Arctic Circle Project (Svalbard)
In 2012, I undertook an artist residency aboard a tall ship, sailing around the Svalbard archipelago. The expedition was documented through photographs, short films, plein air drawings, and a journal; selected images were later made into an artist's book. The exhibition at Galerie Saint-Simon extends the Arctic Circle Project's meditation on the Arctic as what Michel Foucault called a "heterotopia" — a real place that simultaneously represents, contests, and reinvents other spaces. It also returns to questions the project has carried throughout: the role of the photograph as a record and a claim to knowledge; the souvenir as an object that encapsulates, and inevitably distorts, the memory of a place visited.
The exhibition brought together selected work from the residency — arranged in the manner of a working archive. At the center of the gallery, a large table held postcards, maps, souvenirs and ephemera as well as books that have informed and accompanied the Arctic Circle Project, present as objects as much as references.
Selected work from the Arctic Circle Project was exhibited at Galerie Saint-Simon, Versailles, France in November 2019. The short film featured in the exhibition was also shown at the Skeiðarárhlaup micro-performance festival, Iceland, in July 2019.
--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).