Ghosts of the Arctic Telliskivi Creative City Outdoor Gallery January 15–March 3, 2025 The gallery is open 24/7
A project of 18 photographic images and an essay film of 20 minutes. The Ghosts of the Arctic project is haunted by the most critical issues of our time: global conflicts, late capitalism and the climate emergency. The stage is a land where the observer can see glaciers melt and notice climate change as they breathe. This project contains memories of our forgotten futures.
Context Richard Denny visited Pyramiden in the summer months of eternal daylight of 2022. Investigating Pyramiden as both a witness and researcher Ghosts of the Arctic engages with memory, colonialism, and climate change themes, reflecting the interregnum between imagination and reality in the tumultuous late-capitalist era.
Pyramiden is an abandoned Soviet coal mining settlement located in the Svalbard archipelago in the high Arctic. Founded by Sweden in 1910 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1927, Pyramiden operated until its closure in 1988.
Over its operational years, nearly nine million tonnes of coal were mined, primarily by a Ukrainian workforce from the Donbas region but also by workers from Russia and other Soviet states. The settlement accommodated over 1,000 residents living and working side by side. The facilities included a cultural centre, sports complex, swimming pool, and primary school.
Following the cessation of mining in 1988, a few years before the total collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyramiden became a ghost town, the Arctic climate preserving much of its infrastructure and the left behind memories.
It is a monument to a fallen empire, with its dilapidated buildings and faded amenities conveying a narrative of human folly and nostalgia.
The Photographs The haunting images stir and evoke the ghosts of the past while contemplating a future shaped by loss and transformation in the face of ecological crisis and global unrest.
The curatorial choice of duplicating, doubling, or mirroring photographic images nudges the viewer to look at what the camera has captured more than once. It suggests that maybe something important has been overlooked, something we have chosen to ignore or not to see for convenience—maybe the reflections are the spectres of the past that are still haunting and warning that the past is returning…or never left.
Possibly, the past has not been captured, but the past has captured the viewer with these images.
All images were captured on an iPhone 7 in 2022 and are untitled. They were reconstructed in 2024 for this exhibition.
The essay film Ghosts of the Arctic essay film (2022) traces aspects of the life and the search for the missing artworks of the fictional artist Edward Knorr by the fictional art critic Albert Bernstein. The journey from the Baltic states to northeast England and onto the Soviet Arctic. It is a story carrying loss, love, war and political and social turmoil into a lost imagined future and the era of the commodification of memories—a journey through speculative fictional time and events.
The film is intended for personal educational and research purposes only and is not for redistribution.
Richard Denny is a British/Australian Citizen. Currently residing and working in & from Tallinn, Estonia. The Artist & Researcher is a practice-based PhD candidate at Northumbria University (Newcastle, UK) in the Department of Visual & Material Cultures. The emerging doctoral research project Revisiting A Vanishing Land investigates the reshaping of the spectral Suffolk coastline on England’s North Sea. The project explores and speculates where and how the memories and ghosts of place dwell- in a coastal land that is shifting and will, in the future, disappear into the sea. Will the memories of this coast become another type of fiction?
