In 17th-century Finnmark a common practice for determining the guilt of an accused witch was to subject them to the “water ordeal.” With hands and feet tied, they would be thrown into the freezing Barents Sea to see whether they sank or floated. If they sank, they were innocent. Water was thought to repel evil, so the suspect’s rising to the surface and floating proved their guilt.
In 21st-century America, Senator Lindsey Graham regarded a woman who, protesting the Supreme Court nomination of a man accused of sexual assault, asked if Brett Kavanaugh should take a polygraph test. In response he sneered “why don’t we dunk him in water and see if he floats?”
The figure of the hunted witch was evoked often in 2018, the year I finally realized a long-held dream to make an art-pilgrimage to the Arctic island of Vardø, the extreme northeastern point of Norway, to see the Steilneset Memorial to the victims of the Finnmark witchcraft trials. Read about my trip in my essay for Hyperallergic.
In 1979 a group of Sámi people, wearing traditional dress and calling to “let the river live,” staged a hunger strike outside of parliament in Oslo while others occupied the prime minister’s office. This was the dramatic climax of the People’s Action against the Áltá-Guovdageaidnu Waterway (1978-1982) in opposition to the construction of a dam across the Alta river in northern Norway.
This strategically visible uprising brought Sámi rights into the Norwegian political mainstream and helped lead to Norway’s signing of ILO Convention 169 and the creation of a Sámi Parliament.
Part of a three-year-long dialogue with Sámi artists and scholars, Let the River Flow ,a group show at Oslo’s Office of Contemporary Art, shows how artists were at the center of the action. The multigenerational show also explores the Alta action’s legacy today and the sentiment that the decolonizing process it initiated has stalled and that Sámi culture is in danger today, through such works as Máret Ánne Sara’s Pile o’ Sapmi Power Necklace, which is made from powdered reindeer bones referencing the Norwegian government-imposed reindeer slaughter in northern Norway, a policy Sámi herders is an infringement of indigenous rights.
The art offerings of the Nordics are well established: from the capitals’ gleaming national galleries to the scrappier artist-run spaces in their less-polished neighborhoods. But travel away from the established centres and you may stumble upon some of the region’s most visually arresting art sites. In each of the following three art escapes, in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, a unique alchemy fuses the site with the place in which it sits, and together they yield something almost magical.
For volume nine of Oak – The Nordic Journal, I wrote about the Steilneset Memorial (above) in Norway, Artipelag in Sweden, and Cisternerne in Denmark.
I spent a few days at the vernissage (preview) of the Venice art biennale where, far from the headlining major national pavilions, I found a collateral event that might have been the highlight of the three days. For Catalonia in Venice, the artist Antoni Abad worked with blind Venetians to bring visitors a sensory experience of a visually familiar city.
Last week, for the Village Voice, I interviewed the Sámi rapper, SlinCraze. Nils Rune Utsi, as he is bestter known in his tiny Arctic hometown of Máze, was in NYC for the U.N Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, a gathering of 1,200 indigenous people from around the world, where he was invited to play a concert. He also appeared at Scandinavia House, alongside Aili Keskitalo, the President of the Sámi Parliament of Norway, and Simen Braathen, the director of a documentary film about him, “Arctic Superstar.”
The story of Arctic Superstar began in New York, where, in 2013, Braathen produced a photo exhibition of Norwegian rappers and the places they represent. SlinCraze played his first NYC gig at the Mothership in Brooklyn afterward. “SlinCraze’s story stuck out to me,” Braathen told me, “because of his raw ambition, yet impossible starting point. Language is obviously important in rap, yet there he was rapping in a language that is considered endangered by UNESCO. And killing it!”
Utsi’s language is Northern Sámi, understood by only 20,000 people. Not only do Norwegians or Europeans or anyone else not understand Northern Sámi, but many Sámi people don’t understand it either.
As he told me: “There’s no numbers on how many Sámi people there are, because of a history of the Norwegian government trying to wipe out the Sámi language. A lot of kids, from at least two generations before me, learned that speaking Sámi is taboo. So they forgot the language. There’s no real numbers on how many people are actually Sámi, because a lot of people work really hard to hide it.”
I was reminded while speaking to him of an artwork I saw last year in the Stormen cultural centre in Bodø, Arctic Norway. By Edvine Larssen, who lives and works on the Lofoten islands, the piece comprises a found vintage photograph of a Sámi couple. The people in the photograph had scratched out their traditional Sámi footwear.
Edvine Larssen at Stormen. Photo by author.
Why? Because at this time Norway had a policy of forced assimilation, known as Fornorsking, or Norwegianisation. Sámi traditions and clothing were banned, as were the Sámi languages, one of which SlinCraze is helping revitalise through his music.
I arrived in the Faroe Islands fairly well-versed in the islands’ musical and literary heritage, but with little grasp of the visual art scene there. In fact, the only encounter with Faroese art that I can recall previously was Tróndur Patursson’s glass bird installation at Reykjavík’s concert hall, Harpa a few years ago.
Tróndur Patursson in Harpa, Reykjavík
Upon arrival in the Faroe Islands I met some of those birds again, this time fluttering across windows and hanging from the ceiling throughout the tiny Vagar airport.
Tróndur Patursson at Vagar Airport
Always working with the nature he lives with in the Faroes, Patursson’s glass work appeared again at The Nordic House, this time taking the shape of the mountains. In the photo below, outside the window, Hans Pauli Olsen’s bronze sculpture, “Pilot Whale Killing,” plays with depths and explores that controversial Faroese tradition, the annual pilot whale hunt.
Tróndur Patursson at The Nordic House
The Nordic House is filled with art works; paintings, sculptures, lithographs and glasswork, by Faroese artists who also include Guðrið Poulseon, Jóhannes Geir and Edward Fuglø.
Fuglø’s work, “Microstate Hiker” was unfortunately on loan when I visited, but I was able to see more of his work at the hotel I was staying at, Hotel Føroyar. “Nation Building” (in the photo at the beginning of this post) was the first to strike me as I saw it hung over the staircase to the hotel’s restaurant. In it, the Faroese flag is created out of food packaging, most of which seem to be imported. The piece seems to comment on ideas of independence and self sufficiency in a nation not wholly independent and (because of the rugged terrain where vegetables do not grow easily) dependent upon imported foods. It’s worth remembering that the practice of pilot whale hunting came to be because it was once a real struggle to find food to eat here.
I was soon seduced by Fuglø’s work, filled with surreal elements and comments on Faroese identity. The below piece, in the hotel’s lounge, is called “Cosmic Event” and superimposes a flying saucer over a vintage wedding scene.
Edward Fuglø, Cosmic Event
This one, in the reception area. I don’t have the title of as the third panel had been removed when I went to take a last look and photo of it. Again, though, Fuglø is obviously playing with ideas of identity.
A year ago I was invited to attend LE Miami, the luxury travel show. The event has a partnership with American Excursionist who organise bespoke tours designed by experts and led by local personalities. I went on their Little Havana Cultural Immersion tour, led by a cultural anthropologist, which took me to Calle Ocho to experience el calor Latino.
Our first stop was La casona de la sagüesera, the home of the identical twin Cuban artists, Ronald and Nelson Curras, who work in ceramics and have transformed their house into a living piece of art. La sagüesera, I was told, is Spanglish for “southwest.”
Throughout the home–which may be turned into a museum one day–are images of O’ Shun, the most popular of the orishas (spirits) in santería, the religion that developed in the African slave communities of the Cuba’s sugar plantations by adopting elements of Spanish-imposed Catholicism while maintaining beliefs from Africa, primarily those of Nigeria’s Yoruba tribe.
Incorporated into the murals and mosaics throughout the house are frequent images of sunflowers–the presence of which in Cuban art invoke O’ Shun.
I just loved the energy and colour of La casona de la sagüesera and feel very lucky to have been invited inside.
Scandinavia House, on Park Avenue near Grand Central, is one of my favorite under-the-radar places in New York City. It’s almost always quiet, never busy, has a great (but pricey) Nordic café named Smörgås Chef; and shows excellent films and free art exhibitions.
Finnish-born, Amsterdam-based graphic artist Kustaa Saksi creates abstract, dream-like, and fantastical illustrations that, as well as gracing gallery walls across the world, have been featured in campaigns for brands such as Nike, Lacoste, and Issey Miyake. His work has appeared in the pages of the New York Times and even on the stamps of the Finnish Post.
Karen Gardiner 