Britta Marakatt-Labba: Under the Vast Sky

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Britta Marakatt-Labba, "Avverkning / Deforestation (detail)," 2020

textile (courtesy of North Norwegian Art Museum, Tromsø)

Britta Marakatt-Labba: Under the Vast Sky

Opening Reception November 26 at 7 PM Meet the artists, view the exhibits, and hear a performance by Lars Henrik Blind, from Karesuando in Sweden, who has fully mastered the traditional Sámi yoik.   

The exhibition title Under the Vast Sky conjures a key image in the prodigious oeuvre of Britta Marakatt-Labba: groups of humans huddled on a narrow isthmus of land suspended under the stellar dome, their children sleeping in the Arctic night with nothing much but boundless space separating them from the stars. The image offers access to a powerful and eloquent strand of Marakatt-Labba’s art: an ability to embrace both comfort and exposedness, solidity and vulnerability. Visions of solitude or vulnerability are paired with reoccurring and compelling notions of consolation and protection provided by the human collective.

The panoramic landscape spelled out in Marakatt-Labba’s embroideries–where life stories happen, where nature holds sway but is under fierce attack, where community is built and affirmed–is not only poised under the heavens, but also above the subterranean "mirrorworld," completing the triad architecture of Sámi cosmology. Indeed, Britta Marakatt-Labba’s art effortlessly performs this leap: From the quotidian and the everyday to cosmos, the vernacular and the sublime side by side. No more, no less. Marakatt-Labba’s precious capacity to observe both precarity and unity also points to a most central path that her work threads, at times with epic dimensions, at times intimate and microsocial: the articulation, advocation, and dissemination of Sámi culture – past, present, and future; its afflictions under colonial oppression and its resourceful resiliencies.

Weighing in on the last decade, Under the Vast Sky brings together a rich and generous selection of over fifty artworks from Britta Marakatt-Labba’s more than four decades of unrelenting artistic practice. Included works range from premiering the just completed replica of the iconic Gárjjat/The Crows (1981 and 2021), where Marakatt-Labba’s stitches bring forth an arresting allegory referencing the historic late 1970s demonstrations against hydropower expansion, to the vertiginous Events in Time (2012), where actual flour sacks, entered to Sápmi by the Nazi occupation army of World War Two, are employed as a canvas housing for a stark and stylized vision of the Utøya terror attack, where blooded veins splinter or crack open the island’s granite rock. Such pivotal works are joined by recent oblong landscapes chronicling contemporary land issues, the ongoing climate catastrophe, struggles against coloniality and exploitation, revisions of history, all interlaced with depictions of the seasonal cycles and vernacular stories. A series of small sculptures summons a particular Marakatt-Labba iconography of the head with the horn hat. Joining this panoramic and manyfold encounter with Marakatt-Labba’s art is also the epic Historija/History–a nation-building work for a people living in four nation-states–that in a cyclic, capacious tableau narrate the history, the spiritual world, the land, landscape, and everyday life of the Sámi people. Here, Historija is rendered through the artist’s original aquarelle sketches and a video panning across the work’s entire length, accompanied by a commissioned yoik.

Britta Marakatt-Labba’s embroidered stories, economically told in miniature stitches, sustain critical and urgent visions, list multiple emergencies, while also doing precise decolonial work, manifestations that revive, revise, heal, and build.

Curated by Jan-Erik Lundström

Under the Vast Sky will subsequently tour to Ikon Gallery, Birmingham with a publication forthcoming in 2022.

Britta Marakatt-Labba (b 1951) is a North Sámi artist, living and working in Badje-Sohppar/Övre Soppero in Swedish Sápmi. Marakatt-Labba studied at the HDK Academy of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg, Sweden, but grounds her art equally in the duodji practices of Sámi crafts and art, learned through her upbringing. With embroidery as her principal medium, Marakatt-Labba works with textile art, collage, sculpture, and installations. In addition, she has also engaged in ecumenical clothing design, scenography, and book illustration. Britta Marakatt-Labba was a member of the influential and legendary Máze Joavku/Sámi Artist Group during its existence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Marakatt-Labba exhibits internationally with recent projects in USA, Finland, Norway, and Nepal. Her art is collected by national and regional museums, such as Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, the North Norwegian Art Museum, as well as many additional public institutions and private collectors.

Jan-Erik Lundström is a curator, critic and historian of contemporary art and visual culture. He is the former director of the Sami Center of Contemporary Art, Kárášjohka, Norway, Bildmuseet, Umeå, and of Fotografiska museet, Stockholm, Sweden. He is the chairman of the Paletten Art journal and of Skogen Art Space, and the former chairman of the Centre for Photography in Stockholm.. Among his curatorial projects are Show Colour: Resist, Stand Up, Advocate, Fall Back Spring Forward, Surviving the Future, The Map: Critical Cartographies, Politics of Place, Carlos Capelán: Only You and Society Must Be Defended (1st Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art). He was the chief curator of Berlin Photography Festival and the artistic director of the 3rd Bucharest Biennale. He is the author and editor of many books, including Thinking Photography – Using Photography, Contemporary Sami Art and Design, Britta Marakatt-Labba: Embroidered Stories, Nordic Landscapes, Ursula Biemann: Mission Reports, and Irving Penn: Photographs, and he has published in journals such as Afterimage, Afterall, EIKON, European Photography, Glänta, Kunstpluss, and Tema Celeste. Lundström has contributed to major publications such as Horizons: Towards a Global Africa, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph and The History of European Photography of the 20th Century. Lundström has been a guest lecturer at, among others, Alvar Aalto University, Helsinki, Konstfackskolan and the Royal Art Academy, Stockholm, Malmö Art Academy, HISK, Antwerpen/Gent, Tarttu Art Academy, Estonia, Universidad de los Ándes, Bogotá, and Oslo Art Academy.

Britta Marakatt-Labba, Händelser i tid/Events in Time, cotton canvas flour sacks, embroidery, and seven flour sacks, 2013. Courtesy of the Sami Art Collection of RiddoDuottarMuseat, Karasjok, Norway