Museum of Natural History · 22 November, 10:40
The artistic research project and resulting exhibition
A feeling of longing that freezes and thaws
explore the poetics of permafrost in a warming climate through analog technologies. This project is the result of a collaboration with permafrost researchers from the University of Oslo’s Center for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene (Mats Ippach, Anfisa Pismeniuk, Eira Carlsen and Alexander Eiler) and performer/choreographer Tim Winter begun in 2022. Through this experience, Taylor began to understand permafrost as an abstract, distant thermodynamic entity, whose emotional counterpart is longing. She thus became particularly interested in exploring how we engage with permafrost physically and emotionally, through our own bodily perceptions of temperature. Her recent exhibition held at Atelier Nord in Oslo combined permafrost samples projected via 35mm slide projectors and magic lanterns, a 16mm film, cooling elements, and field recordings from the sampling process in Sápmi / Finnmark. A performance, publication and presentation with her collaborators accompanied the exhibition.
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 microbes and toxins sampled from these ecosystems into film and video, photography, installation, performance, sound, printmaking and text-based works and workshops. 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.