Exhibitors: Monica Edmondson, Lindsay Seers, Outi Pieski, Roger Mullin, Linda Persson, Joar Nango.
The inauguration of Sámi Dáiddaguovddás new center of contemporary art will now be in the center of the Sami capital Karasjok.
The inaugural will be made by Vice President Henry Olsen at the Sami Parliament and leader of the Sami Art Association, Marita Isobel Solberg. Opening Speech by Director Hjørdis Kurås. We welcome the audience with generous resources – a reception desk with cafe area and seating, shop with Sami arts, crafts/handicrafts and design, art studio and guest apartment, meeting rooms, sound studio and most importantly – good and expansive new showrooms. The inaugural exhibition “Top of the World” is introduced by curator Jan-Erik Lundstrøm, and there will be performance art and music at the opening.
Top of the World, the inaugural exhibition of the new premises of Sámi Dáiddaguovddás/the Sami Center of Contemporary Art, utilizes the particular and exceptional geographical, cultural and existential position of Karasjok and Sápmi as its point of departure. Six artists of international stature contribute new works of art, created exclusively for the occasion, that cross borders, open new vistas, and generate future passions and identities.
The radically perspective-turning maps of Hans Ragnar Mathissen from the 1970s and Katarina Pirak-Sikku’s pointed and charged miniature map Sápmi, pencilled by hand, are the ouverture and reference works to Top of the World, further deepening the complexity of time, space and geography in relation to this particular umbilicus mundi or world summit.
Monica Edmondson’s “A Hundred Migratory” choreographs a spiritual journey of exquisite and delicate glass objects, involving as well one hundred engaged and spirited humans, addressing a distressed and neglected planet.
Lindsay Seers’ video installation Monocular weaves a remarkable narrative where a reindeer herder’s son, baptized with a singular physical/medical condition of differently colored eyes and having, in addition, experienced the loss of language, comes to embody or incorporate this very key point where body and mind, soul and matter, spirit and flesh merge or become interchangeable, indistinguishable from each other.
Outi Pieski’s landscape works are not representations but emergences or emissions of nature, collapsing the binarisms of the Western nature/culture divide. Pieski, engaging her native north Fennoscandian, Sápmi and circumpolar landscape, refuses the culture/nature divide and creates in challenging blends of materials works that exist and before they speak or articulate.
Roger Mullin’s elegantly generative and multimedia work approaches the same arctic and subarctic landscape, making manifest its underlying structures and properties, extracting its grammar and identity.
Linda Persson’s elegiac installation Nourtabealli (The Nightside) engages the Sami shaman drum and the legend of the white reindeer in a captivating shadow-play/puppet theatre of historical fragments, stories and identities.
Joar Nango, in turn, addresses the very occasion of the inauguration of an edifice and performs a door-burning ritual in homage to the new building, reflecting upon the ways which cultures name, inaugurate and welcome their new living quarters.
Many thanks to:
Finnmark Fylkeskommune
Sametinget i Norge
Karasjok kommune
Linda Persson’s contribution to the exhibition is also supported by:
Kulturfonden för Sverige och Finland
Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme
Konstnärsnämden
Längmanska Kulturfonden
