COPENHAGEN — Hundreds of shirts stretched across the exterior entrance of Copenhagen’s Charlottenborg Palace in late August 2022, the soft fabric contrasting with the hard brick building that houses the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Up close, each button-down on the artwork’s 10 tethers waved in and out of focus, revealing idiosyncrasies like wrinkles or tears; farther away, the distinct parts became indistinguishable within the whole. This was Kaarina Kaikkonen’s “We Need Some Hope” (2022), a sprawling iteration of her site-specific assemblages of found clothing commissioned for CHART, the Nordic art fair.

That there is a “we” was “We Need Some Hope”’s subtle message, a notion that reverberated throughout the art fair (which included artist-run spaces, publishers, and student presentations in addition to commercial galleries from Nordic countries) last August 25–28. And it resonates with Down Иorth, the inaugural North Atlantic Triennial on view at the Reykjavík Art Museum through February 5, between stints at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, last spring and Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden, later this year. Down Иorth examines artistic affinities from Maine to Finland; its curators Jaime DeSimone, Anders Jansson, and Markús Þór Andrésson suggest that artists working in these geographies connect through their shared contention with rapid climate change. The curators argue that the 30 artists presented in Down Иorth make work at the periphery — the very edge of environmental adaptation — away from the conventions of urban centers. Like CHART, the “we” in Down Иorth is expansive to artists and traditions beyond the Northern paradigm.

Since their proliferation in the 1990s, regional -iennials (biennials and triennials, commercial or otherwise) tend to exoticize regionality, seeking to confirm the assumptions of cultural capitals. As tandem events, Down Иorth and CHART suggest a model of regional exhibition-making that, instead of commodifying difference, teases out threads of particularity to refute essentialism common in contemporary art.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.