Introducing the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum Nominated Artists for Artica Svalbard 2025 Residencies
Left: Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel. photo: Tuva Heger-Bratterud | Right: Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell. photo: Eva Vēvere
Artica Svalbard is pleased to announce the artists nominated by Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum for residencies in 2025. We look forward to welcoming the artist duo Malin Arnell and Mar Fjell, alongside artist Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, whose unique practices will bring new perspectives to Svalbard.
Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel (b. 1988, Hamburg) is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, scent, moving image, sound, and installation. His artistic practice is driven by a deep curiosity and a desire to engage with tacit knowledge—a form of learning that occurs through doing and experience, rather than formal instruction. Wenzel actively seeks out traces of past traditions and alternative technologies that have been displaced or overlooked in the present, exploring how these can be brought into contemporary contexts.
Engaging with natural materials and their cultural significance, Wenzel often uses both personal experience and fabulation—a process of imaginative storytelling—as points of departure for reconstructing narratives. These narratives deal with the complex relationship between labour and care, with a focus on how these concepts intersect in our daily lives. His work invites both playfulness and dissociation, offering space for viewers to contemplate strategies for resistance and re-skilling in ways that challenge normative structures, particularly those grounded in Western perspectives.
For his residency at Artica Svalbard, Wenzel plans to build upon his ongoing exploration of the relationship between scent, landscape, and memory.
Dr. Malin Arnell (b. 1970, Stockholm) and Mar Fjell (b. 1981, Stockholm) are an interdisciplinary artist duo whose practice spans performance, research, education, and visual art. Their work is situated within ecological and socially engaged art and includes various media such as sound, text, video, performance, and objects. Much of their work is developed through collective processes and collaborations.
Arnell and Fjell engage in queer eco-erotic ethics, exploring affectivity through participatory practices and what they describe as vibrating togetherness. Since 2017, they have shared breaths through many forests, waterbodies, islands, and cities, now bringing their practice to Svalbard.
Their work is often site-responsive, allowing the conditions of each place to shape their practice. In Svalbard, they are interested in continuing their exploration of themes such as the relationship between bodies and water, and the precariousness of water in the context of human exploitation and climate change. They describe: "60 percent of our bodies are water, we are passages. About 70 percent of the earth’s surface is covered by water, we are passages."
Arnell and Fjell’s practice aims to recognise the rights of water as part of natural-human rights and to overcome the violence it faces through regulation, pollution, and other human impacts. They challenge dualities imposed on the natural world, advocating for water's significance as both life-giving and fluid.
Reflecting on the museum’s selections, Dr. Charis Gullickson, Senior Curator at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, said:
“One of Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’s core values is openness. NNKM believes that these nominated artists will promote new perspectives and thereby openness in Svalbard. Perspectives are the way individuals see the world and are shaped by multiple factors. One beautiful skill human beings have is the capability to take different perspectives. Understanding new perspectives enables people to change their mindset with the potential to help create a better world.”
Artica Svalbard and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum are proud to support the 2025 nominees, whose work will engage with the local community in Svalbard and contribute to significant discussions surrounding ecological fragility, labour, and care in the Arctic.