Svetlana Romanova and Laakkuluk Williamsson join Luleåbiennalen 2027

The 2027 edition of Luleåbiennalen focuses on Indigenous perspectives and takes shape through a collective process. Together with organiser Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten, artists Carola Grahn, New Red Order and Wolf Babe Collective as well as writer Lea Simma started formulating the biennial in 2025 through a series of public and private gatherings. As the biennial’s opening in early 2027 slowly approaches, two additional artists are now confirmed to participate in the upcoming exhibitions and programme.

Already in spring 2026, Laakkuluk Williamsson joined the biennial team for their trip to Sábme. Williamsson is a Canadian-Greenlandic Inuk artist based in Iqaluit in the territory of Nunavut. Her practice encompasses performance, poetry, video, theater and Uaajeerneq—a form of Inuit dance where masks play a central role. Williamsson’s work centers on topics such as Inuit cultural politics, decolonization, climate change, heritage, sexuality, love and fear. For the biennial, she will be collaborating with Wolf Babe Collective on a new project.

– I have been avidly following the work of the collective, both professionally and as a close friend to members of the group, says Williamsson. The fact that we are friends touches on what I find to be one of the central aspects of their work: that the personal is political and that the political is art. I want conversation to be central to the work that we create and for the objects and spaces that we collaborate upon to be catalysts, something that is bigger than the sum of us all.

Svetlana Romanova is an artist, filmmaker, and curator from Yakutsk, Sakha Republic, Russia. She is currently based in Massachusetts, conducting a PhD at the Department for Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Romanova’s practice primarily centers on circumpolar relations. Through text, video as well as other audio-visual means, she explores themes such as self-historization, imperial optics and geographical collapse. For Luleåbiennalen, Romanova is creating an immersive space including works by additional artists yet to be revealed to the public.

– As a Sakha artist working in self-exile, coming into relation with Julevu and its Indigenous geography is a chance to think across state borders and alongside other circumpolar voices, and to challenge how our territories have been historically imagined. My contribution to the biennale is a space of counter-image production, a process in which our way of seeing becomes a form of self-historization, says Romanova.