ROSA BARBA
TANYA BUSSE
MARJA HELANDER
MARKUS LI STENSRUD
NORDTING

I converse with fire is the first group exhibition in a broader collaboration with independent curator Vanina Saracino, under the title Solar Kin. This long-term project explores the sun not only as a physical and energetic force, but as a cultural and cosmological presence. It seeks to trace solar imaginaries across astrophysical, spiritual, ecological, and technological domains—asking how our changing relationship to the sun reflects shifts in power, kinship, and planetary responsibility.

Every human culture has used fire intentionally: to gather, to cook, to defend, to attack, to transform, to transcend. Once a center of communal existence, where shared life, storytelling and survival were entangled, fire accompanied the gradual transformation of living conditions and social habits. But today, the act of burning has become a global hazard: the growing need for energy in Western societies manifests as an artificial light, fed by fossil fuels and the expansion of extractive and combustive technologies. “One who utilizes a particular energy starts to resemble that kind of energy,” wrote Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén. “We do not use oil as much as oil uses us. Industrial civilizations do not burn oil; oil burns them.”

I converse with fire references a verse by Sámi artist and poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää. It evokes a worldview where fire is not a tool, but a kin, forming part of broader practices of care, land stewardship, and more-than-human responsibility that rekindle the act of burning to its ancestral, Indigenous roots – particularly those in Sápmi, a region across what is now called northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia. Through a series of pyropoetic works, artists explore what it means to ignite, to burn, to resist burning, and to reimagine energy. These stories are told through situated practices: from Sámi campfires to Arctic extractivism, from California’s vast solar fields to the public square in Svolvær.

In They shine (2007) Rosa Barba turns the camera to the Mojave Desert, a landscape long marked by military experiments that left behind scars and debris. Today, solar panels and wind farms rise from this terrain, suggesting a new technological sublime that simultaneously echoes the ruins beneath. Shot on 35mm film, Barba’s work choreographs the slow movement of solar arrays, overlaid with the voice of a local resident caught between hope and disillusionment. The film reads as an elegy to modernism’s unfinished project, where dreams of progress are layered with the weight of environmental and historical violence.

Tanya Busse’s Wind sings to wire (2023) presents a field of flickering light bulbs suspended above the floor, their pulses keyed to electricity forecasts, energy predictions and futurological mappings linked to a plan approved by the Norwegian government (2023) to connect Melkøya, the country’s largest processing facility for liquified fossil gas, to the power grid. This rhythm traces a fragile future: the infrastructure fueling Melkøya’s operation threatens to reshape the Arctic’s ecologies and Sámi land relations, fragmenting reindeer migration routes and feeding grounds. The installation becomes a way of listening to an unstable future, marked by the political tensions pressing on the northern regions.

Marja Helander’s video works reference Sámi traditions and worldviews, weaving together contemporary life with ancestral stories, mapping tensions between tradition, industry, and identity. In Trambo (2014), a Sámi woman drags across a snowy mountain a large trampoline, a symbol at once playful and imprisoning. Dolastallat – To have a campfire (2016) imagines a modern campfire encounter in the Kola Peninsula, a traditional territory of the Sámi and now located in the northwestern part of Russia, within the Murmansk Oblast, where Arctic mining coexists with strategic military infrastructure.

Markus Li Stensrud conjures a world where meaning circulates slowly – through hands, snails, horses, suns – unfixed and echoing across time. The triptych Arms around the horse’s neck (2023) is part of the artist’s ongoing investigation into the genealogy of modernism. Through fragments of thought, form, and manifestos, he traces how fragmented sculptures from Antiquity were reimagined by artists and theorists as seeds of abstraction. Drawing from an early Dada manifesto draft by Tristan Tzara, who called for cave-painting horses to wash the world clean of logic and violence, Stensrud conveys Dada’s absurdist critique and desire to unmake order. In newer works such as Seremoni for de som allerede har reist (Ceremony for Those Who Have Already Left), Reseptor 1, and Soloppgang (Sunrise, all 2024–25), slow, hybrid creatures perform quiet acts of mourning, repair, and reception. Meaning isn’t fixed, but carried, reversed, and remade.

Like fire itself, the exhibition spreads beyond its core, onto the shop vitrines and out into the public square, both activated by NORDTING (The Northern Assembly: Amund Sjølie Sveen and Jérémie McGowan). In Real. Arctic. (2024), they blend performance, politics, and satire, appearing as artists and instigators to reveal the power structures that shape life in Arctic regions. Confronting the extractivist agendas with irony and choreographed dissent (Reindeer-lion, 2024, and opening performance), they confront the politics of extraction and sovereignty, disrupting dominant narratives about resource control and Arctic identity.

References:
Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, The Sun, My Father, 1991
Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén, Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology, 2015