“The Arctic Is a Mirror of What Happens Around the World”

This month, the Arctic Art Institute organized its fifth Arctic Art Forum at the Climate House in Oslo. 

Through an exhibition and symposium, artists explore the consequences of climate change on nature and culture in the North under the title Climate Microchanges.

As climate change is impacting the Arctic at a disproportionate rate, it has already started to affect local and traditional knowledge, which has been passed down for generations.

The exhibition provides space for local and Indigenous voices, allowing insight into how their art and knowledge can provide hope and serve as a tool when facing future challenges.

Brita Slettemark, Head of the Climate House at the Natural History Museum, says that art and culture give people new perspectives to see the world and the society we live in in other ways than by research and 'dry facts.' 

"We believe that art and culture also allow us at the Museum to have a dialogue with other audiences than people we most often meet."

Ekaterina Sharova, Co-Founder and Co-Curator of the Arctic Art Forum, corroborates this statement and says that many different people took the time to visit the Forum.

"The audience has been diverse: artists, researchers, locals. During the day, the venue is an educational space for young people, which was perfect. It has been wonderful to see friends who attended previous forums or those we met at different Arctic-related events earlier, but also new visitors who are also interested in the themes being discussed."

"I think this meeting between different forms of creating knowledge - academic and artistic research - was especially important."

Forgotten stories

Ekaterina explains that the Forum has focused on epistemological gaps, with the aim of making knowledge from the North visible and recreating forgotten stories.

"The decisions are taken in the centers, often without asking those who actually were born, grew up, and live in the area. School curricula have disregarded indigenous and local knowledge all around the Arctic for decades, so we who grew up there had to unlearn and relearn about ourselves," she says and continues:

"Art focuses on nuances which often disappear in the media noise; having a great power to enlighten in potential, tabloid media often repeat the same story anew."

Climate change and art

Ekaterina believes that the Arctic is still thought of as a vast, white space with no people.

"It is an 'ice queen waiting to be won,' like in the drawing of Joseph Swein, or a resource bank for international companies or political adventurers."

"The theme Climate Microchanges is about multiple invisibilities, which, seen together, show us the irreversible changes taking place globally. The Arctic is a mirror of what happens around the world."

Brita says that the Forum has been able to demonstrate environmental challenges in the North through a new lens.

"Warming in the Arctic is many times faster than the global average. The Arctic is exposed to major changes because of this and social and other conditions. This affects the people who live there, their culture and their livelihoods. We at the Natural History Museum have had this topic up for many years, especially in the Climate House," she says, adding:

"This time, through a collaboration with Ekaterina and her network of contacts in Arctic Art Forum, we had the opportunity to shed light on the challenges in a completely new way where culture and cultural expressions were dominant."

Feeling and experiencing

Olga Shirokostup, Co-Curator of the V Arctic Art Forum, adds that art helps bring people together, allowing them to share experiences and to listen. 

"Art can help to transmit experience, not only by communicating knowledge, but by involving people in it, engaging on different levels of perception, a shared experience for the resonance to be stronger," she says and continues:

"The Forum opened with a performance by Tuula Sharma Vassvik and Nicola Renzi, and it felt like a moment when we were able to tune ourselves to each other and connect to Sami memory and experience."

"Daria Orlova’s sound work presented in the Botanical garden resonated to this. Being a long-term environmental activist, she invited us to hear quiet sounds, quiet voices, and to hear each other, whether these are human or non-human agents. It is about a particular kind of sensitivity."

Brita also believes that art can provide a more pathos-based perspective on climate change in the Arctic. 

"Art can shed light on the effects of climate and environmental change in other ways and perhaps evoke more emotion and curiosity. Hopefully, this can again lead to people and politicians realizing what they are about to lose and getting ideas for how they can do politics and contribute."

A few works from the exhibition:

One of the artists who contributed to the forum is Katie Basile, based in Bethel, Alaska.

For over a decade, she has worked with local communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, one of the first regions in the U.S. to experience forced relocation due to the climate crisis. She has documented how climate change transforms landscapes and everyday life in the area.

She presented her work, Napakiak Memory Maps, which are videos that shed light on how thawing permafrost, floods and erosion threaten the village of Napakiak.

See one of the memory maps to the right.

Concert for Plants

Daria Orlova and Roman Kamilov exhibited their work titled Concert For Plants. 

The work documents a live performance in the Polar-Alpine Botanical Gardens in Kirovsk, which is the northernmost botanical garden in Russia.

The electronic set is a gift to the vulnerable flora, recognizing its resilience in a harsh climate. The work is both a poetic gesture and an ecological reflection of sound artists and environmental activists, who continue a vulnerable practice in a context characterized by extractivism and militarization.

Language, Shame and Laughter

Lena Ylipää lives in Lainio, Sweden, 140 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle. In her practice, weather is both a daily routine and a social language that connects communities, while climate is often a more political and decisive topic.

During a stay at the Vitsaniemi weather station at the Torne River, where Swedish, Sami, and meänkieli coexist, she took back her native language, meänkieli, through daily weather reports on Instagram, a personal dictionary and a weather journal. 

The project is a part of her long-term research on language loss and language recovery.