LB°22 Exhibitions

ARKIV

Sámi Dáiddaguovddáš Foundation, Karasjok (Norway)

Installation Gulahallan ja birgen. Photographer Karl-Oskar Gustafsson

Gulahallan ja birgen, an exhibition by and featuring Berit Kristine Andersen Guvsám, Gunvor Guttorm, Laila Susanna Kuhmunen. The exhibition is the product of a two-year collaboration within AIDA, or Arctic Indigenous Arts and Design Archives–an archive consisting of materials taken from the practices of different craftspeople.

For this exhibition, Berit Kristine Andersen Guvsám, Gunvor Guttorm, and Laila Susanna Kuhmunen have engaged in dialogue with the materials compiled within the archive.

The title of the exhibition, Gulahallan ja birgen, refers to sustainability, a subject the group has returned to repeatedly throughout their process. Gulahallan is often translated as “communication”, and in this exhibition, it relates to the interpersonal dimension, but also to our dialogue with nature and physical materiality. Birgen, which can broadly be defined as “making do”, connects to the group’s explorations of both perspectives, on the use of material, along with their stewardship of the knowledge preserved in the AIDA archives. In one of the group’s many collective explorations of sustainable approaches to nature, they dug up and used roots as materials for crafts. This concretised their relationships to the land, but also made them metaphorical, as they gained new understanding of their own traditions and histories.

A film, in which the exhibition participants reflect on this process, is shown as part of the Luleå Biennial 2022, both on site at Galleri Syster and online here via the Learning room.

With: Berit Kristine Andersen Guvsám, Gunvor Guttorm, Laila Susanna Kuhmunen.