Join us on Friday, 24th March for a conversation about art, activism and forest ecologies of the Russian North, stimulated by Ruth Maclennan’s film, A Forest Tale, currently on show at Pushkin House. A Forest Tale was filmed in the Arkhangelsk region at the end of 2021 during an artist residency organised in collaboration with Ekaterina Sharova and the Arctic Art Institute. We will also be joined by writer and historian Charles Emmerson.
The subarctic boreal forest that encircles the planet, from Scandinavia across Russia to Alaska and Canada, plays a crucial role in regulating the Earth’s climate. The history of the Far North is one of the exploitation of natural resources, especially timber, and the colonisation of indigenous lands. The peoples of the Far North built their material and spiritual world out of the immense forests that surrounded them. This is the background to A Forest Tale. Today, global warming and deforestation are transforming the planet, disregarding national borders and military conflicts. Meanwhile, people in the Far North live, work and create together, in the extreme conditions of weather and politics.
Among the participants are artist Ruth Maclennan; Ekaterina Sharova, co-founder of the Arctic Art Institute; and author and historian Charles Emmerson. The conversation will be moderated by Denis Stolyarov, assistant curator at Pushkin House.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Charles Emmerson is a writer and historian based in London. He has travelled all across the European and American Arctic. His book The Future History of the Arctic (2010) looked at a region being transformed by climate change into an arena of global geopolitics and geo-economics. He owns the only remaining copy translated into Russian, after the others were pulped during a Russian Geographic Society meeting in Moscow where he was told a comment in the footnotes about Vladimir Putin meant the book had to be destroyed.
Ruth Maclennan is an artist. She is known for her films in post-Soviet countries and her research in the Russian Arctic. Her work includes films, multi-channel moving image works, photographs, performances and writing. Her recent films examine how the climate emergency has irrevocably transformed ways of seeing and understanding landscape and place – both for inhabitants, and as representation.
Ekaterina Sharova is a curator, educator and writer based in Oslo, Norway. Being raised in the Arctic region, she works with decolonial feminist ecologies, alternative knowledge systems and reappropriation of memory and repair. She is a co-founder of the Arctic Art Institute, an international contemporary art platform that operates as a residency-based venue for artists, writers and musicians from around the world focusing on materiality, the Anthropocene and emergency.