Ghosts of the Arctic

2023-2025

Ghosts of the Arctic is a project comprising an essay film, photographs, and artefacts, made in response to a residency in Svalbard during the perpetual daylight of the High Arctic summer of 2022. Objects and documents from the abandoned Soviet coal-mining town of Pyramiden contribute to the work’s atmosphere of eerie displacement.

The essay-film, one component of the project, follows the fictional artist Edward Knorr and the search for his missing works by the disappeared art critic Albert Bernstein. The journey moves from the Baltic states to North-East England and then to the Soviet Arctic, drawing together themes of loss, love, war, and political turmoil across a landscape of lost and imagined futures. The era it inhabits is one in which memories have become commodities.

Time, reality, truth, and fiction are fragmented and presented with urgency through multiple characters and voices. The film moves between speculative fiction, autobiography, and lived experience, leaving the past and the future deliberately unresolved. The work grapples with questions of authenticity, ownership, and control over archives and memories, assuming the roles of forecaster, documenter, philosopher, confessionalist, and historian without settling into any of them.

The project draws on essayistic documentary filmmaking, hauntology, collage, memory studies, colonialism, and psychogeography. Photography, film, text, sound, painting, narrative voice, and found footage are combined into assemblages that move between real and imagined landscapes within a post-capitalist decline. The melting of Svalbard’s glaciers is visible to any observer who travels there.

The photographic work and the essay-film were shown separately at Telliskivi Outdoor Gallery, Tallinn, in 2025. Four Corners Gallery, Bethnal Green, London, 3–6 May 2023, was the only venue at which all components of the project were exhibited together. The essay film was previewed on 28 April 2023 at The Art Station, Saxmundham, Suffolk, in a screening curated by Dr Emily Richardson.

As with recent previous works, Ghosts of the Arctic is created by the publicly anonymous Kotzebue Kollective and produced by Katka Films, each guided by their own collective positions on authorship, labour, and ownership.