The Best Country in the World

The Best Country in the World 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.

Initiated by curator and artist Sergey Terentyev, the exhibition in Terminal B and The Old Tourist Hotel is a result of the Guidebook to Norway/Russia project that has been ongoing since Barents Spektakel 2021. The project has been inspired by the Pomor communities of the Barents coast, who, in the 1700s, until the early 1900s, created a common language of “Russenorsk” through the exchange of goods and services. 

The process has involved the artists ‘guiding’ each other through different elements of each other’s lands – What are the familiar sounds, smells and feelings in Karelia? How does one ‘become Norwegian’ through an understanding of its idioms? What can be learned about a place through its music, its poetry, its plants, customs, and natural resources? What are the things one might find written in a guidebook, and what knowledge remains more hidden?

A direct webcam link to an installation called Future Perfect Continuous in Vyhod Media centre in Petrozavodsk, will also give us an additional insight into the processes of the artistic works on display.