Sámi Center for Contemporary Art presents Fall Back Spring Forward.
Sámi Center for Contemporary Art presents Fall Back Spring Forward at Small Projects in Tromsø 22.11.2012 – 2.12.2012 and during the UNITED NATIONS WORLD CONFERENCE ON INDIGENOUS PEOPLES IN ALTA 10. 06 -12.06.13
Three projects on identity, belonging and the strange in the past and future, on changes in old patterns and on moving into our own time.
In 1928, Simoni Laakso from Enontekiö took his family and reindeer with him to Hamburg Zoo. They lived there on the exhibition premises for half a year, entertaining the public with their everyday life – something exotic for the spectators. In 2012, Simoni’s grand-grandson Markku Laakso visited the same location together with Annika Dahlsten. In Hamburg Zoo, the two created a performance piece at the same place where his ancestors had exhibited their lives.
This is one of the three projects presented in the exhibition Fall Back Spring Forward. In their own ways, they all look at the past in the present, examining how orders and structures reflect or organize what is and will be current in the present and future. They look at how earlier conceptions and stereotypes talk to us now and in future and what this view of history says to us today. It becomes apparent that no-one can step outside modernity: it concerns us all.
In Annika Dahlsten and Markku Laakso’s A Campfire in Zoo, history is re-experienced and re-presented through a series of new photographs and videos that confirm and examine the experience of the exotic, the vulnerable and the deviant. Julie Edel Hardenberg’s Sapiitsut (Heroes) tells, through a series of film posters, about a post-colonial nation that has never existed: we see images that both shed light on the lack of identities and, first and foremost, create new heroes. These film posters tell about imaginary feature films that have been produced in Greenland and staged by Greenlanders themselves today. Kristin Tårnesvik examines language: how do vocabularies and words contribute to the presentation of identity and the legitimization of stereotypes. Tårnesvik’s project looks at material from books, postcards and declarations published in 1914–1950. The posters of the exhibition Fall Back Spring Forward are based on the book Samekulturen (Sámi Culture) that was published by Tromsø Museum in 1958.
