Nastassja Simensky Returns to Artica Svalbard
We are delighted to welcome back Nastassja Simensky to Artica Svalbard.
Simensky returns following her 2024 residency, which was supported through a nomination by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Her work investigates the unevenly distributed impacts of global energy regimes and extractive processes on specific geographies, using fieldwork as a central method. She frequently collaborates with both artists and non-artists to produce authored and co-authored works across a range of media, including live performance, sound, text, amateur radio, moving image, and installation.
At Artica, Simensky is developing Dust, Static and Feedback Loops—a radio play and moving-image work that explores Svalbard’s atmospheric infrastructure and the long-term legacies of environmental toxicity. The project is structured around three conceptual feedback loops:
Extractive industry and airborne particulate matter.
Glacial retreat and the circulation of heavy metals.
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 draws connections between material and spectral infrastructures—from coal dust and radio static to satellite weather systems and abandoned Arctic communication facilities.
She also plans to share aspects of her research with the local community through a fossil radio receiver-making workshop and an open listening session.
Simensky coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network, a platform that engages with the politics of archaeology through experimental, embedded, and collaborative art practices. She is also one third of MOIST, an independent press for literary fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry.
Her work has been commissioned and exhibited internationally, including The New Present Tense (Feminist Autonomous Centre for research, Greece), Postscript of Silence (McaM, Shanghai), Receiver and Rings on Water (Focal Point Gallery, UK), and Zu Gast bei den KunstVereinenRuhr (Urbane Kunst Ruhr, Germany).
We look forward to seeing how her work continues to evolve during her time in Svalbard.
Nastassja Simensky’s residency is generously supported by Arts Council England.