Calling all adventurous artists under 35: the Antarctic Biennale wants you. Artist are invited apply to join an art-making journey to the world’s southernmost continent this spring. The open call for submissions—which launched Monday, 22 August—was announced last Friday at the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island at a fundraising weekend for the event, hosted by the philanthropist John Blaffer Royall, a member of the biennial’s organising committee. Submissions, due by 3 October, may be in any medium, but must draw upon the Biennale’s guiding theme, “Mobilist in mobile” (moving amidst mobility), which was the motto of Jules Verne’s anti-hero Captain Nemo from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Applicants should note that this is no ordinary biennale, but an “upside-down” one, according to the Moscow-based artist Alexander Ponomarev, who is also a trained nautical engineer and former submariner in the Russian Navy. This background should come in handy when Ponomarev leads the expedition to Antarctica with around 100 artists, scientists and visionaries aboard the Akademik Ioffe, a 117-metre research vessel from the fleet of the P.P. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Speaking in Rhode Island this weekend, Ponomarev compared the participants in the journey to “Newport pirates in the past” with the goal to “attack the stale system of arts in order to change it”. There are already established artists involved, such as the Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno, but Ponomarev said that he also wants “young radical artists” to participate. The 12-day voyage is due to kick off from Ushuia, Argentina, on 27 March—weather-permitting, of course.
Once on board, the expedition team—including The Art Newspaper’s founding editor and chief executive, Anna Somers Cocks, the chair of the biennale’s board—will participate in discussions, debates and performances. The ship will also house a photography lab to help document the journey. When they land in Antarctica, the plan is for artists to construct installations that will be documented and then removed, since expeditions to the continent must not leave anything behind. (Even human waste, said Veronika Gimenez, the Antarctic Biennale’s director, recalling a previous trip she took to the continent.)
Some of the works will later be shown at the “intra-national” Antarctic Pavilion at the next Venice Biennale in 2017 and other venues; Norah Dietrich, the director of the Newport Art Museum, says the institution would like to add works from the biennale to a show they are considering for next summer, the travelling independent exhibition The Ocean After Nature. “The Antarctic Biennale re-engages [the 19th-century] spirit of artist-explorer in the 21st century,” Dietrich said. “The addition of scientists and philosophers adds a utopian twist.”
What is the significance of Antarctica? Nadim Samman, the Berlin-based curator on the artistic advisory board for the event and the curator of the onboard film programme, points to the singular success of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which—at the height of the Cold War—designated that the continent will only be used for peaceful ends and scientific research, with no claims of national sovereignty. Samman also said that artists can offer a different view of Antarctica, since current documentation is generally made in the context of scientific expeditions. According to Ponomarev: “The only human activity which is still capable of capturing the world as a whole is art.”
A shortlist of 15 artists from the under-35 open call, to be announced in October, will be chosen by Ponomarev and the Antarctic Biennale’s artist advisory board. All 15 artists will also be invited to participate in the next Antarctic Pavilion, and artists are also invited to submit videos for the on-board film programme. The jury’s final choice will be announced in December.
Meanwhile, the biennial has received its first major fundraising boost—$25,000 from the Toronto-based Donner Canadian Foundation, which was announced at the Newport fundraising events. Next on the biennial’s circuit: a three-day symposium in September in New Harmony, Indiana.
