Following an Encounter: Emilie Demant Hatt and Eva la Cour

Bringing together Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings and prints with a new video essay by artist Eva la Cour, the exhibition Following an Encounter: Emilie Demant Hatt and Eva la Cour draws attention to the relationships that shape human lives, works of art, and the writing of history. At its center is Emilie Demant Hatt (1873–1958), an artist and self-taught anthropologist from Skive and Copenhagen. In 1904, a chance encounter on the Iron Ore Line—the railway newly built to carry iron ore from Kiruna to the Norwegian coast—brought Demant Hatt together with the Sámi wolf hunter and artist Johan Turi, changing both of their lives and marking the beginning of a pivotal collaboration. Demant Hatt learned Sámi and returned to Sápmi a few years later, where she spent time living with reindeer-herding families in the areas around Torneträsk and Karesuando. Through her encouragement and work as a copyist, editor, and translator, she helped bring Turi’s book Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi) to completion and publication in 1910—the first book about Sámi life written in Sámi by a Sámi author.

In the video essay (Re)Turning to Emilie Demant Hatt, Eva la Cour revisits Turi and Demant Hatt’s collaboration. Drawing on archival materials, historical reflection, and speculative interpretation, she traces how their relationship shaped the book’s creation and transformed them both. At the same time, she foregrounds the work—translating, editing, organizing, and giving form to the material—through which Demant Hatt helped make the book possible. Their collaboration was both a creative and emotional exchange and a relationship marked by unequal conditions.

Demant Hatt’s own artistic practice received only limited recognition during her lifetime, yet her position was also a complex one. She worked at a time when prevailing ideas of the artist, the researcher, and the explorer were largely shaped by men, while at the same time occupying a privileged place within a colonial system—one unavailable to Turi and the Sámi families with whom she lived. La Cour’s work lingers on these tensions, seeking to bring into view the relationships, dependencies, and acts of mediation that so often recede into the background of historical narratives.

Following an Encounter: Emilie Demant Hatt through Eva la Cour is presented alongside the exhibition On the Ugly and the Beautiful: Johan Turi, Outi Pieski, and Johanna Minde on the second floor.

Image 1: Still from the video essay (Re)Turning to Emilie Demant Hatt
Image 2: Still from the video essay (Re)Turning to Emilie Demant Hatt