January was a busy planning month for the Northern Initiative. We launched an internship program for researchers to access Museum collections and archives to further their investigations—whether students or independent researchers. We also launched Polar Lab, an active program that invites artists in all media to activate museum spaces for performances, installations and other temporal events. Polar Lab is a two-year project that will culminate in a major exhibition, interactive website, and publication. It places artists at the center of Northern researchers and takes traditional researchers at the center of Northern issues and presents their work through a visual and compelling narrative.

February the Northern Initiative is represented at the Reading and Exhibiting Nature Conference, which the Anchorage Museum is co-organizing with the University of Westminster in London and Ambika P3, the flagship exhibition space at the University of Westminster, which is presenting Out of Ice by visual artist Elizabeth Ogilvie, who participated in the Anchorage Museum’s Next North Symposium in 2012. The exhibition features environments created with ice and ice melt, constructions, films of ice systems, film of scientific expedition from Antarctica, and poetic film, much of it created through collaborations with Inuit in Northern Greenland, and reflecting upon their deep and sustaining relationships with ice. The exhibition will portray the psychological, physical and poetic dimensions of ice and water and draw attention to ice processes. It will describe the presence of ice in the world from a human perspective in which the observational traditions of fieldwork will be combined with the artist’s trademark visual splendor.

Reading and Exhibiting Nature is a three-day conference examining how nature is being understood in contemporary cultural and artistic production. With a focus both in and beyond the polar regions, we will explore how artists and scientists are apprehending and representing natural phenomena, engaging with emerging non-human materialities and translating environmental data into aesthetic experience. The conference seeks to explore the shifting definitions of nature and how nature, including plants, animals, land, water/ice and weather inserts itself into human affairs and is represented culturally. The Reading and Exhibiting Nature conference is planned in association with project’s host institution, the University of Westminster and co-hosted by Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh and the Anchorage Museum. The organizing committee includes Elizabeth Ogilvie, visual artist, Edinburgh; Mark Eischeid landscape architect/artist, Edinburgh; artist and curator Michael Maziere, University of Westminster; Lindsey Bremner, Director of Architectural Research, University of Westminster; Katharine Heron, Head of Department of Architecture, University of Westminster; Jo Vergunst, anthropologist, Aberdeen and Julie Decker, director of the Anchorage Museum. Scholars and practitioners from any relevant discipline were invited to interrogate both the fine-grained nuances and broad contours of reading and exhibiting nature and the Anchorage Museum is sending three artists to the conference—performing artist Allison Warden, poet Jeremy Pataky and visual artist Marek Ranis. The keynote address will be by Professor Tim Ingold, Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen

Confirmed participants will include:

Allison Warden, Inupiaq performance artist
Amanda Thomson, Glasgow School of Art
David Dernie, University of Westminster
Davide Deriu – University of Westminster
Dimitra Ntzani and John Barber, University of Edinburgh
Dominic Hodgson, British Antarctic Survey
Elizabeth Ogilvie, Edinburgh College of Art
Fiona Curran, Slade, UCL
Jeremy Pataky, Poet
Jessica Lee, York University, Toronto
Jo Vergunst, University of Aberdeen
Alan Johnston, University of Edinburgh
Jon Goodbun – University of Westminster
Julie Decker, Anchorage Museum
Karen Jaschke, University of Brighton
Karo Thomson Fleischer, Ilulissat, Northern Greenland
Katharine Heron, University of Westminster
Lesley Harrison, University of Aberdeen
Lindsay Bremner, University of Westminster
Lisa Mackenzie, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Livia Rezende, Royal College of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum
Marek Ranis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Maria Mitsuola – University of Edinburgh
Mark Eischeid, University of Edinburgh
Martin Siegert, University of Bristol
Michael Perkins, University of Westminster
Ronald Binnie, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Ruth Maclennan, Royal College of Art
Suna Christensen, Metropole University, Copenhagen
Tiago Torres-Campos, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen
Tom Corby, University of Westminster

This conference will take place from Friday February 7 to Sunday, February 9, 2014.