Arctic Circle Project (Svalbard)
The Arctic Circle Project (Svalbard) exhibition at Galerie Saint-Simon is a meditation on the Arctic as a real and imaginary place. Borrowing from Michel Foucault's concepts of the 'heterotopia' and the 'countersite,' it considers places like the Arctic as “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites [...] are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.” The Project also asks questions about the role of the photograph as an authentic record - a means of knowing things - and the ‘souvenir’ as object, encapsulating memories of sites visited.
The work exhibited at Galerie Saint-Simon stems from an artist residency aboard a tall ship, sailing around the Svalbard archipelago in the autumn of 2012. The expedition was documented with a series of photographs and short films, ‘en plein air’ drawings and a journal. Selected images were made into an artist’s book.
A long table in the center of the gallery space held assorted postcards, books, paintings, 'souvenirs' and ephemera. Photographs, drawings, posters and maps were displayed on the walls. In the window, a short film played on a loop.
--See Michel Foucault, « Texts/Contexts : Of Other Spaces », Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1986 : 22-27; Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin Books, 1977).
Images here are installation views of the exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Simon, Versailles, France in November 2019. The short film was also shown at the Skeiðarárhlaup micro-performance festival, Iceland, in July 2019.