Today the Office of Contemporary Art Norway announced that Siri Aurdal, Nina Canell, Charlotte Johannesson, Jumana Manna, Pasi “Sleeping” Myllymäki, and Mika Taanila will collectively represent Norway, Sweden, and Finland for a joint project titled Mirrored in the Nordic Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The collaborative exhibit, with all three countries equally represented, will be the standard format for the Nordic Pavilion through 2021.
The idea of a unified Nordic identity is the point of departure for these six artists. The older half of the group—Aurdal, Johannesson, and Myllymäki—share a similar aesthetic through their respective explorations of urbanity and landscape, using a range of mediums from industrial material to digital renders in sculpture and video. Taanila and Canell, by contrast, delve into temporality and process. Manna, the youngest of the group, interrogates questions of representation as they pertain to geopolitical narratives.
Mats Stjernstedt, pavilion curator and incoming director of Sweden’s Malmö Konsthall, described the shared enterprise as a “mapping of connections that override national and regional boundaries, and instead track a more multi-faceted view of how artistic practice may connect.”