PAST RESIDENTS
Tomas Colbengtson
Tomas Colbengtson, winner of the 2024 Queen Sonja Print Award, is a Sami artist whose work examines the impact of colonialism on indigenous communities, with a particular focus on the Sami people. Born in Björkvattnet, Colbengtson’s art draws on Sami history and collective memory. His printmaking often employs materials that cast shadows, reflecting themes of visibility, loss, and resilience within indigenous cultures.
Siri Helle
Siri Helle is a nonfiction author and journalist whose work often explores themes of environmental responsibility, rural life, and practical engagement with the world around us.
With a background in ecological agriculture, Helle’s writing reflects her deep interest in how our connection to place influences our actions and responsibilities, both locally and globally.
Cléa Darnaud
Cléa Darnaud is a french drawer and intaglio engraver. In her practice, she uses traditional drawing as well as engraving to develop various illustration and publishing projects. Since 2018, she has completed several artistic residencies in France and abroad, notably in Canada, Finland, Luxembourg and Greenland. Both a moment of life and an artistic material, travel allows her to wander through the accidents of the landscape and daily life in order to collect snippets of memories.
Mhairi Killin
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist from the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. She makes her return to Svalbard this February to continue the research and development of ‘Svalbard & The Hebrides - Island Archipelagoes in the Anthropocene’, which started at Artica in October/ November last year.
Sébastien Robert
Sébastien Robert (b. 1993. Nantes, FR) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher developing a practice at the intersection of visual and sound art, technology, science and ethnography. Most of his projects revolve around a research cycle, ‘You’re no Bird of Paradise’, through which he explores disappearing Indigenous sonic rituals and cosmologies.
Liryc Dela Cruz
Liryc Dela Cruz is an artist and filmmaker from Tupi, South Cotabato in Mindanao, Philippines based in Rome, Italy. His work has been performed and shown at numerous international film festivals and contemporary art venues.
Mhairi Killin
Mhairi Killin is a visual artist who lives on the Isle of Iona in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where she works with the precious relationships between land, sea, humans, and other living beings.
Nastassja Simensky
Nastassja Simensky is an artist based in Nottingham, UK. She uses fieldwork to explore and understand how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and the geopolitics of extraction are crystallised in specific geographies.
Inma Herrera
We are pleased to welcome back artist Inma Herrera who returns to Longyearbyen continue her project Artic Tales of Mother Earth. Herrera is a Helsinki-based artist, recipient of the Ducat Prize in 2020, and a former resident at the Royal Academy of Spain in Rome from 2017 to 2018.
Ellen Heck
Ellen Heck works as a printmaker in North Carolina. Over the past decade, through several print projects, she has explored specific questions about identity—its creation, variability, persistence and change—by combining subject matter and thematically resonant printmaking techniques.
Endre Harvold Kvangraven
Endre Harvold Kvangraven is a writer, researcher, and wildlife enthusiast. His research centers on the relations between humans and birds in contemporary Scandinavian literature.
Januario Jano
Januario Jano is an interdisciplinary visual artist, who lives and works in London, Luanda and Lisbon. He holds a MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, and his practice spans across sculpture, video, photography, textile, sound installations, and performance, and it is substantially research-based.
Cathrine Alice Liberg
Cathrine Alice Liberg is a Norwegian-Singaporean artist and printmaker working in a variety of techniques, including lithography, photogravure, cyanotype, etching and mezzotint. Her art revolves mainly around the family portrait, where she contemplates the stories that were lost through her family’s migration, and how descendants can never become reliable narrators of their ancestors’ lives.
Ellen Viste
Ellen Viste lives in Bergen, where she works as a communication adviser at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research. Having a background as a meteorologist and climate researcher, she has also worked extensively with popular science writing on weather and climate.
Roald Berg
Roald Berg is professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Stavanger, working mainly with polar history, foreign and defense policy history. During his residency at Artica, he will embark on a book about the history of Norwegian polar imperialism, centered on one of the key players who was around at the turn of the century.
Trine Hamran
Trine Hamran (b. 1971) is a freelance writer and journalist, trained as a social anthropologist and has a master's degree in journalism. She has worked as a journalist for a number of years, as a freelancer and for NRK, Dagsavisen, Finnmarken and Sør-Varanger Avis.
Ruth Maclennan
Ruth Maclennan is an artist and researcher based in London and northern Scotland. Her art practice includes films, video installations, photographs, writing, drawing and interdisciplinary and collaborative research projects. For the past ten years Maclennan has been researching experiences of climate heating and geopolitics.
Nicole Rafiki
Nicole Rafiki lives and works between South Africa and Norway. Rather than producing finished products as an end result, Rafiki treats art making as a practice of remembrance, healing and cultural analysis.
Nikhil Vettukattil
Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, India) Artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences.