ROSA BARBA
TANYA BUSSE
MARJA HELANDER
MARKUS LI STENSRUD
NORDTING


I converse with fire marks the beginning of a broader collaboration with independent curator Vanina Saracino, titled Solar Kin. This long-term project traces post-carbon imaginaries through art within the rapidly shifting context of the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, particularly solar energy. It looks at the sun as a central figure in ancestral cosmologies and genesis stories, and traces its reframing in the climate crisis as a symbol of ecological promise; a transition shaped by hope, contradictions, and shifting structures of power and accountability.

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.”

The exhibition title I converse with fire references a verse by Sámi artist and poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, found in his 1988 book Beaivi, áhčážan (The Sun, My Father). It evokes a worldview in which fire is not merely a tool, but a being, a presence, and it is granted personhood and agency in a reciprocal relationship. This understanding forms part of broader practices of care, land stewardship, and more-than-human responsibility in Sápmi, a region across what is now called northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and parts of Russia. Through a series of pyropoetic works, the 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 world-views, 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 works with the legacy and imaginary of modernism – not as a linear narrative, but as fragments and echoes circulating across time. The triptych Arms Around the Horse’s Neck (2023) is part of this ongoing inquiry. It explores the connection between the appropriation of ancient artifacts by colonial powers (sculptures marked by the wear of time and missing parts) and the emergence of abstraction as an independent aesthetic language. Through a juxtaposition of ideas, materials, and texts, including an early draft of a Dadaist manifesto by Tristan Tzara, Stensrud traces a critical thread through Western art history, where the absurd and the fragmented are placed in contrast to the notion of unity and order. In Tzara’s text, cave paintings of horses are summoned as counter-images to the ideals of modernity: wild, alive, and unruly – capable of washing the world clean of logic and violence. In recent 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 beings move through quiet gestures of mourning, repair, and listening. Here, meaning is not something to be fixed – it is carried, turned, and reimagined.

Like fire itself, the exhibition spreads beyond its core, into the shopfront and out into the public square, both activated by NORDTING (The Northern Assembly: Amund Sjølie Sveen and Jérémie McGowan). Blending performance, politics, and satire, they expose the extractivist agendas and the power structures that shape life in the Arctic. Disguised as a souvenir shop, the installation Real. Arctic. (2024) plays ironically with the notion of the “Arctic,” a term increasingly used in the touristic rebranding of the northern regions, encouraging mass tourism. In Reindeer-Lion, 2024, a monumental hybrid creature guards the entrance to the exhibition: with the body of a lion (a 1:1 copy of one of the lions placed in front of the Norwegian Parliament in Oslo) and the head of a reindeer, it disrupts dominant narratives of sovereign power and raises questions of land ownership and stewardship, particularly in relation to the Sámi territories.


dolain ságastalan
ihttin
juo eará giella dolasnai
ihtá bovccuin ođđa johtolat, geđggiin iežá vierut
amas áigi áiggis
amas
gárgánit, saŋet oavdu oainnut
vieris suopmanat jurdagiin čudjet
girjái
govvái govadas, girjjat
girját

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää


I converse with the fire
tomorrow
it too will have another language
new migration routes for tomorrow’s reindeer, the stones will have different
traditions
an alien time within time
alien
visions of wonders gradually reveal themselves
strange voices speak in my thoughts
ambiguous
like an image, emblem, figure
with many meanings

Nils-Aslak Valkeapää



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

Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
Video: Jona Kleinlein / Christopher Brautaset