North by Southeast
Dates: 2015-18
Presented by Spaced with Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA)
North by Southeast was a program centred on an exchange between Nordic and Australian visual artists, concluding with an ambitious group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA). North by Southeast comprised 11 residency-based projects that took place in regional, remote, and outer-urban locations in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Western Australia. Nordic artists undertook their residencies in Western Australia, whilst Australian artists were placed in the Nordic region. These residencies were positioned as the means to develop new works, created by each artist, in response to their engagement with the social, environmental, and historical contexts of the host communities.
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Case study: Tor Lindstrand, Old Balgo Mission (2016-17)
Artist: Tor Lindstrand
Partner: Warlayirti Artists
Location: Balgo, Western Australia
As an architect Tor Lindstrand's interest and response to the history of the built environment of Balgo looks at how the recent colonial past still reverberates through the community, how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people alike still try to adjust to the impact of these structures.
From his residency and subsequent bush trips together with the artists from Warlayirti Artists, Tor gathered information about the old mission, sites and paths of importance and stone quarries for the institutions of Balgo.
His project for North by Southeast consisted of two parts. The first a commission of paintings by artists from Balgo, showing histories and landscapes physically overlapping the sites of the old and the new mission. Secondly, a series of architectural survey drawings based on information found at the sites. Combined they tell stories about fundamental change of history, culture, and everyday life.
Learn about Tor Lindstrand’s process:
Case study: Sam Smith, Lithic Choreographies (2015-17)
Artist: Sam Smith
Work: Lithic Choreohgraphies (2015-17)
Partner: Baltic Art Centre
Location: Gotland Island, Sweden
Sam Smith’s project, produced on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, is a single-channel video that examines the distribution of geological material across time, with a focus on minerals circulated in cultural, economic, and environmental contexts.
By giving sentience to the island and a voice to its fight against slow deconstruction, the work provides the landmass with agency to make known the problematics of our current crisis, where the Earth’s system dynamics are absorbing the effects of human influence. In this role, Gotland urges us to think and feel on geological scales, to slow down and to receive messages transmitted by planetary media.
The artist travelled around the island of Gotland to meet with key people and specialists like Tom Mels, Associate Professor, Department of Social and Economic Geography Uppsala University, Dr. Gustaf Svedjemo, lecturer at the department of Archaeology and Ancient History Uppsala University and local fossile expert Sara Eliason at the Gotland Museum. One year Sam Smith returned to shoot a film at locations like Brucebo, Suderbys Ekoby, Uppsala University Campus Gotland, the archive of the Museum of Gotland and the Cementa lime stone quarry. The work resulted in the experimental documentary Lithic Choreographies, that mixes historical facts with speculative fiction to chronicle different chapters embedded to the island’s geological strata.
Scanning the landscape characterised by paleo-sea-stacks, fossil coastlines, concrete production plants and limestone quarries, the film focuses a lens on minerals circulated in economic, cultural and agricultural contexts. Working with locals to ground the film’s investigations within the myriad communities of Gotland, Sam Smith seeks to re-imagine our modes of engagement with and contributions to ecological assemblages.
“Through my time at Baltic Art Center, I gained a sense of Gotland as a living force: an active entity, but one that’s being deconstructed. Millions of years ago, sediments that circulated at the equator constructed the reef mass that became the island. Those raw materials are now being radically dispersed.” Sam Smith
Learn about Sam Smith’s process:
Explore all North by Southeast art projects:
Explore other Spaced programs:
Rural Utopias (2019-23). Rural Utopias is a program of residencies, exhibitions and professional development activities organised in partnership with the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) and 12 Western Australian rural and remote towns.
Art Out of Place (2009-12). Between 2009 and 2012, 21 Australian and overseas artists and collectives were invited to live and work in one of 16 regional communities across the state, each residency lasting 2 months.