Anne-Karin Furunes’s public work at the Fram Centre in Tromsø, Norway

Anne-Karin Furunes’s commissioned public work at the FRAM Research Centre for Climate and Environment is unveiled on 21 August 2018. “I chose to portray the more unknown heroes in the Polar history who have explored the Arctic and Antractic”, Furunes says. Her subjects are botanist Hanna Resvol Holmsen who participated in the Svalbard expedition in 1907–08 to study to the island’s flora, and Per Savio, a sápmi who had substantial knowledge on the Arctic conditions and who worked as the caretaker of dogs at Carsten Borchrevink’s expedition in 1898–1900.

The portraits are based based on archival images of Resvol Holmsen and Savio. Furunes has perforated the images on aluminium and completely changed the scale of the source material: the works, mounted in the buildings atrium, measure up to 14 meters in height.