SHIFTING GROUND – MUUTTUVA MAA
The exhibition ‘Shifting Ground’ is envisioned as a platform for transnational creative encounters with the everyday experience of climate change in rural and remote communities of Lapland and northern Canada. ‘Shifting Ground’ aims to contribute new artistic perspectives of Northern communities, peoples, and cultural contexts whose orientations in the global community are fundamentally shifting as a result of climate change.
What is the visual language of resource extraction and climate change? How can artworks shift attention to energy in place, represent local realities and figuring futures? How can we use artistic research[1]creation to disrupt the scale of our climactic imaginaries, bringing climate change into view as both an abstract, ‘system-wide’ and visceral, ‘here-and-now’ process that reflect northern experiences? In many ways, artists living and working in Northern ecologies – where the markers of climate change grow ever[1]more salient, and where the rate of warming far exceeds that of more southerly regions – are uniquely positioned to respond to such questions, and to consider the adaptations, challenges, and future possibilities that emanate from them.
Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa invites proposals from artists living in and working on issues of import to Northern ecologies, and which consider climate change through such lenses as:
- Extraction, consumption, commodification
- Technologies of adaptation
- Infrastructure and the built environment
- Site-specific, collaborative, or context-sensitive pedagogies
- Water security, habitat loss, or environmental justice
- Mapping or counter-cartography
Proposals will be accepted across a diverse range of media. We are particularly interested in works which engage with the materialities of land, either in a direct sense (e.g. as a material component to an artwork) or in a metaphorical sense (e.g. as a lens through which to problematize/investigate broader questions), as well as those which communicate the artist’s unique experience of and relationship to their local context.
Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa is a collaboration between Rovaniemi Art Museum, the Lapland Artists’ Association and Shifting Ground: Mapping Energy, Geography and Communities and in the North – project (Canada). Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa is funded in part by a Research Creation Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Shifting Ground Artists are Lindsay McIntyre (Inuit/settler), Tseme Igharas (Tahltan), Timo Jokela, Ruth Beer and Maureen Gruben (Inuvialuk).
Application instructions
We have open application process. Artwork technique is free. Applicant should be a member of Artists’ association of Lapland.
DATES: Exhibition 2.2.–12.5.2024, opening 1.2.2024
PLACE: Korundi House of Culture in Rovaniemi
CURATORS: Ruth Beer (CAN) ja Ulla Viitanen (FIN)
APPLICATION PERIOD: 15.3.–15.5.2023