After a successful run at PS1 Gallery, the influential off-shoot of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it was dubbed a ‘surprise sleeper’ by art critics for provoking more interest than national survey shows from small nations usually do, Arctic Hysteria has now infected Budapest.  The Finnish partner in this curatorial joint venture, Marketta Seppälä, explains that since ‘Finns are born in snow, live in snow, and die in snow’ they have a deep relationship to the natural world. The picture that emerges from this ambitious exhibition is therefore not a distillation of Finnishness, but represents instead an understanding that human culture is part of the ‘cycles of nature’.  The American co-curator of the show, Alanna Heiss, who is also the director of PS1 Gallery, introduces the concept of ‘arctic hysteria’ in more personal and anecdotal terms. Although in some ways ‘too important and too old’ to undertake a survey of young artists, thanks to a ‘complete blood transfusion’ in Helsinki some years ago she feels a special kinship with Finland, because the ‘pure Finnish blood’ coursing through her veins provides her with ‘unique insight into this mysterious and beautiful country.’

The sixteen artists, duos and collectives taking part in this exciting show contribute works in a wide variety of media, from sculptural installations to photography, video and computer graphics, to create an overall impression of balance within a rich diversity of artistic approaches. At the same time, there is a lingering feeling that some of the works have had their edges smoothed over and have been expertly repackaged for an international audience, in order to meet the expectations of the New York critics. A daydreaming Hungarian artist was left wondering after the opening what contemporary Hungarian art would look like if given a similar makeover.

The first work we encounter on our journey around the transformed gallery space of the Ludwig is the imposing video projection ‘Screaming Men’. The film is a documentary about a ‘shouting men’s choir’ from the frozen north, who let it all out in the face of an approaching icebreaker and the work is an engaging  introduction to the topic of humans and nature that dominates the show. The other choir in the exhibition is the ‘Complaints Choir’, a project conceived by Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and copied successfully in cities from Birmingham to Budapest and Chicago to Singapore by groups of citizens who put their collective gripes into verse. Apparently the Hungarian version filled Heroes Square with 2000 vocal complainers, and included tuneful lines such as ‘My neighbour holds folk dancing lessons in the flat above my bedroom’.  Pekka Jylhä achieves a completely different effect with his stuffed white rabbits. One bunny holds a saucer of milk, another one gazes at its candlelit reflection in the mirror, while in the third scenario a rabbit peers hauntingly into a large steel dish filled with rippling water.

Deep within the labyrinth, we come unexpectedly upon Markus Copper’s chilling installation of trapped sailors from the Kursk submarine that noisily rattle huge spanners and chains, while light shines out of their blackened diving helmets into the gloom. Tea Mäkipää offers a light reprieve with her very large photographic print ‘World of Plenty’, which depicts magical scenes of happy people and animals, mostly reindeer actually, along 20 metres of gallery wall. The digital images on Ilkka Halso’s prints have been painstakingly retouched to cover forest landscapes with artificial structures. The work comments on the fragility of nature, the sense in which natural views are constructed by human minds, as well as the perils of purely technocratic solutions to ecological crisis.

Among the most striking pieces in the show are Anni Rapinoja’s extraordinarily delicate shoes and fur coats made out of natural materials, such as red worthleberry, common reeds and the leaves of the weaping-willow, which were all collected from a remote Finnish island before being transformed into human products. It could be argued that these precious handcrafted objects belong more to the world of ‘applied’ rather than ‘contemporary’ art, although the strong environmental intentions that can be read in the work contribute a lot to the conceptual underpinning of Arctic Hysteria.

The photographic  Weather Diary of Jari Silomäki stands out as the work that best conveys the interrelation between locally-lived existence and impinging global realities through the prism of the everyday experience of our natural surroundings. The artist started out in 2001 with the decision to take one photo a day for every day of the year and supplement each with a handwritten diary entry. The text on the photos refer to far away events, from the Asian tsunami to the bombing of Afghanistan, which somehow still make themselves felt in the silence of the snowbound Finnish countryside.