Nastassja Simensky
Nastassja Simensky, Photo: Tom Warner
In residence: May – June 2025
Nastassja Simensky returns to Artica Svalbard following her 2024 residency, which was supported through a nomination by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Her ongoing work explores the unevenly distributed impacts of global energy regimes and extractive processes on particular geographies over time, using fieldwork as a central method. Simensky frequently collaborates with artists and non-artists alike to produce authored and co-authored works across a variety of media—including live performance, sound, text, amateur radio, moving image, and installation.
She coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network, a platform that engages with the politics and processes of archaeology to inform embedded, experimental, and collaborative art practices. Simensky is also one third of MOIST, an independent press for literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.
Her work has been commissioned and shown internationally, including The New Present Tense (Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, GR), Postscript of Silence (McaM, Shanghai), Receiver and Rings on Water (Focal Point Gallery, UK), Art and Archaeology Residency (West Dean College of Art, UK), and Zu Gast bei den KunstVereinenRuhr (Urbane Kunst Ruhr, DE).
During her 2025 residency at Artica, Simensky will develop Dust, Static and Feedback Loops—a radio play and moving-image work that explores Svalbard’s atmospheric infrastructure and the ongoing legacies of environmental toxicity. Organised around three conceptual “feedback loops,” the project considers (1) extractive industry and airborne particulate matter; (2) glacial retreat and the circulation of heavy metals; and (3) the ecological and biological transmission of toxicity across species and scales.
Through field recordings, performance-based transmissions, and collaborative research with local and international partners, Simensky’s work draws connections between material and spectral infrastructures—such as coal dust and static, satellite weather systems, and abandoned Arctic radio stations. She plans to share aspects of her research with the Longyearbyen community through a fossil radio receiver-making workshop and an open listening session.
Instagram: @nastassjasimensky
Vimeo: vimeo.com/nastassjasimensky
Nastassja Simensky’s residency is generously supported by Arts Council England.
