We are pleased to announce the official launch of Arctic Voices in Art and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, a 4-year international and interdisciplinary research project. Based at the Department of Language and Culture, Arctic Voices is funded by the Research Council of Norway.
Welcome, short presentation of the project and launch of website
Ingeborg Høvik (project manager, associate professor in Art History, UiT)
Address by the President of Sámediggi / the Sámi Parliament
Aili Keskitalo
Presentation ‘“Art history arrived in 1988”: Decolonizing Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’
Charis Gullickson (PhD student in Art History, UiT, and curator, NNKM)
Closing words
Ingeborg Høvik
To attend this event, please use the following Zoom link:
https://uit.zoom.us/j/67751099964?pwd=QlJuaWlKVEhmaE5WeHlDa05PUUtIZz09
Meeting ID: 677 5109 9964
Password: 153036
Arctic Voices gathers stories from the Arctic that places Arctic peoples and animals at the centre. The starting point for these stories is local places in the Western Arctic between about 1789 and 1914, a period when people and animals here experienced increased contact with and influence from Europe and North America. This was the result of intensified Euro- American imperialism in the region, through exploration, travel, settlement, missionizing, resource extraction and administration. At the same time there was a boom in textual and visual representations of the Arctic – from diaries, letters and sketches written or drawn in the Arctic to expedition narratives, illustrations, novels and paintings produced in Europe and North America. Common for this material was that it was mainly produced or inspired by European and American men who were attached, directly or indirectly, to colonial ventures in the Arctic. A result of this was that the perspectives of Arctic indigenous peoples and the presence of animals were excluded.
Arctic Voices presents an revised history where we address the perspectives and experiences of those who were on the receiving end of Euro-American imperialism in the Arctic. We find traces of these stories in texts and images that are based on meetings between Arctic indigenous peoples and Europeans/Americans and between humans and Arctic animals. This material falls in 3 main categories 1) Western art and literature bearing traces, or the clear presence, of indigenous peoples; 2) Images and texts created by Arctic indigenous individuals working in a colonial context; and, 3) Western and Arctic indigenous art and literature pointing to animal agency.
We analyse this material through a framework of Indigenous methodology, postcolonial, ecocritical and ecofeminist theory. Our hypothesis is that this approach to textual and visual analysis may elicit more democratic, equal and sustainable ways of understanding human relationships to the environment today.