7.3.2023. ISAR-7, Japan. The Relational Exhibition: Connecting Landscapes, Communities, and Research Archives

Victoria Peemot has participated in the Seventh International Symposium on Arctic Research (ISAR-7) held at the Japan Consortium for Arctic Research, Tachikawa, Tokyo. Her talk was part of Session 16 “Making of Arctic Exhibition and Material Study: the Potential of Collaboration Study with Local People”, March 7, 2023.
Title. The Relational Exhibition: Connecting Landscapes, Communities, and Research Archives.
Abstract. This study explores the ways in which the archival photography exhibition negotiates the relationships within and between different community groups. My case-study for this project is the black and white photography exhibition entitled “In Search Of Gold In Siberia:
The Heritage Of The Finnish Geological Expedition to Uriankhai in 1917” and its opening event which took place on January 13th, 2016, in the Nordic Culture Point in Helsinki, Finland. The exhibition was a result of then three-year-long work on the heritage of the Finnish geological expedition to Uriankhai which is currently known as the Tyva Republic in
North Asia, a part of (Soviet) Russia since 1944. I have collaborated on this heritage project with Sjundby Traditionsförening—a community organization based in the Swedish-speaking municipality of Sjundby (its Finnish name is Siuntio) in southern Finland. The head of the organization is retired farmer Carl-Johan Lindén whose father, Erik Lindén, participated in the
1917 expedition to Tyva. Prior to the exhibition, in summer 2013, we followed the 1917 expedition’s routes in Tyva together with Carl-Johan Lindén and three members of his family. During the trip, we visited the same locations featured in the archival photographs, shared the historical expedition’s
story with local communities and tried to identify descendants of people who were photographed back in 1917. I have continued the same work in the following years, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork for my doctoral and postdoctoral research projects. I approach the exhibition (its preparation, assembling the photographs and artefacts, and the opening programme) as a social process which connected its diverse audiences: the Sjundby community, researchers, people who are interested in Tyva, and numerous descendants of the 1917 expedition’s members from Finland and abroad. In this work, I discuss how each of these groups makes use of the exhibition. https://www.jcar.org/isar-7/program/