Guided Tour: Archiving Border Art

What is border art? And to what extent has it been present in Northern Norway and its neighbours Finland, Sweden and Russia over the past three and a half decades?

Why does border art worldwide require archiving? And what does archiving border art involve in practice?

This guided tour will suggest some answers to these complex questions.

This tour will be given by Associate Professor Ekaterina Mikhailova, a border scholar from the UiT-turned amateur archivist. She is one of the contributors to the exhibition "For History Change Position" and the online Border Art Archive curated by Hilde Methi.

In this tour, Ekaterina will share some insights from border
studies and her experience of border art archiving on the Barents Sea shore, conveying some of its joys and pitfalls, discoveries, and realisations.

Bio:

Ekaterina Mikhailova is a Political Geographer working at the crossroads of Border Studies, Eastern European Studies and Governance. She has over ten years of research experience, studying Eurasian borderlands. She is a regional editor of the Journal of Borderlands Studies and Head of the project "Border(land) Museums as sites of remembering and forgetting: between lieux de mémoire et lieux de l’oubli" (2026-2028) funded by the French-Nordic trilateral program CUNP/FMSH.

Before joining the UiT, Dr. Mikhailova held postdoctoral positions in many well-known centres of Border Research and Eastern European Studies, including the University of Eastern Finland (Finland), the University of Geneva (Switzerland), the Leibniz Institute for Eastern and South-Eastern European Studies (Germany) and Luxembourg Institute of Social-Economic Research (Luxembourg).