Association of Polar Early Career Scientists

 

With great pleasure, the APECS Arts Project Group invites the public to an online tour of the Active Witnesses exhibition, an introduction to the project concept, and a Q&A session about socially engaged art in the Arctic and Lapland, specifically. The session will be held by the exhibition curator Raphael Vega. Please register here and join us on April 22 at 12 pm GMT.

Amass Poster square web2 Anastasia Deyko

The voices and faces of participants in socially engaged arts projects were presented in the Active Witnesses exhibition at Gallery Valo, Rovaniemi, Finland. Rovaniemi, located in the Saami Arctic, is famous for its cultural- and social-related art movements. The Arctic is the mix of cultures, nations, and traditions united by nature; this point is stated by the Active Witnesses initiative. Lapland was a very symbolic place for this exhibition: philosophy to observe life inside the polar circle, to coexist and conquer nature, to fight every single day in eternal winter and to make the most of every moment during the short summer. Those are gentle uniting points of everyone from the Arctic region. Those are secret ancient knowledge, that let original people survive independently of language, borders, and passports. Everyone in the Arctic is the active witness. Tracking activities of international cultural institutions and art movements, we can see a lot of effort in the direction to become relatively closer and the struggle to fight with divisions inside the region. Art was always a uniting power, evidence archiver, heritage protector.

The Active Witnesses exhibition brings together people and outcomes which form part of the EU-funded, Horizon 2020 research project ‘Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture’ (AMASS). A key goal of the AMASS project is to develop multidisciplinary methods for discovering, evaluating, and exploiting the societal impact of art. The project also aims to reduce isolation among women, children and minority groups by exploiting various forms of inclusive art and training participants through art-based pedagogical methods. Participants in the project's creative projects will come to the fore with the large AMASS wall on display in the exhibition, whose many faces and voices will bring out the experiences and life-guiding realities of people from different cultural backgrounds. Participants have first-hand experience of the realities that define their lives, but through artistic activity, they also actively address these life-guiding conditions. Socially engaged art is their means of responding to questions of cultural exclusion and discrimination through feelings, words, and doing. The exhibition also includes videos presenting the projects implemented in the AMASS project and other documents projecting the research work. In addition, the exhibition features a handful of works of art completed in the projects, which are a tangible testament to the material beauty of the outputs created during the project. The Active Witnesses exhibition is curated by artist and art educator Raphael Vella from the University of Malta. Researcher Amna Qureshi from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lapland is responsible for planning the exhibition.

Text by Gallery Valo, University of Lapland, and Anastasia Deyko

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