Finessage – Sunday, November 30 – REVIEW
Go and see today
Our polarized and conflict-filled world needs hope – See Marakatt-Labba today even if it’s at the last minute. Last day of the exhibition. Last time to save the climate.
Artist Britta Marakatt-Labba has the exhibition Where Every Stitch Breathes/Juohke sákkaldat vuoiŋá , Moderna Museet, Stockholm. June 14–November 30, 2025.
The exhibition shows Britta Marakatt-Labba’s many works of art, embroideries, prints, paintings, installations created with over 40 years of work. The central work is Historjá (2003–2007) a 24-meter-long depiction of Sami history. A work that gave her an international breakthrough at the Documenta art fair in 2017 in Kassel. Today, Marakatt-Labba is seen by many art critics as one of the world’s leading artists.
Marakatt-Labba was born in 1951 into a Sami reindeer herding family. Her Swedish passport lists her birthplace as Idivuoma, a small town in Kiruna. But Marakatt-Labba herself believes that she was born during an autumn migration right on the border between Norway and Sweden: – “ I am a border case !” Everyone in her family worked with Sami crafts called Duodji , which included stories about Sami spirituality.
Britta Marakatt-Labba has been creating artwork for over forty years. She uses the rich Sami storytelling, childhood images such as reindeer herding, and images as political art about indigenous rights from the Kaitokeino uprising of 1852 in Norway to the Sami protest during the Alta conflict in Norway in 1979-1982.
Marakatt-Labba and the artist group Masi Group participated in the demonstrations of 1979-1982 during the Alta conflict when their collective was located in the area that would be affected. The expansion of the river would destroy the nature and salmon fishing in the rivers. Alta is a symbolic place as it was where the executions of the Sami leaders during the Kaitokeino rebellion took place by beheading in 1852. Marakatt-Labba saw how the Norwegian Police force of 600 police stormed their camp.
Marakatt-Labba created a work about the event that was retitled Garjját, Kråkorna (1981), which was named after she remembered her mother’s words that sovereignty is like crows that take everything and leave nothing to others. The work shows how the arriving Norwegian police arrive in Alta in the sky in the form of flocks of crows that then transform into police when they land on the ground and attack the Sami protestors’ camp.
Nature ethics. Traditional Sami spirituality exists as part of the hard nature where there are moral rules on how to hunt, fish and herd reindeer. Where humans are in spiritual contact with animals and nature. Where Sami shamans can receive help from animal spirits and cross the border as spirits to the spirit world, where spirits can also fly.
Marakatt-Labba paints by her stitches flying shamans, these flying spirits, for example in the work Girdi noaiddit Flygande nåjder (1985) where the shamans release rats and people in black uniforms from the sky who fall into a river. Balance and harmony.
It is a fantasy that inspires courage in the movement that fights against the status quo with the unsustainable ” growth ” with mines and climate destruction. The best climate policy may be to give the indigenous people their rights, which Sweden has not done.
Many motifs are round in the works. The cyclical time of migrations for the nomads. It is the round enclosure for the reindeer, the hut, the drum, the meeting rooms and often we the viewer see the motif in the picture in a perspective from above. It is the perspective of the spirits and the previous generations of family members who see the Sami people from above. The dead are spiritually alive, present and helping.
Today, Marakatt-Labba creates images, an environmental aesthetic, about how mythology can lead us to live in a sustainable way with nature as per the Sami ethic.
The artwork Historjá , a 24-meter-long epic, is in a circular room, where the story begins and ends in primeval birch forests, where there are spirits and arctic animals with Sami people from the early hunter-gatherer culture before reindeer herding to today’s snow scooters. The climax of the story Historjá , is a scene with the three Sami goddesses praying for the Sami culture in the boundless spiritual Sápmi’s nature.
See the exhibition today – last day Sunday, November 30th until 6 pm.
We, wrote a review “The Traveling Exhibition Áigemátki, or Time Travel” in 2019 where Marakatt-Labba was one of the participants. You can read about it here: Sámi National Day February 6, 2019