Lena von Goedeke

Orbitals

Svalbard
31.10.26
About the exhibition
What happens to our sense of space, time and human connection when nothing is fixed? For years, artist Lena von Goedeke has lived and worked in Longyearbyen, Svalbard: a place where permafrost is loosening its hold on the land, and day and night stretch into entire seasons, and where you might lose your track because you can’t calibrate your vision in the barren and volatile landscape. 

Without a culture rooted in centuries of settlement and mythologies to anchor human orientation, the Svalbard archipelago has become a cultural and physical void that has been, and continues to be filled with technology, data, mapping and continuous calibration. With innovative strategies combining artistic investigations of material, remote sensing technologies and pattern mapping, Orbitals takes a critical look at the material and sociocultural dynamics of Svalbard. The artist observes a community where residents and visitors often act as ground stations and satellites, constantly passing through to extract data without putting down permanent roots. 

Moving through an installation that evokes an industrial freezer, visitors navigate between lightness and deep darkness. Alongside the new moving-image works In Orbit and Event Horizon, the installation artworks include tangible and material markers of human entanglement with transience and deep time: lava composites, cycles of thawing and re-freezing, and ice core glass sculptures containing human breath. In this volatile environment, every element mirrors the impossibility of human calibration through technology when the planet itself is in flux. 

 

 

Lena von Goedeke is a German visual artist based in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Her work moves between human perception and the digital systems we build to see beyond it. 

For more than two decades, she has worked across installation, film, photography, traditional craft techniques and digital media. In recent years, the Arctic has become both the landscape and laboratory of her practice. Satellites, photogrammetry, scanning and scientific imaging meet physical encounters with ice, rock, bodies and extreme environments. 

Von Goedeke is interested in the act of translation itself: what happens when a landscape becomes data, a body becomes a scan, or something experienced becomes an image. Working closely with scientists, researchers and local communities, she explores the glitches, blind spots and unexpected realities that emerge between the physical and the digital.