Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa

The Shifting Ground exhibition is a platform for international creative encounters with the everyday experience of changing ecologies in rural and remote communities in Finnish Lapland and northern Canada. Artistic exposure to the land and lived experiences serves as a productive mechanism for perceiving, representing, and interrogating the affective dimensions that are in planetary flux.

What is the visual language of resource extraction and climate change? How can artworks shift attention to energy in place, represent local realities and unfolding futures? In many ways, artists living and working in northern ecosystems – where the markers of climate change become consistently more glaringly obvious – are uniquely positioned to answer these questions, and to consider what adaptations, challenges, and future possibilities emanate from them.

The artworks in the exhibition offer ways to understand the land and the memories it carries – calling forth stories inscribed across the surface and layered deep underground. The exhibition communicates the artists’ unique experience and their relationship with location. The works highlight themes related to climate change, resource extraction and the changing ecologies and future challenges in the North.

Shifting Ground – Muuttuva maa is a collaboration between Rovaniemi Art Museum, the Artists’ Association of Lapland, and the Shifting Ground: Mapping Energy, Geography and Communities and in the North -project from Canada.

Artists of the exhibition: Ruth Beer, Lola Cervant, Maureen Gruben, Maria Huhmarniemi, Tsema Igharas, Timo Jokela, Eemil Karila, Miia Kettunen, Elina Länsman, Lindsay Mclntyre, Mari Mäkiranta, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Marjo Pernu, Marjo Pitko, Simi Ruotsalainen & Johanna Ruotsalainen, Antti Stöckell and Seija Ulkuniemi. The exhibition is curated by Ruth Beer and Ulla Viitanen.

The exhibition has been supported the Canadian Embassy in Finland, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Finnish Heritage Agency.

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EVENTS:

Shifting Ground -seminar 1.2.
13.00 Opening words
13:10 Artist Talk: Ruth Beer
13:30 Artist Talk: Timo Jokela
13:50 Artist Talk: Maria Huhmarniemi
14:10 Break, 30 min.
14:40 Artist Talk: Lindsay Mclntyre
15:00 Artist Talk: Tsema Igharas
15:20 Panel Discussion
16.00 Seminar ends

Seminar is in English. Free entrance. Welcome!

Shiftig Ground -exhibition opening 1.2.
at 18-20
Free entrance. Welcome!