Thirteen British artists are currently setting up a joint exhibition in Tornio, in the city art museum in this town on the edge of Lapland, northern Finland. Most of the artists have never been to Tornio or even to Finland. Their knowledge and conception of the location of the forthcoming exhibition and of the cultural framework surrounding it are entirely based on information acquired indirectly, on what they have read about and heard from others.

A fundamental aspect of the image of contemporary art is the artist who is constantly travelling from one place to another. Instead of sending works made in the studio to an exhibition, the artist travels to be on the spot and to assemble works intended for that specific exhibition space and that situation in situ, frequently out of materials gathered from that place. The world’s museums are this nomadic figure’s studios.

Even though realising the work for a specific situation and display context offers plentiful possibilities, the notion of some form of deeper communication with the local public can easily remains half-realised. Artists who go from one exhibition to another, carry their art as though in a rucksack, and ultimately act on their own terms. What happens when the artist’s aspirations meet the local viewer’s interpretations? Is there time and space for communication, or is the outcome ‘something strange’?

The artists in this exhibition have adopted another approach. As their starting point they have focused their works on the hazily bounded space that lies between Tornio reality and their own knowledge and conceptions of it. One of the themes of their exhibition could specifically be this: at the same time as their works measure and define the space between reality and ‘reality’, they set bounds to it and change it into an open, creative field of action, in which the communication between the artist and the public proceeds naturally, on the terms of both parties. The title of the exhibition, Something Strange, can thus be seen as ironic, too.