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Art NOW presents Sigrid Lien
Sámi Silence Visualized – Marja Helander’s “Jaskes eatnamat”
12 pm MT | February 8, 2023
University Recital Hall
Free admission, everyone welcome

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Sigrid Lien joins us virtually in the recital hall for this lecture.

In a speech presented at the Sámi Parliament in Norway in 1997, the Norwegian king, Harald V, officially pardoned ‘the injustice inflicted on the Sámi people, the country’s northern indigenous population, by the Norwegian state through a hard politics of assimilation’. Twenty years later, in 2017, the Norwegian Parliament decided to set up a Truth commission in order to document the long-term consequences of the forced assimilation processes. Norway has not been alone in taking such a step. Also in 2017, Finland established its own commission ‘to investigate and spotlight the discrimination of the Sámi in the past, and to improve the relationship between the Sámi and the State on the basis of the information gathered by the commission’.

While the conclusions of the Norwegian commission still remains to be seen, the consequences of the assimilation politics for Sámi peoples, including the loss of history, memories, language, culture, and land, are already in the process of being negotiated in contemporary Sámi art. Lien’s will explore the Sámi artist Marja Helander’s work in this perspective, arguing that her photographic aftermath-confrontations with the environmental destructions of Sámi culture and landscapes may be understood as a Nordic indigenous version of colonial melancholy. But in addition to photographic elegies, Helander also produces video works. The talk will also present a video-piece, where Helander, who grew up and has spent most of her life in the urban environment of Helsinki, stages herself and her own experience of memory loss and estrangement in the landscape of her Sámi ancestors, through the use of humour and irony.

Sigrid Lien is professor in art history and photography studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Lien has published extensively on nineteenth century as well as modern and contemporary photography. Latest publications include: Sigrid Lien & Hilde Wallem Nielssen (eds.): Adjusting the Lens: Indigenous Activism, Colonial Legacies, and Photographic Heritage, University of British Columbia Press, 2021, and Sigrid Lien & Justin Carville (eds.): Contact Zones: Photography, Migration, and the United States. Leuven University Press, 2021.