Svalbard, Norway, a cluster of islands north of the Arctic Circle, is rich with paradox. A former international whaling base and subsequent site of extractive coal mining, Svalbard is now home to the Global Seed Vault, which stores more than 1 million seed duplicates to safeguard the world’s food supply. Described as a “geopolitical unicorn,” Svalbard is, at once, an open haven for artists and researchers seeking to generate new knowledge and climate interventions by learning from its landscapes, as well as a target for international meddling because of its prime access to satellite data from above and rare earth minerals below. Site of both extraction and regeneration, attracting both a spirit of collaborative inquiry and pursuits of global dominance, Svalbard’s paradoxical singularity inspired Vanderbilt faculty Jana Harper, Lutz Koepnick and Jonathan Rattner to embark on a three-week research trip in summer 2025 to witness its rapidly changing landscapes and experiment with artistic methods to address the effects of planetary overheating.
The culmination of this investigation is Seeds from Svalbard: Art, Resilience and Adaptation in the Polar North, which is on view continuously from Feb. 9 to March 6, 2026, in Buttrick Hall Atrium and other sites throughout the building. Harper, professor of the practice of art; Koepnick, Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies, professor of German and professor of cinema and media arts; and Rattner, associate professor of cinema and media arts, collaborated to realize this immersive exhibition that offers viewers a sweeping yet intimate multimedia encounter with the complexities of this Arctic land. Featuring multichannel video installation, large-scale photography, intricate collages and interpretive material contextualizing the project, Seeds from Svalbard transforms Buttrick Hall into an ark of curiosity and inquiry, inviting its occupants to experience the wonder of this polar setting and to consider what Svalbard can teach us about how we respond and adapt to the climate crisis.
The team approached their time in Svalbard with a posture of curiosity about what its landscapes might reveal. Harper, a multimedia artist, said, “Our role in Svalbard was to listen. We were listening with our ears, with our eyes and with our bodies, and responding from that.” Her artistic responses began with an investigation of the color palettes found within the landscapes: To identify the discrete artistic building blocks of these complex scenes, she used a set of cards designed by 20th-century abstract artist Josef Albers to teach color theory. “Bringing an art historical reference and focusing on something as simple as color allowed me to understand the landscape in a fundamental way,” she said.
For Harper, Svalbard’s landscapes evoked an embodied response, and her physical interaction with her immediate surroundings revealed larger truths about the changing planet and our place in it. “Next to where we were living, there was a glacial riverbed filled with rocks that appeared whole, but were broken almost exactly in half,” she said. “I had never encountered anything like that before.” Harper made a series of short films interacting with these rocks and, in doing so, found that they were rich with metaphor about the climate crisis. These films, she said, ask, “How do we hold this brokenness? How do we understand the friction of it, and how do we try to piece it back together? My actions and gestures with the rocks became a metaphor for this moment about the complexity of living through climate change.”
In addition to representing the brokenness and beauty of this Arctic landscape, Seeds from Svalbard addresses larger questions about the ethics of making art amid the climate crisis. “The challenge of our project in Svalbard was this: How can and should we make art and carry out research in the wake of its multifaceted histories?” Koepnick said. “How can we be as mindful as possible about the footprints we leave as artists and scholars; practice less extractive models of engaging with the polar landscape; and explore art as a seed ensuring our future on this damaged planet?” For Harper, an attitude of artistic inquiry revealed new insights about climate change and the responsibility to attend to it. “As Westerners, we are the ones who have done the damage, but we can’t use Western solutions to mitigate the problems,” she said. “This trip was a practice of thinking and working differently—of collaborating with and listening to the landscape rather than trying to impose an idea on it.”
For Rattner, an experimental filmmaker, the core of his engagement with Svalbard was attention. “I work with long, durational photography as a way to sustain attention—it helps me recalibrate my perception of the world around me,” Rattner said. “My work in Seeds from Svalbard does not aim to illustrate climate change directly, but to create a space where perception can shift. The ideas of resilience and adaptation invite time, instability and light to shape our understanding without demanding resolution.” The films in Seeds from Svalbard encourage viewers to fine-tune their attention—not only to the landscapes of Svalbard, but to more familiar environments as well—and to consider how deep noticing might transform everyday actions.
Seeds from Svalbard is a Middle Tennessee Highlight Event for the Tennessee Triennial, which spotlights contemporary art that is accessible, visually engaging and critically respected in the state of Tennessee. Accompanying the installation is a suite of programs on three consecutive Thursdays at 5 p.m. CT in Buttrick Hall that offer multiple disciplinary entry points into the exhibition’s content. On Feb. 12, the Svalbard team will join Dan Morgan, associate professor of the practice of earth and environmental sciences; Lily Claiborne, associate professor of the practice of earth and environmental sciences; and Chris Vanags, director of the Peabody Research Office and research assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, in a panel discussion about models of adaptation and co-existence in the face of the climate crisis. On Feb. 19, Koepnick’s 75-minute film Ritter Reframed, a two-channel video featuring footage gathered during the team’s three-week journey to the Arctic, will be screened in Buttrick 103. And on Feb. 26, the student-led Vanderbilt New Music Society will present “Re-Scoring the Arctic,” a performance drawing upon Seeds from Svalbard as inspiration for a musical score that will fill Buttrick with unexpected and wondrous sounds. “Re-Scoring the Arctic” is presented by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries and the Wild Bunch Lecture Fund, established by members of the Class of 1977 in honor of the late Chancellor Alexander Heard and his wife, Jean.
The project and exhibition, supported by the Program in the Communication of Science and Technology, the Curb Center and the Max Kade Foundation Chair, are key contributors to ongoing campuswide conversations about art as an essential tool for communicating the urgency of the climate crisis. In fall 2024, the Science Communication Media Collaborative and the Curb Center co-launched the Vanderbilt Eco-Grief Initiative, a multidisciplinary investigation into the emotions that accompany living through the climate crisis. The Department of Theatre commissioned and produced four plays—Daphne & Florence, Blue Blood Red Knot, Waiting for Enviroman and Let Us Sit Upon the Ground—using sustainable materials and methods, while the Curb Center hosted Extraction/Interaction, an exhibition highlighting artists’ engagement with extractive industries. This semester, as a continuation of the work that the Eco-Grief Initiative began, the Curb Center and CSET are looking toward the themes of resilience—a perspective concerned with systemic change, capacity-building and recovery—and adaptation—incremental and transformational actions that aid communities locally and globally in adjusting to the reality of climate change. Resilience + Adaptation, on view at the Curb Center, shows the work of 10 Middle Tennessee artists who are examining and responding to the climate crisis—a local complement to Seeds from Svalbard’s global vantage point.
“My hope is that this project opens up unexpected conversations,” Rattner said. “Are there new ways to interact with the space around us, with the environment itself?” Seeds from Svalbard’s perhaps unexpected placement in the heavily trafficked Buttrick Hall Atrium is an invitation for students and other visitors to do just that: to attend to the surrounding environment with curiosity, reverence and wonder. “I hope this work acts as a seed in that way.”
