Support NiCHE’s Work, Contribute to our 2025 Fundraising Campaign Here.
Editor’s Note: This is the seventh post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.
For my master’s degree in Arctic & Northern Studies at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, I recently curated dis/comfort in the North (October 2025), an exhibition examining how comfort and discomfort materialize in Northern-based contemporary art. Through a call for submissions and by invitation, more than fifty artists from sixteen countries shared a range of intimate and complicated experiences, asking viewers to consider their own comfort and reflect on the broader contexts of how dis/comfort shapes living in and visiting the North.
dis/comfort as a framework and concept for an exhibition materialized by attempting to define ‘colonial comfort’ for my thesis statement. Comfort and discomfort are multimodal and have different meanings and effects depending on identity, worldview, social status, and physical location. For example, comfort could mean exerting control over land and marginalized groups through colonial or political power. Or, comfort could mean the freedom to move through one’s homeland and territories in an unfettered way. If comfort is informed by identity and worldview, where do viewpoints, imaginings, and feelings about the North* split and merge, and by whom? How does comfort and discomfort shape what is unknown or misunderstood about the Arctic? dis/comfort as an analytical and aesthetic tool offers insight into answering these questions.
dis/comfort also became an analytical tool to interrogate outsider artistic practices that imagine the Circumpolar North from a distance or through brief encounters. Within this framing, the exhibition became a multidimensional tool to consider how one may be responding to and/or experiencing comfort or discomfort at any given time within Northern contexts and in relation to the land. This is evident in the carefully carved Utiguu iqaluk (cute little fish), by Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq** carver and interdisciplinary artist, Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich [Image 1]. Connecting two salmon with delicate strings of beads reflects the relationships of salmon with water, land, beings, and the reciprocity and care of all who see salmon as kin.
Many selected works by both insiders (inhabitants of Northern regions) and outsiders (visitors or newcomers from Southern locales) depict messy paradoxes of Northern place and identity that are not necessarily made with pleasant viewing in mind.1 Some images show ice not as a spectacle, rather as dirty and abstract. Others depict dis/comfort through relationships with people and animals to show the North as a complicated, lived-in place. Many works refuse distant romanticized ideals by grappling with social and cultural contexts alongside ongoing colonial conditions.
In Sovereign Resilience at the Edge, Atlanta-based photographer Eley depicts the All Things Iceland podcast host Jewells Chambers as an “Afronaut,” to provoke cultural adaptations melanated bodies take to make Iceland their home [Image 2]. Afronauts blends imagery of diasporic identities reshaped through the Northern landscape by juxtaposing sensory elements, such as vibrant, textured fabric with a muted landscape. Eley aims to communicate reimagined identities through both dis/comfort and the resiliency found in the stories of her models.2 She writes:
For me, the Circumpolar North is both a literal and metaphorical space for exploring migration, adaptation, and reimagined identity. Afronauts asks viewers to confront how notions of comfort and discomfort intersect with climate, place, and cultural perception—sparking dialogue about the complexity of belonging and the shared humanity within our diverse experiences.3
Greenlandic photographer Minik Bidstrup shares images of Nuuk, including the apartment building complex where he grew up, adding another layer to what is considered comfortable and for whom [Image 3]. Imported architecture and housing design for southern living standards may be completely inadequate for the daily needs of Northerners.4 Poor insulation, heating, ventilation, and small size and room function are some examples affecting the use of a ‘home,’ therefore making it uncomfortable to live in.
Proximity to dis/comfort reveals itself in the haunting imagery of wildfire and its aftermath in Forced Into a Great and Difficult Transformation by Vancouver, British Columbia-based artist Liz Toohey-Wiese [Image 4]. Her version of a reimagined BC Recreation Site sign in a recently burned forest along the British Columbia-Yukon border calls to question the contradictions of wildfire and the overlapping realities of land use and recreation, resource extraction, and complex relationships people and place have with increasing wildfire.5
Familial connections and traumatic realities are deeply felt in Nora’s Hair Cut (lock 1 of 6), where lush greenery holds a recently cut lock of hair [Image 5]. Made by the late Inupiaq photographer, Jenny Irene, when they and their partner lived in New Mexico, the vibrant green contrasts with what one may think of as a Northern image. What is revealed is a story of complex relationships many Northerners have with Southern locales, including how traditions, identities, and warm-weather storms know no borders. In a recent photo essay on Typhoon Merbok sweeping away their and many families’ fish camps in Uinñaataavik, near Nome, Alaska, they pondered, “how do we tell stories of place when that place is gone? It is through stories that we survive.”6 This question is reflected throughout Jenny Irene’s photographs. As the plants tenderly hold her partner Nora’s hair, this image holds Jenny’s story and memory close to the heart of dis/comfort and the exhibition.
dis/comfort in the North encouraged viewers to feel and question their own dis/comforts. Asking who dis/comfort is for in any given setting reveals the possibilities of the concept as a survival mechanism. As an analytical tool, dis/comfort enhances modes of thriving and survivance, and active, dynamic presence and resistance towards imposed outsider narratives and pressures.7 Accessible and relational art can offer a needed comfort to ‘weather’ current acts of geopolitical posturing and the effects of a rapidly changing climate.8 Comfort, in this way, creates space to move through ongoing colonial conditions, while discomfort offers space to reflect on why certain places, conversations, actions, and cultural belongings are or are not comfortable, and for whom.
Sections of this article appear in the dis/comfort in the North exhibition catalogue. More information, including a list of all artists featured in the exhibition, can be found here.
Each image is copyrighted and shared with permission by the artists or by their next of kin.
Notes
[1] See Emilie Cameron’s description of inside/outside in Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2015).
[2] Eley, submitted artist statement, 2025.
[3] Ibid.
[4] For more on inadequate housing and design in the North, see Lisa-Jo K. Van Den Scott, Walled-In: Arctic Housing and a Sociology of Walls, (Lexington Books, 2024); and Peter Hemmersam, “Comfort and Discomfort: Conflicting concerns in Arctic urban planning and design,” in Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic, edited by Leena Cho and Matthew Jull (Routledge, 2024).
[5] Liz-Toohey Wiese, Forced Into a Great and Difficult Transformation, www.liztoohey-wiese.com.
[6] Jenny Irene, “On this Sand (Together),” in How to Survive: Practicing Care in a Changing Climate, edited by Francesca Du Brock (Hirmer, 2025), 121.
[7] For more on survivance, see Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance Narratives of Native Presence (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
[8] See Billy-Ray Belcourt’s framing of ‘weathering’ in “Fucking Around with Inuit Art” in Inuit Art Quarterly. 40-47, Summer 2020.
*For this exhibition, North, Circumpolar North, and Arctic were used interchangeably, as some ideas and concepts stretch beyond geographical Arctic framings and encapsulate a broader Northern locality.
**Iñupiaq is distinguished from Inupiaq by regional dialect.
Feature Image: Minik Bidstrup, Untitled, Nuuk, Greenland, 2024. Shared with permission from the artist.
Katie Ione Craney
Latest posts by Katie Ione Craney (see all)
- Curating with dis/comfort - November 13, 2025