San Francisco Bay Area artist Tanja Geis proposes a speculative future in which a submerged former military guard station is home to new marine life-forms adapted to and thriving amidst polluted, warming, acidifying and rising oceans.

To create her installation, Mud Will Remember Us (2023), the artist foraged local San Francisco Bay mud containing byproducts of human activity, including plastics, heavy metals and chemicals, which she then formed by hand into hundreds of sculptures suggesting simple-bodied organisms from another time. Geis incorporates these objects into a debut series of mobiles set against a fluorescent red background, playfully beckoning us to imagine this site beyond human memory.

The installation is free and open to the public, viewable through the windows 24 hours a day.

The Guardhouse is located at the main entrance to Fort Mason Center.

About the Artist

Tanja Geis makes research-based paintings, drawings, sculptures and videos that invite intimacy with human-disturbed edge ecosystems through queering, drawing close to and staying with the impacts of humans on the liveliness of non-humans. She received an M.F.A. in Art Practice from University of California, Berkeley, an M.R.M. in Marine Management from the University of Akureyri, Iceland, and a B.A. in Fine Art from Yale University. Her work has been exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and in Iceland, Scotland, England, Hong Kong and Japan. Geis is from Hong Kong and lives in Berkeley, CA.

Tanja Geis at The Guardhouse is presented by FOR-SITE in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The Guardhouse Program is made possible thanks to generous support from the ARB Fund.