What does the term "provincial" mean? Who decides whether or not something or someone is provincial and what does it mean to say that something or someone isn't? How are these concepts being applied and what impact does it have on the contemporary Nordic art community?

Provincialism has often been used to ridicule that or those it is applied to. The opposite of provincial is urban, and the term provincial is never used by those who do not see themselves as urban. In effect, the term says more about the one who uses it than about those it is meant to describe. This irony becomes even more striking when we recognise that by labelling something as provincial, the user hopes to highlight his or her own superior urban qualities and create a distance to his or her nearest neighbours who by implication lack these qualities.

The cultural communities in the Nordic capitals are all too eager to label the Nordic countryside as provinces and its cultural and artist communities as provincial, mainly to secure their own spiritual bonding and trendy harmonic resonance with the great cultural metropolises like Berlin, New York, London and Milan. This may serve to justify the existence of the Nordic urban culture opinionator, but in reality any true cosmopolitan will find the comparison of actual world metropolises to small towns like Stockholm, Oslo and Reykjavik to be beyond ridiculous. The Nordic capitals are as "provincial" as the Nordic region itself.

Postulate I: We consider the entire Nordic region, including our small capitals, as part of our globally oriented art province.

We have chosen to name the exhibition "The Provincialists" because we want to emphasise that we have in fact made a conscious decision to live and work in our countries Norway, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. We feel no need to distance ourselves from urbanity. Rather, we live in the province because it is here we are able to perfect our personal artistic language.

Postulate II: The artistic expressions we create are important and their strength comes from the fact that we live in the province.

With the group exhibition "The Provincialists", we wish to indirectly pose the question of what provincialism is and to inspire a debate around the various notions of provincialism. The exhibition covers a wide spectrum of artistic expression from painting and sculpture to installation and video. These works can nevertheless be said to have something in common: they are distinctive products of their place of origin and reflect some of that local character. This art and the artists can thus easily be labelled "exotic" or "original", which raises the question of whether or not this actually influences the creative process, and how the artists respond to being an exotic object?

Postulate III: As globalisation makes the art and cultural scene more homogeneous, the interest in art that originates from a specific geographic locality will grow.