Opening program—On the Ugly and the Beautiful: Johan Turi, Outi Pieski, Johanna Minde, and Emilie Demant Hatt in the Eyes of Eva La Cour

Opening: Saturday, September 5, 2026, 2nd Floor

12:30
Opening ceremony Markerna, a work by Carola Grahn and Nils-Johan Labba.

Words of welcome from Maria Lind, Director of Kin

12:45
Krister Stoor joiking Johan Turi

13:00
Artist Outi Pieski and architect Johanna Minde speak about their works in the exhibition.

13:45
Artist Eva La Cour on her video about the complex relationship between the Danish artist and self-taught anthropologist Emilie Demant Hatt (1873–1958) and Johan Turi, Konstverkstan, 1st Floor

Lectures, 5th Floor

14:30
Harald Gaski
The Wolf Hunter Who Became a Sámi Classic: Johan Turi’s Art Viewed and Assessed from an Indigenous Aesthetic Perspective

It took a hundred years before Johan Turi (1854–1936) began to be recognized as an artist. For a long time, he was best known to the outside world as the author of the first Sámi book written in Sámi by a Sámi—a work that gave voice to Sámi perspectives without being a religious text. However, for the Sámi who knew Turi, he was above all a skilled wolf hunter and a bearer of cultural knowledge with a strong desire to communicate and share his experiences. When his art was exhibited in Copenhagen in 1928, his colored drawings were described as “youthful and entirely uninfluenced.” The works were characterized by a freshness that introduced motifs from a geographical area perceived as peripheral in Copenhagen. Today, Turi is one of the most frequently cited Sámi authors and is regarded as an Indigenous philosopher—a source of inspiration for Sámi cultural revitalization.

15:15
Mikael Svonni
Johan Turi: A Sámi Writer with an Eye for Both the Big Picture and the Details

Johan Turi became the first Sámi writer to publish a book in the Sámi language about Sámi life. He was born in Guovdageaidnu on the Norwegian side of Sápmi in 1854 and moved with his family to Dálbmá (Talma Sámi community) on the Swedish side in the 1880s. He was a reindeer herder, like the rest of his family, but fishing and hunting were also major parts of his life. He had long harbored a desire to write a book about the Sámi, so that people other than the Sámi might gain an insight into their way of life.

A series of coincidences enabled him to realize this wish when he met Emilie Demant (Hatt), an artist and ethnographer from Denmark who promised to help Turi with the book, while her dream was to follow a reindeer-herding family for an entire year. Turi arranged for her to spend a winter with his brother, Aslak, and his family. After that winter, she helped Turi with his writing. Turi had intended to write in Finnish, but because Demant did not speak any Finnish, he instead wrote in Sámi. For three months, he sat writing in small notebooks while she read and commented. The result was a detailed account of Sámi life by someone who knew the circumstances well and was often a participant in the events. He recounted his knowledge and observations in his book, Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi), which was first published in 1910. A recent edition, published in 2010, was based on a new transcription of Turi’s handwritten manuscript, prepared by Professor Mikael Svonni.

16:00
Hanna Horsberg Hansen
Johan Turi and Emilie Demant Hatt: A Modern Collaboration and Friendship

In 1904, two people met on an ore train between the Swedish-Norwegian border and Torneträsk in northern Sweden. He was a Sámi reindeer herder, hunter, and storyteller living in the area and carrying a strong desire to tell others about his people’s inner as well as their everyday life. She was a traveler and trained artist from Denmark seeking an opportunity to live among the Sami reindeer herders for a year. Their meeting marked the beginning of a remarkable collaboration.

One result of the collaboration was the book Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi), published together with an atlas of fourteen drawings by Turi. A new edition of the book, published to mark its 100th anniversary, also includes additional images by Turi, inviting a reassessment of his visual practice. Emilie Demant, in turn, published the illustrated travel account Ved ilden (By the Fire) in 1922, based on her experiences among the Sámi. Taken together, these works call for an examination of the artistic exchange between Turi and Demant and of how their collaboration shaped the subsequent development of their respective visual practices.

16:45 Break

17:00
Eeva-Kristiina Nylander
The Ládjogahpir: Resistance, Resilience, and Reconciliation

Duodji can be understood as a repository of cultural knowledge. It is holistic, encompassing inherited skills and knowledge as well as Sámi philosophies, ontologies, and worldviews. In this presentation, Eeva-Kristiina Nylander explores the significance of the ládjogahpir, a traditional hat that was banned by the church in the nineteenth century. Preserved in museum collections, this piece of duodji raises important questions about what happens when such objects are returned to Sámi communities. Nylander also highlights the emotions and processes set in motion when Sámi duojárs engage with the ládjogahpir, demonstrating how museum-held duodji can facilitate processes of healing and contribute to reconciliation. Her presentation is based on an art, science, and craftivism project developed together with Čiske-Jovsset Biret Hánsa Outi Pieski, as well as on their book The Ládjogahpir: Foremothers’ Hat of Pride (2020).

Presentations

Krister Stoor, from Orusjohka/Årosjokk, holds a PhD in Sámi studies and is currently a senior lecturer at the Department of Language Studies/Sámi dutkan and Várdduo: Centre for Sámi Research at Umeå University. His research focuses on how stories conveyed through joik and oral tradition reappear and are reinterpreted in contemporary contexts. He studies intangible cultural heritage as a force within society, a field that includes both joik and other storytelling traditions.

Harald Gaski was born and raised along the Deatnu/Tana River on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Gaski is an author, editor, and retired professor of Sámi culture and literature at UiT: The Arctic University of Norway and Sámi allaskuvla / Sámi University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on Sámi culture and literature, both oral and written, as well as Sámi values, worldviews, aesthetics, and Indigenous critical studies. He was instrumental in establishing Sámi literature as an academic field from the mid-1980s onward. Gaski has also translated Sámi literature and the poetry of Nils-Aslak Valkeapää into Norwegian and English. His most recent book is the trilingual Vuoiŋŋalašvuohta – Samisk åndelighet: An Essay on the Sámi People’s Spiritual Connection to Land (2025). Also noteworthy is his anthology Myths, Tales and Poetry from Four Centuries of Sámi Literature, published in 2020. His first book, Med ord skal tyvene fordrives (1987), is an account and analysis of narrative juoigan (Sámi folk music) texts. Gaski has been a visiting scholar at several universities internationally. He served on the International Research Advisory Panel of New Zealand’s Māori Centre of Research Excellence at the University of Auckland for ten years (2006–2015). In 2006, he received the Nordic Sámi Language Prize, Gollegiella, and in 2024, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Umeå University in Sweden.

Mikael Svonni, Professor Emeritus of Sámi Studies, earned his PhD in 1993 with a dissertation on the Sámi language of Sámi schoolchildren. He was Professor of Sámi Language and Sámi Culture at Umeå University from 2003 to 2008, and Professor of Sámi Linguistics at the University of Tromsø from 2008 to 2017. Svonni’s research has focused primarily on the syntax of North Sámi. He has published numerous articles in this field and has also developed a North Sámi grammar in both Swedish and North Sámi, as well as a North Sámi–Swedish / Swedish–North Sámi dictionary, first published in Norway in 2013 and followed by a substantially expanded edition published by Ravda Förlaget in 2023. He has also transcribed Johan Turi’s Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sámi), published in a new edition in 2010, as well as Turi’s travel narratives, originally published in 1931. Working from Turi’s handwritten manuscripts, Svonni was able to correct inaccuracies that had appeared in earlier editions. Both the 2010 edition of Muitalus sámiid birra and the collection of travel narratives published in 2018 under the title Mátkemuitalusat ja iežá muitalusat (Travel Narratives and Other Stories), are based on these transcriptions. In addition, Svonni has analyzed Turi’s language in several articles, as well as his narrative technique, including the chapter “Johan Turi’s Narrative Technique” in the anthology Visions of Sápmi (2015). He has demonstrated how Turi’s narrative strategies and perspective are also reflected in his drawings.

Hanna Horsberg Hansen is a Norwegian Professor Emerita of art history. From 2012 until her retirement in 2024, she held a position in the Department of Art at the Academy of Arts, UiT: The Arctic University of Norway, in Tromsø. She is a pioneering scholar in the field of Sámi art. For the past twenty-five years, she has published accounts of Sámi art from heterogeneous perspectives rather than as a linear, Eurocentric art history. Her research includes a critique of art history as a discipline with a specifically Western understanding of both art and history. Her publications encompass both contemporary and historical Sámi art, institution building, and the connections between Sámi art and politics.

Eva-Kristiina Nylander is a postdoctoral researcher with Frontiers of Arctic and Global Resilience (FRONT), Giellagas Institute, at the University of Oulu.

Eva la Cour is a visual artist based in Copenhagen, also trained in media and visual anthropology. Her work unfolds across film, artistic research, and contemporary art, exploring how chance encounters, affective relations, and collaborative processes expand the often institutional frameworks of archives and knowledge production. Since visiting the Art Academy in Tromsø as an art student in 2008 and subsequent fieldwork in Svalbard in 2011, she has been engaged with Arctic imaginaries. In 2022, she completed a PhD at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, based on her experiences in Svalbard and experiments with collaborative live video editing. She subsequently held a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Art as Forum, University of Copenhagen (2022–2024), and currently holds a research grant at the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (2025–2027), focusing on knowledge production in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), its colonial legacies, and their entanglements with contemporary ecological and social cris

Bild 1: Johan Turi
Bild 2: Outi Pieski
Bild 3: Johan Turi, bild av Johanna Minde
Bild 4: Stillbild, video av Eva la Cour