Artists facing Polar Bears and Lemmings: art&sci expeditions in the Arctic

I present three Arctic art and science projects: Cape Farewell, PolArt and Ars Bioarctica. They are long term projects involving a collaboration of scientists and contemporary artists from the arctic environment. Cape Farewell has organised expeditions to Greenland, and PolArt to the Barents Sea and the fjords of Svalbard in Norway. Ars Bioarctica is an artists residency program in Kilpisjärvi, Finland. The result of these projects in contemporary art has included, for example, the use of video and photography to present the aesthetical dimensions of snow and ice, and documentation of the environment through various media and artworks to illustrate climate change. In the presentation I analyse how the North is described and presented in these art projects and what kind of meaning the art brings to the concept of the North; how this art reflects the Arctic region and presents an image of the Arctic.