People
Irina Shirobokova
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Irina Shirobokova (she/they) is a feminist geographer, Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center, and researcher in the Cities ‘Becoming Lost’: the Ruptures of Grand Narratives of Modernity project at The Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, Germany, where she explores space and time in utopia, artist-in-residence at the Pikene på Broen, Norway, Kirkenes. Irina’s current dissertation work is inspired by years of fieldwork in the Arctic’s peripheral cities. It asks what the politics of darkness might look like today and develops a grounded theory of darkness. Irina is a 2026 ERI/PS2 Summer Fellow.
In 1993, the satellite Znamya attempted to reflect sunlight onto Arctic cities during the polar night, aiming to extend working hours and “conquer” darkness. The Negotiating Darkness Artistic Research Network critically challenges a long legacy of treating darkness as unproductive, dangerous, or negative. In the Nordic region, seasonal extremes of polar day and night shape everyday life, so darkness is profoundly rooted in rhythm, environment, and living conditions.
NDARN is an emerging multidisciplinary collective of artists and researchers working across Norway, Finland, France, Iceland, and the United States. In our work, we combine artistic research, feminist methodologies, and critical theory to question colonial legacies, extractivist economies, and gender inequalities. In a world on the edge of burnout and against the overwhelming domination of light and enlightenment politics, we are trying to find how to embrace, inhabit, and negotiate darkness.
Together with my colleagues from NDARN, we created a series of events as a satellite program of the 9th Open Out international queer art Festival in Tromsø with its 2026 topic, ‘Dreaming in the Dark’. The festival took place from September 5th to 12th at the Tromsø Kunstforening / RomssaDáiddasiida / Tromssan Taitopiiri / Tromsø Center for Contemporary Art.
We took participation in the festival as a place to further develop our methodologies and process-based art and research practices, which included:
- Darkness and Capitalism: Reading Group by Ruth Aitken
- Lecture on Queer Geographies of Darkness by Irina Shirobokova
- Collaborative writing and printing workshop in collaboration with Mondo Books
- Queer Dreaming shared reading with Mona Astrid Fonnes
- Workshop on embracing falling and failure through embodied practices, experimentation, and a contextual overview of dance and performance histories by Dasha Sedova
We read in the dark, fell and leaned on one another, talked at length about darkness, printed on an amazing Riso Printer with Mondo Books and Marion Bouvier, and created different situations and forms of togetherness. These encounters allowed us to expand our repertoire of practices and share them with an international group of artists and researchers from Brazil, Turkey, and Germany, as well as local participants in Tromsø.
Related links:
https://openoutfestival.com/program
https://www.tromsokunstforening.no/en/about
Tromsø, Norway, September 2026.
Photo: Irina Shirobokova
