spawned collective memories.

At the Back of the North Wind, first presented at the 54th Venice Biennial in 2011, is the result of Ginzburg's part-fictional, part-documentary journey to and search for Hyperborea, a mythical land that first appears in the writings of ancient Greek writers Hesiod, Homer and Herodotus as a place of pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal springtime. 

In Walking the Sea, Ginzburg crosses the Aral Sea — an inland salt-water sea that lies between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Previously one of the four largest inland bodies of water in the world with an area of more than 26,000 square miles, the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s and by now has almost dried up. Calling it a "ready-made earthwork," Ginzburg explores the poetic paradox of the sea without water. As in At the Back of the North Wind, the artist employs landscape that contains the remnants of the 20th century past to explore themes of collective memory.

On view through March 15.