Arctic artists draw attention to how climate change impacts local life

Arctic Today sat down (virtually) with curators Ekaterina Sharova and Olga Shirokostup to discuss the Arctic Art Forum, held last month in The Climate House in Oslo. Titled “Climate Microchanges,” the event focused on environmental impacts that reshape everyday life in the North — changes that remain largely invisible from political centers where decisions are made.

Q: What is Climate Microchanges about? Why was this topic chosen this year?

Ekaterina Sharova: Climate Microchanges is about the small, often unnoticed environmental and cultural changes happening across regions like Northern Norway, Greenland, Alaska, and Northern Canada. Instead of focusing on dramatic climate disasters, it highlights subtle shifts in ecosystems and everyday life, and how these changes affect communities and identities. It also explores how dominant ways of understanding the world can overlook or silence local and Indigenous knowledge — or include it into knowledge production.

There are not many large urban areas in the High North; there are villages and small settlements. The forum wanted to highlight how small, local changes in different Arctic places, observed and reflected by artists from Svalbard, Alaska, or the Kola Peninsula, point to a shared, larger climate reality — even if each change seems minor on its own.

Olga Shirokostup: Our aim was to create a space where different forms of knowledge and experience could meet and where climate urgency could be discussed not only as an abstract global issue, but as something lived and experienced in specific places, communities, bodies, and languages. Climate urgency is something we observe through micro-changes and through everyday practices, by paying attention and by taking small but constant actions. For many of the participants, climate change is not just a topic for making works; it is something present in their everyday lives – something they study and experience from within.

Q: What is the Arctic Art Forum?

Ekaterina Sharova: It is an initiative of artists and curators born and raised in the North, which has a goal to put Northern stories on the map, discuss knowledge creation, open unexpected possibilities and challenge the existing biases.

The High North is an abstract space for many, but the area has become more attractive economically and politically because large amounts of oil and gas could be found there. Because of global warming, the Northern Sea Route is used for logistics of goods between Asia and Europe. The recent interest of Trump to Greenland shows that it’s not a peripheral region anymore; it’s a center to be discussed and understood better.

Olga Shirokostup: Arctic Art Forum works with creating spaces for a meeting of different views and voices, and shared practice. We are happy that the team of the Natural History Museum is a co-author of the V Arctic Art Forum this year. The Climate House’s atrium space is activated daily through educational programs and meetings. Artworks became a part of this living and active environment.

Additionally, we understand the V Arctic Art Forum not only as a temporary gathering, but as an organic, situated project, shaped by its environment and attuned to the broader ecologies it inhabits. Placing the program within the Climate House allows us to activate an intersection of critical discourses: reflections on human–environment relations and the Planetary Garden concept proposed by Gilles Clément. Together, these perspectives guide our inquiry into human and more-than-human entanglements, emphasizing the creation of shared knowledge among artists, participants and visitors.

Q: How can art help us better understand climate issues?

Ekaterina Sharova: Artists have been developing artistic research rooted in place. This deep sensitivity allows them (and us, as exhibition visitors) to notice and express subtle changes, like weather patterns or shifting relationships between people and land, that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Art also translates complex processes into human experiences. Instead of abstract data, it shows how climate change affects the identity of people and everyday life. By working closely with Indigenous and local knowledge, artists can challenge dominant perspectives. In this sense, art doesn’t just explain climate change; it connects people to it emotionally and culturally, helping us see that even small changes are part of a much larger global reality.

Olga Shirokostup: Many of the projects we discussed work through small or quiet gestures — attentive observation, listening, or long-term collaboration. This attentiveness and persistence are very important.

But we are also living in a moment of ecological urgency, when climate issues are increasingly overshadowed by war, geopolitical conflict, and sometimes deliberately pushed aside in political discourse. We discuss how artistic and research work can help keep these questions visible, even when public attention shifts elsewhere.

Q: Can you give us some examples of the types of installations on display at this Forum?

Ekaterina Sharova: Katie Basile’s work about the Napakiak village in Alaska shows the long-term consequences of gradual climate change over several generations. Children in the village interview the elders about the space and their childhood. The artists, together with the kids, created a map and filmed with a drone from above. We find out that the areas the elders are talking about are now under water. What begins as small environmental shifts eventually leads to displacement, making a distant global issue feel immediate and human.

Artists focus on lived experience and intergenerational knowledge. Researchers Mai Britt Utsi and Nicola Renzi, in Čuoikkariššu / Mosquito Shower, draw on Sámi perspectives, showing how climate change is understood through everyday encounters with land and animals. Their collaborative production was presented at the sound shower at the exhibition.

Mai Britt, who earlier has also been a rector of the Sami High School, performed the Mosquito Joik at the Symposium and brilliantly discussed together with a PhD and sound researcher Nicola Renzi.

Similarly, a collaboration between the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation and Kultivator bring forward Indigenous knowledge, emphasizing that these changes are not abstract, but deeply tied to culture and identity. What should be a priority?

Stein Henningsen uses performance to engage the audience more directly. His works, made in Svalbard, invite reflection on personal responsibility and our place within global environmental systems, connecting individual experience to larger planetary processes.

Arctic Sustainable Arts and Design Network of the University of the Arctic took part in the Forum with a talk about the Living in the Landscape Project. It also presented a fungi installation made of clay, textile, wood and other materials, showing the richness of crafts and its possibilities. Those who visited the symposium on March 14 were offered a seat next to this fungi installation, which was also a metaphor of networking, dialogic and horizontal relations. These topics have also been central for the Arctic Art Forum and the way it has been created and developed.

Together, these works form a coherent narrative: small, local changes are part of a much larger climate reality. Art connects these perspectives, making the invisible visible and the distant personal.

Olga Shorokostup: The Forum has explored questions of where knowledge is produced and by whom, and how it is shared and circulated. For us, it is important that artists present their research and experiences directly, in their own voices. Here we see an intersection of many contexts — social, political, cultural. The works presented at the Forum address environmental issues, but they always speak about something more as well: the disruption of everyday practices, the loss of language, or different forms of exploitation.

It is important to mention the work and presentation by the artist Lena Ylipää, who speaks simultaneously about climate urgency and about the loss and attempted remembering of her native language, Meänkieli. She uses a very personal and touching approach – working through her own experience of shame and loss – but presents it in a light and ironic format of Instagram stories, in the form of daily weather reports. In this way, we see an example of how we ourselves produce and consume circulating information, and how large political and environmental processes become part of everyday media language.

At the Forum, we also presented the ongoing work Carried by Rivers, Held by Land by Kultivator & Marianne Nicolson, created in collaboration with members of the Dzawada’enuxw First Nation (Melissa Willie, Charlene Dawson, Elisha Willie, Dawn Nicolson, Midori Nicolson). Malin Lindmark Vrijman and Mathieu Vrijman presented the project and spoke about its development.

Since 2023, within the framework of the Northern Art Project (Remai Modern, Saskatoon, and Konstmuseet i Norr, Kiruna), this long-term collaboration has brought together artistic and Indigenous knowledge. Öland, an island in Sweden where the artists of Kultivator live and work, and the Dzawada’enuxada’enuxw territory in the Queen Charlotte Strait region, are connected through research on water and shared ecological responsibility. Workshops with local communities — including one on making fishing nets from natural fibres — have created a space for the exchange of skills and memories, as well as for developing shared sustainable practices in response to climate change.

Artists showed the object – the net – in its current state. The work will continue during research trips to Canada in May and September next year. The documentation accompanying the work includes photographs from the exchange with the delegation from Kingcome Inlet, when nettle fibers were processed at Kultivator’s site on Öland, as well as documentation from research travels to the north of Sweden and Sápmi.

Q: Is art created by artists in the High North different from art created by artists in the south? How so?

Ekaterina Sharova: I think it is more about center/periphery instead of North/South axes. Artists in the South also work with decolonization and epistemic violence as a topic.

When I was trying to find a language for what I have been doing in the North both through research and curatorial work, I found answers or descriptions in the texts of Gayatri Spivak or Madina Tlostanova.

Olga Shirokostup: I agree with Ekaterina, I would not frame this as an opposition, but rather as a question of how and from where we look. Sometimes it is important, metaphorically speaking, to “turn the chessboard around” and try to see what is happening from the places where knowledge is actually produced, rather than from large intellectual centers and capitals.

This shift of perspective is an important process that many colleagues around the world are currently working to support. After the so-called spatial turn in the humanities, place and space are no longer understood as something given; they are seen as something constructed through human interaction, writing, and storytelling. Local experts, artists, cultural practitioners and knowledge holders do such important work to shape how we understand a place and what stories can be told about it.

Q: Do Arctic artists have to confront misconceptions about their region and people?

 Ekaterina Sharova: While I was co-curating the Art Ii Biennale in Finland, I spent some time in a residency called Kultuuri Kauppila. It had a library, and one book in particular was strange for me. It was about Romantic-era figures like Lord Byron and illustrations by Joseph Swein portrayed the Arctic as an empty, feminine space waiting to be “conquered.” This reflects a patriarchal, colonial mindset that ignores the people who actually live there.

So yes, Arctic artists often have to challenge persistent misconceptions about their region.

The Arctic is sometimes seen mainly as territory to control or exploit, while local perspectives are overlooked. As a person who grew up in the region, I know all too well what it means not to own your own history. The stories you hear at school shape your identity, and all of them were produced in the capital.

Artists respond by showing the region as lived-in and culturally rich, bringing forward local and Indigenous knowledge and everyday experiences, and challenging the idea of the Arctic as something to be won.

Olga Shirokostup: I think it is important not only to talk about existing narratives, but also to give greater visibility to artists and their practices – for the public, for colleagues from other fields (scientific, for example), and also for the artists themselves in relation to each other.

What is important, I think, is this work of developing shared understandings and a shared imagination of what the cultural spaces of the Arctic and the North are today: how they function, who shapes them, and what kinds of knowledge and experiences they include.

Q: What did you want to achieve with the 2026 Arctic Art Forum? Did you succeed?

Ekaterina Sharova: Arctic ice loss contributes about 35% of global sea-level rise. We would like to use the network developed through the 10 years the Forum has existed and keep showing new work from the productive and highly relevant artists from the Arctic.

It’s about raising awareness about the changes happening right now, which influence not only people living in the Arctic, but all others as well.

Olga Shirokostup: Art can help transmit experience – not only by communicating knowledge, but by involving people in it, by creating emotional and sensory engagement, and sometimes a kind of shared experience that allows the message to resonate more deeply.

I hope the Forum made this space possible – a space for listening, for careful observation, and for conversations that can continue beyond the event itself.

You can find out more about the program for the Arctic Art Forum here.