Britta Marakatt-Labba Brings Sámi Culture to the Rest of the World

In most textbooks, history typically only moves forward, from past to present. But in Britta Marakatt-Labba’s 75-foot-long embroidery Historjá (2003–07), a piece that aspires to sum up the entirety of the Sámi experience, history is a continuum that starts and finishes in the same place: the forest. “You can read it from the right or from the left,” Marakatt-Labba recently told ARTnews by Zoom. “It’s endless.”

Historjá portrays Sámi rituals such as reindeer hunting and deities like Madderakka, the goddess of childbirth. (“We only have female gods,” Marakatt-Labba explained.) But more than merely offering images of an Indigenous culture that has survived centuries of assimilation attempts, the piece also bears witness to Europeans’ attempts to disenfranchise the Sámi people from their homelands of Sápmi, which encompasses the northern areas of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, as well as Russia’s Kola Peninsula.

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One segment portrays a church set ablaze, with Sámi protesters holding wooden spears at a group of Norwegian settlers in retreat. The withdrawing forces had tried to dispossess the Sámi people of their traditions; just one method for this was a ban on the ládjogahpir, a red hat worn by Sámi women, within Christian churches. Many of the demonstrators in this 1852 uprising in Guovdageaidnu (a city known to Norwegians as Kautokeino) were subsequently imprisoned, and some died behind bars.

In typical form for Marakatt-Labba, her depiction of the Guovdageaidnu uprising is embroidered in a plainspoken, minimal way, with the revolt pictured against a sparse white linen background and the protesters’ weapons represented as little more than single stitches of brown thread. This is not a work that boasts its own importance.

Sámi history remains a blind spot for many in the Nordic region, and Historjá offers a visual record of events that have traditionally only been transmitted orally within the Sámi community. For that reason, it’s struck a chord with many in the area. But even beyond the Nordic region, Historjá has received notice, drawing praise when it appeared at Documenta 14 in 2017. In Artforum, critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote that she emerged from that German art exhibition “dying to know more” about Marakatt-Labba.

“It was a big surprise that people would see this and want to learn more about Sámi mythology, Sámi culture, everything happening today,” Marakatt-Labba said. “I could never know that it was going to be famous.” She paused, smiled a little, then asked, “Can I use that word?”

She can. Originally commissioned by a university in the Norwegian city of Tromsø, Historjá now forms the centerpiece of a Marakatt-Labba retrospective that debuted last year at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. This summer, the show will travel to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, having already appeared earlier this year at the Kin Museum of Contemporary art in Kiruna, a Swedish city drivable from Marakatt-Labba’s hometown of Idivuoma. Meanwhile, in New York, Marakatt-Labba is this week unveiling a new commission for the High Line, where one of her biggest sculptures to date will soon be viewable near the Whitney Museum.

It’s impossible to diminish Marakatt-Labba’s importance within Sámi art history. She cofounded the Máze Group, an influential Sámi artists’ collective, and she found ways of synthesizing duodji (Sámi crafts) with the stylings of contemporary art, blazing a trail for younger artists after her to follow. Yet she was not known widely to the rest of the world until recently. Less than a decade ago, she had appeared in neither Documenta nor the Venice Biennale, the world’s two premier art exhibitions. By 2022, she had shown at both.

Randi Godø, a contemporary art curator at the Nasjonalmuseet, said the appearance of Historjá at Documenta prompted her to organize Marakatt-Labba’s retrospective. “I tried to decode Historjá, which I understood was important—that she had something to say,” Godø said. But the work eluded the curator. She recalled asking herself: “Why don’t I understand this?” The answer, she realized, was because the Nasjonalmuseet, like so many other Nordic institutions, had failed to devote much attention to Sámi art. Godø and Anne Sommerin Simonnæs, a curator of textile art at the Nasjonalmuseet, set to work to fill that gap.

International institutions have done the same. In 2022, the same year that Marakatt-Labba appeared in the Venice Biennale, the festival’s Nordic Pavilion was renamed the Sámi Pavilion by artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, and Anders Sunna, who became the first Sámi artists to represent Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The next year, Marakatt-Labba appeared in “Indigenous Histories,” a grand exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo that also included Sunna and Sara, the latter of which will this year do a monumental commission for Tate Modern’s hangar-like Turbine Hall.

High Line Art director and chief curator Cecilia Alemani, who curated Marakatt-Labba’s work into her 2022 Venice Biennale, said the artist stands out for her ability to bring Sámi culture to the rest of the world. “She’s transmitting the identity of the Sámi people to communities that are not necessarily Indigenous,” Alemani said, adding that Marakatt-Labba is “weaving a personal narrative” with her art by threading references to contemporary issues afflicting her community.

Marakatt-Labba’s embroideries tend to be much smaller than Historjá, but they are all part of the same project: offering a visual record of the Sámi people’s life and lineage. The embroideries depict reindeer, Sámi cosmologies, scenes of childbirth, and more, and she tends to approach these works without any preparatory sketches in advance. “I improvise because I have everything in my head,” she said. “I know exactly how the embroidery will be.”

The sparse aesthetic of her work conceals the labor-intensiveness of her process, which is conducted solo, without the help of assistants. As she Zoomed in from her home in the small, remote village of Övre Soppero, she occasionally used Google to translate Sámi and Swedish words into English, one of five languages that she speaks. “It’s not so easy to learn,” she said of her craft. “You have to be—What do you call it when a person won’t give up?” Persistent, I offered. “Stubborn,” she said, beaming.

Marakatt-Labba was born in 1951 in the mountains on the Swedish side of Sápmi and was raised by a mother who bore 12 children, two of which died. (The artist was just 5 years old when her father was fatally struck by a taxi while en route to tend to his reindeer.) A fascination with recounting tales for others was instilled in Marakatt-Labba by her mother early on. “Storytelling was very central in my home,” Marakatt-Labba said. “She was also teaching us how to behave with nature, because we do believe that all things in nature have a soul.”

Her desire to learn was tough to fulfill. Swedish government policy required that Sámi children permanently residing in small villages must be sent to boarding school. Marakatt-Labba was one of them. She attended such a school and, in one interview quoted in the catalog for her retrospective, described being dissatisfied with her “nomad school,” whose fixed location ran counter to the nomadic lifestyle typical of many Sámi people, including Marakatt-Labba’s family. Art, however, offered a reprieve. As a kid, she wrote that she wanted to one day do “something that involves drawing.”

Having studied sewing in high school, she pursued a formal art education in Göteborg, where she was enrolled at the Art Industrial School between 1974 and 1978. “When I went to Göteborg, nobody even knew what a Sámi was,” she said. “It was not so easy for me to come down there. It was a new culture for me.” The experience helped shape her political consciousness.

The year she graduated, Marakatt-Labba and seven other Sámi artists formed the Máze Group. “We wanted to reunite our people, that was the main idea,” painter Synnøve Persen, a member of that group and a longtime friend of Marakatt-Labba, wrote in an email. “No one should ever split us. We were very angry because of the colonial politics from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia to split the Sámi people.”

Marakatt-Labba’s 1981 piece Garjját (The Crows) recalls some of the sights seen when she and some of her Máze Group colleagues were on the front lines of protests over the proposed Alta-Kautokeino waterway, which threatened to disrupt Sámi life because it would ran through places where their reindeer herds grazed. During the protests, which lasted from 1970 to 1982, Marakatt-Labba and around 800 others were arrested, and she looked on as police beat activists. The waterway was ultimately built and opened in 1987.

But rather than naturalistically representing this brutality, both to the people and to the land, Garjját transforms the scene into something dreamier: a chilling tableau in which crows descend, morph into cops, and then walk one by one toward Sámi protesters, with a violent conflagration shown taking place between the two. (Those birds, Marakatt-Labba tells artist Susanne Haetta in the catalogue, are a reference to her mother’s “stories about the crows that take everything.”) The work’s spartan look, with its dozens of figures, belies the deftness required to produce it. When Marakatt-Labba remade the piece for a 2021 show at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, the entire process took her more than 100 hours.

Garjját achieved new resonance in 2022, when wind turbines were erected in Norway’s Fosen peninsula, spurring actions in which protestors clashed with police. The 23-year-old Norwegian environmental activist Gina Gylver has said these demonstrations brought to mind Marakatt-Labba’s work.

Marakatt-Labba still considers herself politically engaged, though she can no longer attend protests as she once did. “I’m 73 years old, so it’s not so easy to be active in physical way, but I am an activist with my art,” she said. And now, New Yorkers will get a taste of that activism with her High Line commission.

Titled Urmodern, this large-scale sculpture—a rarity within Marakatt-Labba’s oeuvre—features the bronze head of a goddess, an earth mother from Sámi mythology. Marakatt-Labba has given her a base of granite taken from Sweden. “She’s sitting there on High Line, trying to protect the people who are walking there and she’s looking after them,” Marakatt-Labba explained.

She also expressed a desire to return to Historjá, this time with a renewed emphasis on recent instances of industrial intervention in Sápmi and their environmental impact. As it currently stands, Historjá measures 24 meters in length, but Marakatt-Labba has considered making it even longer.

“If I were making a new Historjá, it would be different,” she said, “because we have a lot of challenges in my area. All these companies are always digging all the time in our area. They are building big wind farms and cutting down forest.”

“This,” she continued, “is what I want to do with the next 10 meters.”