Joar Nango

Pitch black

Joar Nango’s piece represents a different approach to the framework of an environmental-art biennale as it is process based and investigates the tradition of burning tar. At the biennale, traces and documentation of the process, conducted during the preparative workshop in June, can be seen.

Joar Nango: Pitch black. 2016. Photo: Antti J.Leinonen.

This work researches how a familiar material—birch—changes and is transformed in the Arctic landscape. The traditional Sámi way of doing tar is to make it from birch bark. Tar burning has a long tradition in the Ii and Oulu area. Nango is interested in creative simplicity and sustainable knowledge. By experimenting with and learning the process of making tar, he reconnected with old knowledge and transformed it into a conceptual work.

Nango (b. 1979) is a Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect. He graduated from Norwegian University of Science and Technology in 2007. Nango’s work inhabits the frontier of architecture, design and art, exploring issues of native identity through the contradictions in contemporary architecture and the built environment. He is especially interested in the concept of nomadism and in the creative simplicity and sustainable knowledge that exist within the informal building environments of the north. In 2010, he co-founded the architectural collective FFB, specialising in nomadic structures and subversive interventions in urban contexts. FFB was nominated by Norsk Form for the Young Architects of the Year award in 2012.

Gallery

See also

Outi Pieski

Forewalkers is based on the Sámi philosophy of the agreeable life (soabala eallin): preserving, protecting and supporting diversity in both nature and humans. Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski have made their own borderless fence from walking sticks. In Sápmi, walking sticks traditionally have been used to mark reindeer calves in the bare mountains. Thus, this artwork references praxis which decolonises Sámis’ land by defining its borders. This piece also pays homage to the Sámi ancestors, who wandered before the artists and are their forewalkers. Their legacy is alive in Sámi culture today.

Ingunn Utsi

Ingunn Utsi made her first ‘Gudni’ or ‘Tribute’ work in 1995 in the Ássebákti forest of Karasjok. Her new ‘Gudni II’ or ‘Tribute II,’ which she finished for the biennale, resembles a poem whose lines link Ii and Karasjok. “Two pines stand in a forest far from each other, still connected.” Gudni II is like a family tree whose branches stretch through distance and over generations.

Jenni Laiti

Forewalkers is based on the Sámi philosophy of the agreeable life (soabala eallin): preserving, protecting and supporting diversity in both nature and humans. Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski have made their own borderless fence from walking sticks. In Sápmi, walking sticks traditionally have been used to mark reindeer calves in the bare mountains. Thus, this artwork references praxis which decolonises Sámis’ land by defining its borders. This piece also pays homage to the Sámi ancestors, who wandered before the artists and are their forewalkers. Their legacy is alive in Sámi culture today.

Carola Grahn

Carola Grahn’s contribution to the Ii biennale is a series consisting of three wood signs with hand-carved sentences positioned in relation to the landscape. The blunt sentences bring to mind human relations.

Aage Gaup

In the front of the park, a structure rises from the ground. The contours of a person can be seen in the forest, almost guarding the site. Aage Gaup’s piece is made from the trunks of pine trees, carved into a sculpture. From the material, he awakens vuovdeolmmo.

Tomas Colbengtson

Tomas Colbengtson’s pieces for this biennale are two silkscreen portraits of Sámi people printed on polycarbonate glass. The portraits are placed in nature, with a river as their backdrop. We can see the faces of two women, visualized through patterns taken from old carvings on reindeer antlers. The river passes behind their faces, symbolising the years that have passed and the culture that has vanished.

Matti Aikio

Matti Aikio’s sound installation tells about the present-day situation of the Sámi people in Finland. It turns upside down the Sámi storytelling tradition by presenting a story of the future.