Art Across Borders: Dislocating Artistic and Curatorial Practices in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region

Abstract

The present article investigates the role of artworks in processes of bordering in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region. Drawing upon a neo-formalist framework, it firstly analyses works that were exhibited during the X-Border Art Biennial to identify disruptive potentials vested in the artistic pieces’ formal properties, before it, secondly, addresses potential performance effects of these works and of the curatorial decision to distribute exhibition space across three cities in Sweden, Finland, and Russia. I argue for an ambivalent role of artistic and curatorial practices that have the inherent potential to articulate opposition and de-familiarize established frames for perception and cognition, and at the same time inhere the capacity to reinforce regimes of exclusion and facilitate processes of commodification and capitalization.