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Department of Art

Faculty in the News: Seeds from Svalbard – a collaborative project and exhibition by Jana Harper, Lutz Koepnick, and Jonathan Rattner.

Posted by on Monday, February 2, 2026 in Exhibition, News, Spotlight, Uncategorized.

Opening February 12, 2025, Seeds from Svalbard a collaborative project and exhibition from three Vanderbilt University professors (Jana Harper, Lutz Koepnick, and Jonathan Rattner) will activate Buttrick Hall with a building wide installation and a series of public events.

In summer 2025 Vanderbilt faculty Jana Harper, Lutz Koepnick, and Jonathan Rattner traveled to Svalbard to pursue a project on art and climate change in the Polar North. Their aim was to engage with Svalbard’s rapidly transforming landscapes and experiment with different artistic methods to address the effects of planetary overheating.  

In February 2026 some of this work will be on view in Buttrick Hall in a building-wide installation, featuring continuously running experimental films, large-scale photographs, intricate collages, and didactic displays discussing the overall project.  

Svalbard is famous for its history of extractive coal mining and more recently for its Global Seed Vault. Seeds from Svalbard aspires to transform Buttrick Hall into an ark of curiosity and inquiry—a space for unexpected encounters that challenge what we take for granted about our environments.  

A series of public events will complement this exhibition, including an interdisciplinary panel featuring artists and scientists jointly discussing the challenges of overheating and resilience, a screening and discussion of the team’s 75-minute collaborative film, and an experimental music program.

 

Schedule of Events

Seeds from Svalbard has been made possible with the generous support of the Science Communication Media Collaborative of the College of Arts & Science,
the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt, and the Max Kade Foundation Chair.

Seeds from Svalbard will be open to view in Buttrick Hall all day every day between February 9 and March 6, 2026.

The team will also be happy to meet with individual classes and their instructors to discuss the project.