The Arctic Impossibility of Art

press release:

You are cordially invited to the CEMS Arctic Symposium: 

“The Arctic Impossibility of Art”

Thursday, September 21st, 6 p.m., Elvehjem 140

In 1596, two Dutch ships laden with trade goods left Amsterdam for Siberia, intending to navigate a Northeast Passage to China. They never arrived. The ships mistimed the winter ice; the vessels were soon trapped off the west coast of Nowa Zembla, deep within the Asian arctic. This is the beginning of a story told in a forthcoming book by the art historian Christopher Heuer, who is visiting UW-Madison to speak about works of art produced as the result of encounters with the arctic in the 16th century. Joining him are two artists from campus, Stephen Hilyard and Anders Zanichowsky, who are both making art in and about the arctic.

Christopher P. Heuer teaches in the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and serves as Interim Director of the Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute. He is the author of The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (New York and Oxford 2009, pbk. 2013), and a co-author of Vision and Communism (New York, 2011). His writing has appeared in Artforum, The Burlington Magazine, Res, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, October, Print Quarterly, Kunstschrift, and elsewhere.

Stephen Hilyard is an artist and Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He creates artwork in a wide range of media both digital and traditional. A common theme in his work is the paradoxical nature of our impulse towards the profound – at once both sincere at an emotional level whilst remaining in every way mediated by our culture. On Thursday evening he will be presenting “Катюша (Katyusha),” a three channel video piece based on material collected at Pyramida, a show-case community established by the Soviet Union in the Svalbard territory in the high Arctic.

Anders Zanichkowsky, is an artist, writer, and activist, who is currently pursuing an MFA in printmaking at UW-Madison. This summer, with the group The Arctic Circle, he spent three weeks in June on a Barquentine tall ship that sailed the international waters around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. On Thursday, he will present some of the work that emerged as a result of that expedition, his second to the arctic.

Please join us for this symposium, which is generously co-sponsored by the Departments of German, Nordic & Slavic and Art History. Organized by Shira Brisman, Assistant Professor of Art History.

The event is free and open to the public.