Studio 207 · 20 → 23 November, 12:00–18:00
5mm slide projector, carousel of 80 slides containing thawing permafrost samples and more.
This sculpture is part of a larger artistic research project exploring the poetics of permafrost through analog technologies. The 35mm slides held in the projector’s carousel contain no photographic film, but rather permafrost samples taken by the artist’s collaborators in field research sites in Sápmi / Finnmark, that have been chosen and manipulated by the artist, and repeatedly frozen and thawed. In addition to permafrost samples, some slides also contain microbes cultivated from permafrost and thermokarst pond (thawed permafrost) samples, all taken in Finnmark. Others contain mixtures of forever chemicals and human tears: speculative sources of future permafrost. Every minute, the carousel rotates and a new slide (a sample sandwiched between two glass slides) is projected, thus thawing the sample and generating a moving, gradually disappearing image.
Taylor Alaina Liebenstein Smith (b. 1993) is a U.S.-born, French-nationalized visual artist currently based in Oslo, Norway. Her practice unfolds through collaborative research. She has been working with natural scientists since 2014 and more recently with poets, choreographers, architects and others in search of an appropriate interdisciplinary language to address the global ecological crisis. Her works seek to generate meaningful, emotional connections to threatened ecosystems, from polluted urban lakes and toxic waste landfills to thawing permafrost peatlands. Materially, she incorporates microbial media and toxins sampled from these ecosystems into film and video, photography, installation, performance, sound, printmaking and text-based works. She holds an MFA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, an MA in Cultural Mediation from the École du Louvre in Paris and both a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History from Boston University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Atelier Nord in Oslo, and the KulttuuriKauppila Art Centre in Finland.