Thu 15:00 - 20:00
Fri 15:00 - 20:00
Sat 12:00 - 20:00
Sun 11:00 - 15:00
The Exhibition Programme at Barents Spektakel 2022 will open on Wednesday 23. February across several venues in Kirkenes – Terminal B, The Town Square, Gågata, Pumpehuset and The Old Tourist Hotel. These venues will also provide the setting for many of the festival’s live events. Parallel exhibition works will be staged as part of our Russian Satellite programme in St Petersburg, Petrozavodsk, and Murmansk in addition.
The Best Country in the World
Group Exhibition / Terminal B
The Best Country in the World is a group exhibition that explores the possibilities of how one can travel across borders at a time when free movement has not been possible. Over the past year, four artists from Karelia (Artem Starodubtsev, Natalia Loginova, Natalia Egorova, and Victoria Kopeikina) and four artists from northern Norway (Janna Thöle-Juul & Malin Lin Nordström, Kristin Tårnes, and Trygve Luktvasslimo) have been taking part in a process of digital exchange – sharing information, contacts, knowledge, and artistic ideas together. The result is a group exhibition that shows the power of imagination and camaraderie, and the lenses through which we perceive distant places. A parallel exhibition installation Future Perfect Continuous by Sergey Terentyev will be staged in the Vyhod Media centre in Petrozavodsk.
“Martsialnye Vody”, or “Waters of Mars”, located around 50 km outside of Petrozavodsk and founded in 1719, is the oldest spa in Russia. The artists Janna Thöle-Juul and Malin Lin Nordström will work with the fantasy of this distant place, as if it were science fiction, within their installation space inside the Old Tourist Hotel in Kirkenes.
An advertising sign displaying the words MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! will light up Kirkenes throughout the Northern night.
We all remember Donald Trump’s failed proposal to buy Greenland in 2019 – a large slice of the arctic region. This time it is the North that will be “Great Again”. NORDTING will turn the ex-president’s infamous election slogan on its head in order to challenge these power relations.
This is an “I love the North” campaign, a “The North must decide its own fate” campaign, a “The North is Great” campaign!
It’s about changing the way we think, and how to shift the perspective inside our heads – both in the North and the South. It is simply a matter of the stories we want to tell and who decides who gets to tell them. – Amund Sjølie Sveen, leader of NORDTING.
The Norwegian minister of culture and equality Anette Trettebergstuen will mark the official opening.
Espen Sommer Eide presents Arkadia 02-22, an audiovisual work based on a series of travels, experiments and performances in the Northern regions of Norway, Finland and Russia. The video and audio material are recorded with various equipment over the course of 20 years and re-composed and re-presented with the assistance of various artificial intelligence and machine learning models.
In addition to the computer generated material, the work forms a hypnotic loop inside the local venue, pumpehuset, where repetitions and rituals weave a number of new audiovisual performances based on local everyday experiences.
Riikka Keränen introduces a family of sculptures made of clay from Pasvik, sand from Grense Jakobselv and Sandnes, horse manure from Jarfjord, and straw from the artist’s home village of Karhulankylä in the Barents region of Kainuu, Finland. Riikka will activate these sculptures along Kirkenes Gågata in a performative “work of warming” throughout the festival.
What are the sounds that represent us exactly? Kurant9000 – an artist-run exhibition space in Tromsø – will introduce and operate quite a special mobile listening station during Barents Spektakel. Collectively, they will begin a mission to collect and archive the sound of the young, untamed voices in our borderless North. With a listening station on wheels they will roll around Kirkenes, and hold an open studio base in the Old Tourist Hotel. Audiences can tune in with their FM radio, and experience live performances, field recordings and conversations throughout the week. The whole process can be followed through: https://kurant9000.no/!
The Old Tourist Hotel bar opens its doors again under the name “Bar Du Nord”! Distilled essences from the forest park at Elvenes will be available, and visitors can observe how moss-grown tables, and the practice of sniffing northern lights powders are now in vogue. In the newly opened establishment, an eclectic mix of past, future and scientific meditations will be served. Enter the festival bar to see, listen, touch, smell, and sniff through this unique experience. Get yourself a drink, a shot, a sniff, or a touch! And above all, expect the unexpected!