Welcoming Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel to Svalbard

We are delighted to welcome artist Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel to Artica Svalbard for his residency in Longyearbyen, nominated by Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum.

Working across performance, scent, moving image, sound, and installation, Wenzel’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in curiosity and a deep engagement with tacit knowledge. Through material investigations and fabulated narratives, his work traces displaced traditions and explores alternative technologies—offering new perspectives on labour, care, and the embodied transmission of knowledge.

Wenzel’s installations often emerge from encounters with natural materials and their cultural significance, drawing on personal experience as well as research into marginalised knowledge systems. His approach creates space for both play and dissociation, inviting reflection on how resistance, re-skilling, and embodied learning can counter normative, Western-centric structures.

During his residency at Artica, Wenzel will expand his long-term inquiry into the sensory relationship between scent, landscape, and memory. Informed by fieldwork and conversations with researchers and local residents, he will explore Svalbard’s botanical and geological environments, particularly those shaped by scientific observation or ecological vulnerability. Through experimental studio work and site-responsive mapping, he aims to investigate how scent can carry histories of place and offer new ways of sensing environmental change.

We’re excited to see how Simon’s time in Svalbard will evolve. Welcome to Svalbard!