Pile O’sápmi and the Connections Between Art and Politics

Relate North #9

“…The Sámi artist Joar Nango also used a similar way of conveying a message with the help of objects in his exhibition section Sámi Library in Helsinki Contemporary Art Centre Kiasma 2022 (Yle Sámi, 2022). The reindeer herder families' photography process and the installations in the exhibition reflected similarities with the forms of Sámi contemporary art, which strive to utilise the culture's own material and cultural ways of expression (Grini, 2017;Hansen, 2019;Lundström et al, 2015). As the result of Korsström-Magga's exhibition project reflecting and renewing cultural heritage and creating new arts-based form of expression based on nature, culture and current debates on posthumanism, it can be seen as Arctic art .…”

Breaking the Dam: Sámi Art Histories

“…The title of the work, Pile O'Sápmi (2016-), references the buffalo skulls stacked high by settler colonialists in the United States. 14 Then, as now, the skulls function as a threat: whoever controls the animals controls the people. Blood has frozen on the skin of the dead creatures, twinkling in the brief Northern Norwegian light.…”

“…Entangled in environmental and colonial power struggles, Sámi art history cannot be disconnected from debates about land exploitation and Indigenous relations with law enforcement. 2 In Norway, these relations are almost beyond repair. For around one hundred years, Sámi children were taken from these lands and Norwegianized, their languages and culture systematically erased.…”