Annike Flo and Lexie Owen Begin Their Artica Residency

We are delighted to welcome Annike Flo and Lexie Owen, our next residents nominated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), to Artica Svalbard.

Since 2022, Annike and Lexie have worked together as a duo alongside their individual artistic practices. Their collaborative work explores relationships between humans and the more-than-human world, asking how artistic and social practices might make space for the agency of other living organisms, materials and entities. Their projects often take the form of participatory performances, workshops, interactive installations and publications.

During their residency at Artica, Annike and Lexie will continue their ongoing research into death cultures, burial practices and the afterlives of bodies. Their long-term project challenges the idea of life and death as fixed opposites, instead considering decomposition as part of an ongoing and circular process. Through this work, they are interested in how approaches to mourning and remembrance might respond not only to personal grief and collective loss, but also to wider ecological change.

Svalbard provides a particularly compelling context for this research. Permafrost has historically preserved graves and human remains, while a rapidly warming climate is now changing these conditions. In Longyearbyen, shifting ground, thawing permafrost and changing environmental conditions also raise questions about the future of burial and remembrance in the Arctic.

Over the coming weeks, Annike and Lexie will explore these questions through research into the collections of Svalbard Museum, conversations around permafrost and environmental change, and encounters with people living in Longyearbyen today.

By bringing together the historical, social and ecological conditions of Svalbard, their project seeks to create space for conversations about death, funeral practices and mourning, and the ways personal and collective experiences of loss intersect with a changing planet.

We look forward to seeing how their research develops during their time with us and to sharing more from their residency over the coming weeks.

Annike Flo and Lexie Owen are in residence at Artica Svalbard from August–October 2026, nominated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Their residency has received additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts.