Walking through Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba’s exhibition in the capacious Light Hall of Oslo’s National Museum last year, I was reminded of the Morandi / Edmund de Waal exhibition at Artipelag in Stockholm’s picturesque archipelago in 2017. There, too, a purpose-built space to view art overwhelmed the delicate works on exhibit. Such contradictions seem to sum up our times: art and art institutions feel increasingly at odds with each other.
Admittedly, Artipelag is set in a stunning natural setting. My memory of the visit was that the views, at the expense of the art, stole the show. Norway’s National Museum, which opened to the public in 2022, inhabits a far more urban context near the waterfront of Oslo’s trendy Aker Brygge area. The museum is now home to an eclectic breadth of collections drawn from what were previously three separate institutions: the Norwegian Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the National Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Marakatt-Labba works not just at the scale of a stitch, but very delicate stitches at that. In her exhibition on view for the first half of 2024, the National Museum brought together a comprehensive collection of the artist’s textiles and works on paper in its vast temporary exhibition space: the Light Hall. At just over 25,000 square feet, the Hall is enviable for the sizable artworks it can accommodate. Ironically, the works in Marakatt-Labba’s Sylkvasse sting (Sharp Stitches) exhibition required protection from natural light, necessitating a temporary conversion of the space into a maze of suspended partitions.
Marakatt-Labba’s participation in Documenta 14 in Kassel, Germany in 2017 cemented her international reputation. There, she exhibited her nearly seventy-nine-foot-long Historjá, an epic embroidery of Sámi history that unrolls like a scroll and demands close viewing. In Oslo, Historjá appeared in a curved display case set within a black cloth rotunda. The purpose-built setting encouraged viewers’ concentration but equally cordoned the work off from the rest of the exhibition. The result felt vaguely like entering a memorial site, which, considering the repeated abuses the Sámi and their lands have endured, may have been unintended but not entirely inappropriate.
“Why on earth work with embroidery?” Marakatt-Labba laughed in an interview I conducted with her in 2020. Answering her own question: “This is my material. I grew up with traditional handicraft in the home.” Her adopted and adapted tradition began with materials first readily available in her childhood home of Kiruna, or in the Sámi language, Giron, in the northern reaches of Sweden, where she continues to live today. She clarified that the narrative embroidery she makes is not historically Sámi duodji (craft), but a close working knowledge of materials certainly is.
Recent years have seen textiles enjoying center stage in mainstream museum exhibitions. But Marakatt-Labba does not gloss the resistance her chosen medium faced when she was a student in the late 1970s at what was then named the Academy of Art and Crafts at the University of Gothenburg. At the time, painting was considered the serious medium to pursue; yet, Marakatt-Labba was undeterred. Sylkvasse sting includes a touching puppet theater from her student years—clear evidence of her abiding interest in the capacity for textiles to tell stories. By 1978, she had co-founded the artist’s collective Mázejoavku (Masi Group) with a focus on artwork that addressed Sámi themes. Works like Garjját / Kråkene (1981) that followed drew on her own activism in response to the controversial development of the Alta-Kautokeino waterway.
Today, many of the themes she embroiders continue to depict topics that directly affect Sámi life. Encroaching industrialization in the form of wind power plants appear in the newly commissioned Luoÿÿat / Spor, but so too are scenes from Sámi mythology as seen in Garjját / The Crows (1981) and Girdi noaiddit / Flying Shamans (1985). Indigenous knowledge, a heightened awareness of environmental concerns, and global warming are topics that now enjoy increased interest from the art world, but for Britta Marakatt-Labba these interests have been her lifelong concerns and her lived reality.
Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She is Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and Professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Norway.
