Shifting Ground - Muuttuva maa : Volcana Arctica 2022-2023: wool, mixed media textiles and charcoal on wood / villa, tekstiilit ja hiili puulle

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