The End of Reference

The Arctic has captured the human imagination for centuries. In the nineteenth century, its inhospitable landscape and polar exploration became an obsession in the West, with the Arctic framing narrative inspiring literary fiction, photography, and painting. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, begins and ends in the ice pack of the Arctic Ocean, with the Arctic used as a space for the critique of heroic masculine endeavour and as metaphor for the creature’s internal trauma. This far North in ancient mariner’s maps marked the end of reference.

At only 650 miles south of the North Pole, Longyearbyen in Spitsbergen in the high Arctic Svalbard archipelago, is the world’s northernmost permanent settlement. Built into the permafrost in Spitsbergen, is the Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest backup facility storing over one million crop samples from almost every country in the world. Known as the doomsday vault, its genebank collection secures the world’s future food supply. Yet the Svalbard archipelago is warming six-times faster than anywhere else on our planet; it is ground zero of climate change.

In the words of Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Arctic is the ‘health barometer for the planet’. What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic; it is the reference point and repository of the past and for all future life on Earth. As the seasonal rate and extent of Arctic sea ice melt increases, more sunlight is absorbed by the Arctic Ocean leading to further changes in our global climate. In addition, approximately 60% of Svalbard is covered by glaciers. Formed out of falling snow compressed into ice over thousands of years, glaciers cover approximately 10% of the Earth forming the largest reservoir of fresh water. They are melting at an alarming rate causing rising sea levels and flooding of coastal areas, extreme weather events, loss of species and freshwater. Glaciers are the sentinels of climate change.

Featuring an audio/video installation, this exhibition bears witness to the melting ice cover and receding glaciers of the high Arctic. The shores are an iceberg graveyard; this is where ice goes to die. The death of glacial ice is the end of reference, the death of our planet and all of us in it.

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