/ 26 March 2004

Art in the Arctic

Welcome to our extreme conditions!” booms the mayor of Kemi. “We Finns have been making holes in the snow for hundreds of years!” Subtlety, understatement … such things are the preserve of balmier climes.

Up here on the Arctic Circle in February, the temperature lurks around -20°C and you say it like it is, whether it’s about the weather or the holes or why you came here in the first place.

The mayor tells us he came to Kemi, in Finnish Lapland, for the skiing. We, perversely, have come to this northern wood-pulping town that clings to the top of the frozen Gulf of Bothnia, for the art.

The Snow Show, an extravaganza bringing together artists and architects to produce collaborative projects in snow and ice, is taking place both here and in the nearby town of Rovaniemi until the end of March, when the installations fall apart. Unsurprisingly, it is not a home-grown project, but the fairly outre idea of Prada-clad Sino-Californian Lance Fung.

Kemi is not the sort of place you’d expect to find art. Nor is it the natural home of New York ladies who lunch called Peeky and Betty. But here they are in fur accessories, as part of the Fung coterie, inherited from his days as a commercial gallerist in Manhattan. Peeky is a curator of sorts. Betty tells me that she used to collect art, as if that was simply so tiring that she had to break up the pressure with extra vacations.

To put Fung’s high-concept show into perspective, I visit Kemi’s more enduring monument in ice, the Snow Castle, or Lumilinna, which has been rebuilt out of Finland’s most plentiful resource every winter for the past eight years. At -8°C, it feels warm inside the Castle’s many snow-walled chambers decorated with snow-princess ice sculptures and ice-benches topped with reindeer skins.

You can drink a (distinctly tourist- priced) vodka in the ice bar from an ice cup. You can have your children christened in the chapel. The truly foolhardy can even stay the night in an arctic sleeping bag on an iceblock bed.

The Snow Show’s activity is in a park not far from the castle, but of another order altogether. Architects, presented with an unfamiliar material, go for heavy-handed structures —walls, tunnels, even amphitheatres of ice. There are famous names aplenty scattered through the project — Yoko Ono is in one pairing, British artist Rachel Whiteread in another —brought together by and large at the whim of the curator.

Collaborators didn’t meet, but communicated by fax and e-mail. Neither did they see the fruits of their labours until now.

Korean artist Do-Ho Suh, on finding no sign of his fibreoptic-laced floor which should have illuminated the dramatic ice walls of LA architects Morphosis’s structure in Kemi, declares himself “dismayed”.

Rovaniemi is the home of Santa Claus, and the world’s most northerly McDonald’s.

Santa has his own village and hotel, The Santa Claus, which is quite the smartest in town. Peeky and Betty stayed there and brought back very favourable reports of the attractive decor.

The Village — an outsized log cabin — is suprisingly genteel, though the Santa Park, with its fairground rides, is for children only.

In Rovaniemi it is the chairperson of the town council who greets us. He is also the town’s psychiatrist, a specialist in Arctic Circle Personality Disorder.

The park accommodating this leg of the Snow Show slopes gently down to the frozen river. It is dotted with trees perfectly flocked with brilliant white powder. The art, too, is of a higher order. US artist Kiki Smith and architect Lebbeus Wood have made a magical circle of ice embedded with angels.

The superstar Japanese architect Tadao Ando has formed a monumental tunnel of ice that has been inlaid with scarlet numbers by artist Tatsuo Miyajima.

Before the opening ceremony, however, a collaboration between Future Systems (architects of the Selfridges store in Birmingham, England) and Anish Kapoor had an untimely collapse. Kapoor, who was reportedly displeased with its colour, was probably less than dismayed.

Extreme conditions are perhaps not the best in which to look at art. In this whitened world of muffled sound and extraordinary light, human intervention seems an unnecessary thing.

It might be interesting to come across a “building” by British-based architect Zaha Hadid, but it has a hard job competing with the sight of endless fields of snow turned ultra-violet by the setting sun at around four in the afternoon.

The Rachel Whiteread installation is a beautiful thing, but it is the sheets of pink and green lights rippling through the night sky that will make you gasp.

Personally, I’d take up the skiing and snowmobiling options in these parts and leave the art and architecture for Helsinki, which is on the way home. The people are helpful, the city walkable, the architecture a stirring expression of Finland’s 20th-century bid for self-determination, though the Constructivist department store Stockmann bespeaks years of Russian control.

It is impossible to miss the city centre’s architectural landmarks such as Eliel Saarinen’s Central Station, built in 1906 as a mark of independence, or Alvar Alto’s early-1970s Finlandia Hall.

But a trip out of town to the artists’ colony of Hvittrask, constructed at the turn of the century by Saarinen, Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, might tell you more about the romanticism of the Finns. The complex incorporates a plethora of architectural twists and turns. And though its exterior is cute, the interior is a superior exercise in modern design.

From here you can go on to the lakeside villa Halonsenniemi at Tuusula where painter Pekka Halonen took up residence in 1902. This a traditional wooden lodge for a simple rustic life.

Pekka Halonen pretty much painted what he saw from the window, and that was pretty much snow. It’s impossible for that not to sound dull but believe me, this is exquisitely sensitive work. It could even be the sort of Snow Show that I prefer. — Â