🇳🇴 Arctic Art Forum: Climate Microchanges

Oslo | March 7–26, 2026
Botanical Garden, The Climate House, Sars’ gate 1

How do we talk about climate change when its most profound transformations are barely visible?

From March 7 to 26, 2026, the fifth Arctic Art Forum transforms the Climate House in Oslo into a meeting place for artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners from across the Arctic: Northern Sweden, Northern Norway, Finland, Svalbard, Alaska, and the Kola Peninsula.

Under the title Climate Microchanges, this year’s edition focuses on the subtle, cumulative environmental shifts that reshape everyday life in the North—changes that remain largely invisible from political centers where decisions are made.

Programme highlights:

• March 7, 12:00 – Exhibition opening: The Climate House Exhibition
• March 14, 12:00–17:00 – Symposium: “How to talk about the shared ecological urgency” with a concert featuring Tuula Sharma Vassvik and Nicola Renzi.
• March 15, 14:30–16:00 – Film screening and Q&A with Ruth Maclennan (UK) and Stein Henningsen (NO): Film Event

Participants

Katie Basile, Isabelle Desjeux, Stein Henningsen, Ketil Isaksen, Margrethe Kolstad Brekke, Kultivator & Marianne Nicholson & members of Dzawada’enuxw First Nation (Melissa Willie, Charlene Dawson, Elisha Willie, Dawn Nicolson, and Midori Nicolson), Lotta Lundstedt, Ruth Maclennan, Daria Orlova & Roman Kamilov, Nicola Renzi & Mai Britt Utsi, Sara Rylander, Lena Ylipää, Tuula Sharma Vassvik, Gro Ween.

Curators: Ekaterina Sharova, Olga Shirokostup, in collaboration with the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo.

The Forum was initiated and is run by artists and researchers from the High North. It promotes interdisciplinary exchange, grassroots collaboration, and artistic research rooted in ecofeminist thinking and decolonial methodologies.

Rather than presenting the Arctic as a remote frontier of extraction and geopolitical tension, the Forum positions it as a space of resilience, cultural innovation, and ecological consciousness. Central to the Forum’s ethos is the commitment to sustaining dialogue despite the challenging sociopolitical and environmental contexts of the present day.

Supported by:

Kulturrådet, Nordisk kulturkontakt, Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design Network (University of the Arctic), Umeå University, University of Lapland, Natural History Museum, and University of Oslo.

For more information, visit: Arctic Art Forum

Media Invitation

We would be delighted to collaborate with media partners and are happy to provide interviews, additional materials, or tailored content about the Forum. Please let us know what type of coverage would be most relevant for your outlet.

Press Contact:
Anastasia K. Røren
Arctic Art Forum
[email protected] | T. +47 46510187

Insights into the Art Forum

Katie Basile

Katie Basile presents her project on a destroyed Alaskan village. A recent New York Times article, “An Alaskan Village Confronts Its Changing Climate: Rebuild or Relocate” (December 5, 2025), examines the urgent realities of climate displacement in Alaska.

Photo courtesy: Photographer and filmmaker Katie Basile (Alaska).

Map of an Alaskan village with annotations.

Margrethe Kolstad Brekke

Artist Margrethe Kolstad Brekke, in her textile installation Utopia500, reflects on how dreams without strategies could turn into a dystopia and militarization.

Margrethe Kolstad Brekke.

Margrethe Kolstad Brekke – Tekstilverk (Textile Artwork).

Stein Henningsen

Stein Henningsen crafts his performances as evocative visual poetry and seeks to provoke audiences to reflect on their role in global challenges.

Stein Henningsen – Habitat.

Stein Henningsen – Timeline II.

Mai Britt Utsi and Nicola Renzi

Learn the indigenous knowledge system in Čuoikkariššu / Mosquito Shower with the Sámi artist Mai Britt Utsi and musician and researcher Nicola Renzi.

Nicola Renzi and Mai Britt Utsi.

Originally published by Arctic Art Institute.