Artistic Programming
Explore a selection of upcoming Artistic Programming below, and check back as additional programming is announced
All Day | The Many Ways We Love, Various Artists; Sjadduo; organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love
13-17 June 2026
Sjadduo
Website
Organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love draws on the essay of the same title by the late Iñupiaq artist Jenny Irene, in which Jenny – whose life and work is celebrated for their deep commitment to storytelling, Indigenous, Queer, and Two-Spirit communities – expresses a desire to see a future where all expressions of gender and sexuality are celebrated, and where everyone can freely express the many ways we love, anywhere in the North. We undertake this project with the support of Jenny’s partner, Nora, and her friends and family in Alaska.
The Many Ways We Love features Queer, Trans, Non-Binary, and/or Two-Spirit (or LGBTI) artists across all visual art disciplines, including images of performance art, by Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, Black people, People of Colour and other artists originally from or currently residing in the North. The artworks are prominently displayed outdoors in a banner installation encircling one of the main public venues. It is co-curated by the research team of Curating Change, a project that focuses on expanding decolonial and inter-cultural exhibition practices, in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices.
Artists:
Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Especially experimental & abstract art, processes, collectivity, periphery, interpersonal relations, family history & the work of the hand. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer.
Arngasaq is a Black Inuk artist that specializes in multimedia arts, aiming to create for self expression– their pieces touch subjects in all forms; trauma, politics, and cultural storytelling. Their art pieces are made from self interests– with the main themes being supernatural, cultural and horror oriented.
Embla is a dancer and performer based in Iceland and her work is rooted in disability and Queer pride. With an academic background in sociology, she has researched disability in relation to sexuality, shame, pleasure, and affect. In her artistic practice, she brings these themes into performance through dance, movement, storytelling, and devised theatre, aiming to present unapologetic and sensual representations of disability and Queerness on stage.
Ethan/Kayaaní J Lauesen is a visual artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2019. Their body of work focuses on their Denaakk’e Koyukon Athabaskan and Lingít cultural backgrounds, their Queer identity, and how they are perceived in Alaskan communities. The prints, paintings, and drawings they produce are an intimate response to public perceptions of their Indigenous and Queer identities, encapsulating their personal narrative and experiences documenting cultural change.
Eva Svaneblom (she/her), born in 1987, is a Tornedalian dance artist, based in Tromsø, Norway since 2020. Her artistic practice revolves around the situated body—how the body is shaped through encounters with its physical and sociocultural environments. She often work by playing with and reshaping stereotypes, where her Tornedalian background meets her Queer identity. In these fields of tension, new attitudes and expressions emerge that inspire and drive my creative work forward. Aesthetics are a central part of her work, both in choreography and performance, as well as in visual elements such as costume and scenography. She frequently uses references from pop culture and seeks expressions that can speak to a wide audience. A common thread in her practice is collectivity and community—she explores how art can create shared spaces and foster understanding across different experiences. Eva’s work takes many forms: from performances in gallery spaces or outdoors, to short videos on social media, and full-length productions in black box theatres. She works both solo and collaboratively, often across disciplines. She usually has both solo and collaborative projects running simultaneously. Eva also explores drag as an art form through the non-binary drag king Ei Ei. Ei Ei is fabulously Queer and extra Tornedalian! Since 2021, curating performing arts is also an extended part of her practice.
Hans-Henrik (HH) Suersaq Poulsen is an actor, singer, seamster, and artist, who graduated from The National Theatre School. He sings contemporary music infused with traditional elements such as throat singing and drum dancing. HH carries into the 21st century the living spirit of Kalaallit Nunaat´s ancient traditions, weaving them seamlessly into contemporary expression. HH also designs and creates contemporary and traditional garments (look out for his Anoraqs!). He has deeply explored other Inuit languages—making him able to communicate in the Inugguit dialect (North Greenlandic), Iivit dialect (East Greenlandic), as well as Inuktitut (the Canadian Inuit dialect).
Fox Sandberg (they/them) is a nonbinary, autistic South Sámi artist, based in Lïkssjuo, Sweden. Fox’s family has roots in Vualtjere, Sápmi, and Scotland. They hold a BA in Sequential Arts from the University of Gävle, and have worked as an illustrator and author, focusing in particular on South Sámi and Queer narratives, alongside a life-long passion for animals, in a number of different mediums. In 2017, they published Elsas Väg mot Tråante, and illustrated the Sámi radio theatre Elsa i Saajvoe-kungens rike. Over the years, they have provided public art for Umeå University, Lycksele Zoo and Lycksele Municipality. As an autistic, Indigenous nonbinary artist, Fox has battled social anxiety, body dysphoria and depression all their life. This has had an impact on their ability to work, and produce art in a fast-paced, often hostile work environment. Nonetheless, art, human rights and animals remain a strong and unyielding passion, which can often be seen in their works. Having been diagnosed as autistic as an adult, Fox is currently learning how to accept their limitations and unlearn years of harmful masking practices to attempt to fit into societal norms, which led to chronic fatigue and burnout. Through their art, they wish to highlight decolonial practices and uplift Queer, neurodivergent and Indigenous voices on a local as well as global stage.
Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest Alaska, creates artwork that reflects Yup’ik identity in both traditional and modern forms. His work is influenced by his Yup’ik ancestors and Indigenous artists all over Turtle Island. As a self-taught artist, Oscar has produced a variety of garments, from footwear to headwear. Living in a Western society, he challenges perspectives of what a Yup’ik lifestyle looks like.
Oscar also emphasizes digital art, such as graphic design and digital photography. Through the lens of the Indigenous perspective, his main goal is to Indigenize Western spaces, creating a welcoming environment for current and future Native artists in conquering the ongoing Western assimilation.
Ida Isak Westerberg (b. 1986, Sunderbyn) has a degree in higher textile craft education at Friends of Handicraft and is living and working as a textile artist in Luleå and Övertorneå. Westerberg works with site-specific processes where creation takes shape, nuances and woven qualities through a dynamic harmony between materials and how they react in relation to specific environments. Through collaboration with nature, with the bog Sompasenvuorna in Tornedalen as a recurring co-creator, Westerberg’s sculptural weaves bear tactile traces of history, but also on questions of belonging, our changing desires and Queer identities.
Jia Illusia Juvani (b. 1988) is a non-binary body, trans and queer artivist originally from Ylitornio, Finland. As a child, their idol was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. At the core of their work you can find subjects like queer, feminism, death, lust, poetry, love, hate, stereotypes, worn out clichés and general silliness. Their main mediums are video, photography, sound, objects and text. They currently live and work in Hyvinkää, Finland.
Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak (they/she) lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. They create works using a variety of materials, including soapstone, permanent marker, sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the connections and ruptures between existence within and outside Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on the expression of gender and sexuality, the desire to make people laugh, and everyday life. Their work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award (2020), the 2019 Sobey Art Award (semi-finalist) representing the Prairies and the North, the 2021 and 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (semi-finalist), the 2023 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award, the Gattuso Award and the prestigious 2023 Sobey Art Award.
Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) artist and curator from Treaty 8 territory and belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Kimble’s photographic practice revolves around acts of self-care, self-repair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Holding both a degree in Acting from Vancouver Film School as well as a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design Kimble imbues his work with a sense of theatricality and levity, which are core principles in their practice. Through a clever subversion of the everyday aesthetics Kimble also plays with language and ambiguity – something that comes natural with them being a two-spirited artist. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange, offering an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that they too may exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost.
Michael Richardt (DK/NE) is a performance artist specialising in time-based and long-durational performance. His practice includes video, film, photography, choreography, sculpture, writing, installation, painting, drawings, prints, artist books, collages and music. Richardt is a matriarchal thinker and creates work using a self-developed system anchored in spectral colours and the physical body. His performances have lasted from 13 consecutive days to a split second. In 2017, the documentary My Mother Is Pink focused on Richardt’s durational, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary artwork RULE PINK, and was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. In 2018, he worked for Marina Abramović performing Imponderabilia and Freeing the Voice at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Freeing Series at Norway’s Henie Onstad Art Centre. His work was recently exhibited at the Kunsthal Nikolaj in Denmark as well as the Reykjanes Art Museum, Gerðasafn Art Museum, the Nordic House in Iceland, and Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Norway. In 2024 he performed the concert performance POPera, composed by Pussy Riot’s Diana Burkot, with his character and lyrics, at Reykjavík Arts Festival, with 7 brass and flute players, conductor and sign language interpreter. The show will be shown in an electronic version at Tjanarbío Theatre in Reykjavik in September 2026, and he’ll exhibit and perform at the group show Cancel Culture Club and Spa, at Södertälje Art Gallery in Sweden from October 2026.
Prim (Pasa Mangiok) is a fourth generation artist, originally from Ivujivik, Nunavut but now residing in Montreal for their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Their great-grandmother was a seamstress, their grandmother, Passa Mangiuk, was a lino printer, painter and graphic artist, while their father, Thomassie Mangiok, is a graphic designer and illustrator. Prim identifies as Two Spirited, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Prim is a mixed Inuit and Atikamekw artist, Prim mainly focuses on creating artwork to challenge what Inuit art is, and what it can be, and their mediums vary from beading, sewing, sculptures, and experimenting with materials, along with paintings and drawings. They are interested in combining both their Atikamekw and Inuit heritage in their artwork, and further plans to research deeper in Inuit shamanism and Indigenous spirituality.
Salomon H Simonsen is a Greenlandic Inuk writer based in Denmark. Their work explores displacement, trans identity, exile, belonging, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Through poetry and prose, they reflect on what it means to long for home while feeling separated from it.
Sebastian Blind (1986) works with reweaving himself to his Sámi heritage and his relationship to the noaidi as a bearer of knowledge, with a deepened connection to the drum as a ritual and historical tool for healing, communication, and navigation between different world levels.
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq is an awarded multimedia artist and Indigenous rights advocate from the Inuit community of Kalaallit Nunaat and has spent most of their life exploring their identity as a Queer Inuk in many different ways.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her Ph.D. in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Since her return to Canada, she has joined the board of Indigenous Curatorial Collective, an indigenous run and led non-for profit. Dr. McGeough serves on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation. An international organization that provides financial support through grants to organizations that fight for economic justice, health and representation for self-identified LGBTQ girls and women in both Canada and the USA. She is also a founding member of Shushkitew Collective, an organization of Métis artists and scholars who are working towards Métis equity in the arts.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
Photo Credits:
Jake Kimble (Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) – Deninu K’ue First Nation), Calling My Spirits Back, 2023, Archival inkjet print, photography
Eva Svaneblom (Tornedalian), Queerilainen, 2024, dance/performance, photo: Courtney B Ropp, choreography/performer: Eva Svaneblom
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq (Inuit, Kalaallit Nunaat), Stay Deadly, 2024, digital art
All Day | A River Runs Beneath, Various Artists; Various Locations, organized by the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath: Indigenous AR Projects from the Circumpolar World to Umeje/Umeå
13 June – 20 June
Various Locations
Organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath is a Northern international Augmented Reality project created to debut at the Arctic Arts Summit and, specifically, Ubmeje. Titled in reference to the river running beneath the city centre, the artists in this exhibition contribute works that think through confluences, movement, shared histories, place-making, site-specificity, language, land and waterways. Local and visiting artists from Sapmi and Inuit Nunaat invite Summit attendees to seek out the QR codes for A River Runs Beneath throughout the city and be the first to experience these thoughtful, fun, and dynamic works in person before they are shared with the world. Visit camp or hit up a disco, dress up in Arctic fashion, and experience language and culture like you never have before.
To create these original works for the Summit, Indigenous artists from across the North and working in all media came together for artistic incubator residencies in Canada and Sweden in 2025 and 2026. Post your AR selfies with the hashtag #AAS_ARiver to be featured online.
Artists
Ida Boman (b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden) is an active artist in Västerbotten with both South Sámi roots and heritage from the Swedish southern regions of Småland and Blekinge. She has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s degree of International Conflict and Crisis Management from Umeå University. She also has academic education in Creative Writing, Feminist Theory and History. In recent years, Boman had solo exhibitions at Konsthall Väst på fjället, Bjurholm 2024 and Galleri Alva, Umeå 2025, and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at Bildmuseet, Umeå 2024, Västerbottens Museum, Umeå 2022 and Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2021. She has been awarded the Region Västerbotten scholarship for graduating students at Umeå University’s Academy of Fine Arts and the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts scholarships for art students and young artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Ida Boman has a curatorial practice where she has curated several exhibitions and she has worked as a guest teacher in sculpture and installation at ABF Umeå Art School since 2024. She currently holds a position as a temporary operations manager at the People’s Movements for Art Promotion, Konstfrämjandet Västerbotten in Umeå.
Monica L Edmonson belongs to the Lule Sámi area of Sábme/Sápmi. The issues she wants to explore in her art work, and the stories she would like to tell, indicate the use of materials and techniques. However, glass is the material she knows best and it is often used to express the coexisting notions of fragility and strength in her people, us humans and our land. Public artwork and collaborations with architects are just as important in her practice as hands-on glass work and extensive art projects. It is a story hidden in each vessel of glass, sculpture in stone, urban glass façade or installation. It can be a story to remind us of our own – as well as natures’ – fragility and strength, a story which explores questions of identity and migration or a story to connect personal or local history with contemporary art. After a visual arts degree from Canberra School of Art Australia (1999), she established a glass workshop and studio in Tärnaby north Sweden. Her work is part of national and international art collections, for example at the National Gallery of Australia and Nationalmuseet Stockholm, and have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and Koganezaki Glass Museum Shizuoka Japan, amongst others.
Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage living in Montréal. He is originally from Corner Brook Newfoundland and has family throughout Nunatsiavut. His research-creation practice is shaped by Inuit ways of learning and knowing – employing a hands-on and tactile approach through animation, video projection, collage, photography, painting, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin and beads. His work often employs a multi-layered approach, combining a materials-based practice with storytelling, archival moments, and embodied experience. Many of his installations create dynamic spaces of audio and visual connection to land, water, and animals; sites that reveal movement, patterns, and life cycles alongside everyday magic. He currently teaches at Queens University in the Film & Media Department and continues to facilitate low-budget, DIY animation workshops with Inuit and Indigenous youth across Canada and abroad. His films have screened throughout Canada and around the world.
Guná is of Dákha/Tlingit Khwáan ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honors her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters such as William Wadsen and Mike Dangelo, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling. Her work, which has been recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, and longlisted for the Yukon Art Prize and national Sobey Award, has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, and healing. For Guná, art is activism – a call to respect, protect, and empower. She is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tilingit sovereignty, thereby inviting audiences to honor Indigenous resilience.
Trine Samuelsen Hansen is a Norwegian and Sea Sámi architect, artist, and musician from Skiervá in Northern Troms on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between architecture, spatial installation, performance, and sound, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, place, and collective memory can shape contemporary artistic and architectural practice.Rooted in Sea Sámi cultural traditions, Hansen’s work investigates how space can function as a framework for listening, gathering, and dialogue. Central to her practice is the concept of árran—firepace—understood not only as a physical structure but as a social and spiritual centre for conversation, storytelling, and community. Through ritual-based and participatory approaches, she develops spatial situations that invite audiences to engage with questions of belonging and cultural continuity in Sápmi. Her diploma project Ságastallaárran – A Sea-Sámi Ritual-Based Architecture, developed at the Bergen School of Architecture in 2025, proposes a ceremonial architectural practice grounded in Indigenous methodologies. Presented as a full-scale installation and building manual, the project enables a conversational gathering space to be assembled in different locations, opening possibilities for dialogue across communities and contexts. Alongside her artistic research, Hansen has worked with the international art triennial Bergen Assembly in both 2022 and 2025, contributing as an exhibition technician, builder, and collaborator on large-scale installations. She has also participated as a singer and joiker in performance and radio works presented at institutions including Bergen Kunsthall. Through her practice, Hansen seeks to create spaces that nurture trust, reflection, and shared learning—where architecture becomes a living process of relationship-building between people, land, and history.
Tilde-Ristin Kuoljok (b. 1996) lives and works in Burgávrre, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sábme (Purkijaur, Jokkmokk, Sweden). She belongs to the reindeer herding community of Sirges and comes from a line of Sámi duodje practitioners. Kuoljok grew up learning traditional knowledge and handicraft practices within her family before pursuing formal studies. She is a Lule Sámi duodjár (traditional Sámi handicrafter), textile artist and trained conservator, educated at Sámij Åhpadusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke and at the University of Gothenburg. Kuoljok’s practice is grounded in traditional Lule Sámi duodje, working primarily with textiles, fur and leather – most often sourced from the reindeer. Through her work she investigates materiality, form and process, extending ancestral knowledge systems into contemporary textile art. Her practice moves between tradition and experimentation, exploring duodje as both cultural continuity and contemporary artistic expression, and as a method for engaging with past, present and future. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, among others. In addition to her textile practice, Kuoljok has designed and produced stage costumes for Aira Dance Company. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Region Västernorrland Sámi Artist Residency (2025) and Sápmi Art (2022).
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a multidisciplinary Kalalleq Inuk artist, working within graphic design, character concept art, fashion design, book illustration and art exhibition. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she is a graduate of The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and has also studied multimedia design and fashion design.Her illustrations are printed in several books published across Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, France, Canada and England. She has worked on several AAA games as a character artist and illustrated for board games. Coco’s work has also been published on stamps in Greenland. In 2024 she became an award winning illustrator, for her work on Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide.
Julia Rensberg is a vytnesjäjja and artist from the southern part of Sápmi, currently living outside Jokkmokk where she has her workshop. She primarily works with traditional duodji in wood and antler, while also creating larger-scale art works. Her life and practice are closely connected to reindeer and reindeer herding, which shape everyday life in Sápmi. The reindeer’s grazing lands are part of a larger living landscape where forests, waters, animals, and people are interconnected. These lands support rich biodiversity, and their protection is essential not only for Sámi culture and reindeer herding, but for the health of nature itself. Her work reflects on what it means to live in relationship with the land and asks how we can protect and care for it. Just as land cares for us. She works from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world, but part of it — a worldview where body, mind, and spirit are inseparable from the land.
Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuk fashion designer, artist and content creator from Tuktuuyaqtyuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Raised on the shores of the arctic ocean with her Inuvialuit family and community, she was named at birth according to Inuvialuit custom, after her great-grandmother Taalrumiq. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees, and is currently a 2nd year graduate student in the Master of Fine Art low residency program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she is researching and creating a body of work based on ancestral Inuvialuit Fashion.
Notably her work appears in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, she was a featured Designer on 7TH GEN and Project Runway Canada 2025.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Maria Svonni, based in Giron, Sápmi, is the artistic director of the Luleå Biennial, the oldest art biennial in Scandinavia. She is the founder and artistic director of Verdde, a nomadic art institution working for the inclusion of Sámi perspectives in everyday life through contemporary Sámi art. Her work is organized around collaborations, utilizing site-specific methods and activities to promote dialogue and long term change. Svonni is active as a freelance curator and writer. She was part of the team that formulated the artistic program in the winning application for Giron to become European Capital of Culture in 2029 and will be involved to make the programme come to life with a focus on Indigenous Sámi values and public art. She led the establishment of KiN art museum, the first museum focused on contemporary art in Norrbotten County, and is currently involved in creating the first dedicated space for Sámi contemporary art in the Swedish parts of Sápmi.
All Day | I Saw You, Carola Grahn, Various Locations, organized by the Arctic Arts Summit
I SAW YOU
Carola Grahn
During the Arctic Arts Summit 2026, Sámi artist Carola Grahn transforms the urban landscape of Ubmeje/Umeå through I SAW YOU — a large-scale public art intervention unfolding across the city.
Originally created in 2016, the work takes the form of a love letter placed in unexpected everyday locations: gas stations, roadsides, and transient public spaces. In Umeå, the text will appear on a monumental wall installation in the city centre, across selected petrol stations and in physical letters given to the Arctic Art Summit participants. A Dodge van is also specially decorated by the artist as a moving extension of the work itself.
Blending intimacy, humour, melancholy, and sharp social observation, I SAW YOU reflects on belonging, mobility, class, desire, and the emotional geography of the North. Addressed to an unnamed former lover encountered at a gas station, the text unfolds as a meditation on two fundamentally different relationships to place: one person who could never leave, and another who could never stay.
By bringing this vulnerable and cinematic narrative into public space, Grahn challenges conventional ideas of where art belongs — and who it speaks to. The work moves between contemporary art, roadside culture, Sámi experience, and northern everyday life, inviting audiences to encounter art not only in institutions, but in the ordinary spaces people pass through every day.
About the Artist:
Carola Grahn is a South Sámi artist from Jåhkåmåhkke/Jokkmokk and holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Through her artistic practice, she critically examines humanity’s alienation from nature and the destructive legacy of colonialism, which continues to cause suffering for both people and the environment. In her work, she weaves together references from Western art history and popular culture with Sámi traditions and the rural landscapes of northern Sweden—often with a dark underlying humour.
All Day | The Reindeer-Lion, NORDTING; Renmarkstorget, organized by UmArts
All Day | This is Arctic Land, NORDTING; Tráhppie (Helena Elisabeths väg 4), UmArts Studio (Östra Strandgatan 32D) and Västa Ràdhusgatan, organized by UmArts in collaboration with Tráhppie
All Day | Melting Barricades, Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen: Renmarkstorget; organized by Nuuk Art Museum
Melting Barricades
16-18 June
Location: Renmarkstorget
By Inuk Silis Høegh (KAL) and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK)
Defend your country! Join the Greenlandic army today!
In 2004, two officers marched through the pedestrian street in Nuuk, megaphones in hand, recruiting citizens for a new national military. Volunteers were measured, weighed, and asked about their dog sledding, hunting and snowmobile skills. Hot seal soup was served after enrolment. For those hours, the Greenlandic military was a reality.
This spectacular recruitment campaign was the beginning of Melting Barricades — an art project in which artists Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen assumed the roles of Major General and Lieutenant Colonel. Two years later, the newly formed army invaded Denmark, congratulating Copenhageners on their new citizenship in the United States of Greenland.
The campaign did not stop at the street. Military recruitment posters were plastered across bus stops throughout Nuuk — the same everyday public spaces where citizens encounter advertising and news. Standing here in Umeå, you are now part of that same tradition.
With humour, irony and theatrical force, the project raises urgent questions about sovereignty, colonialism, defence policy and geopolitical power — questions that have only grown more pressing since.
Melting Barricades is presented here as a pop-up exhibition in connection with the Arctic Arts Summit, Umeå, June 2026. Curated by Nuuk Art Museum.
All Day | I SAW YOU, Carola Grahn, Renmarkstorget, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
12.00–16.00 and 10.00–19.00 | Real Arctic, NORDTING, Tráppihe and Kommunhörnan, Väven, organized by UmArts
15.00–17.00 | Sergie and the White Seal Book Launch, Tráppihe, organised by Tráhppie
16.00–18.00 | ARcTic: Art, Land, Power Exhibition Opening: Umeå Konsthall, Väven, organized by Umeå kommun in collaboration with Aejlies - the Sámi Centre
ARcTic: Art, Land, Power
June 15th – September 6th 2026
Location: Väven, Umeå konsthall, 3rd floor
To coincide with the Arctic Arts Summit in Ubmeje/ Umeå, Umeå konsthall is opening an exhibition featuring works that reflect experiences related to the summit’s themes – art, land and power. Here, these themes are explored in greater depth and take on new forms through art. Different perspectives, expressions, and voices are given a voice in the exhibition. History is interwoven with the present and the future.
The participating artists have various connections to the geographical region of Sábmie. This encompasses parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sábmie is and has always been inhabited by the Indigenous Sámi people.
A big thank you to all the participants and to Aejlies – the Sámi Centre in Tärnaby – which, through a generous collaboration, has contributed a selection from its collection of duöjjie/Sámi handicrafts.
Participating Artists:
Victoria Andersson, Linnéa Axelsson, Sebastian Blind, Monica L Edmondsson, Per Enoksson, Carola Grahn, Olof Marsja , Lena Stenberg, Katarina Pirak Sikku and Katarina Spik Skum.
A video by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo will be available from June 15th to June 18th.
Represented through the Aejlies collection:
Birgitta Andersson, Cecilia Andersson, Sabina Baer, William Hallin, Ingemar Israelsson, Marja-Kari Omma, Anders Östergren Njajta and Lena Njaita.
Opening:
Please join us for the opening reception on 15 June from 16.00-18.00. Artists Monica Edmonson, Per Enoksson, Lena Stenberg and Katarina Spik Skum will be in attendance. Please note that remarks will be made in Swedish.
14.00–18.00 | FUTURE CARTEOGRAPHIES, Galerie Verkligheten, organized by UmArts
14.00–18.00 | House_FLOW Counter Move, UmArts. Organized by UmArts
16.00–18.00 | The Love That Remains (Film Screening with English Subtitles): Tagnig, Väven
16.00-18.00 | Film TBD: Tystnad, Väven
17.00–18.30 | Ajatuspaikka: Vävenscenen, Väven
18.30–20.00 | Rörelser (Film Screening with English Subtitles): Tagnig, Väven
18.30–20.00 | Twice Colonized: Tystnad, Väven
22.30–23.30 | Arctic Night Live: Sjadduo
Arctic Night LIVE!
by NORDTING
NORDTING and the Arctic Arts Summit join forces to give the Arctic and the rest of world what it doesn’t yet have (and might not even know it is missing): An original Arctic late-night TV show. NORDTING – known for its Northern People’s Assemblies and Pan-Arctic Visions – will pick up on Summit themes, hosting guests and live music to disturb and comfort us into the light Umeå/Ubmeje night. Arctic Night LIVE will be broadcast from the
Summit gathering venue Sjadduo three evenings in a row. The stage is set for a fusion of art, political commentary, and late-night TV – all with the aim of forming a shared public conversation across the Arctic. Welcome to a new border-crossing exercise.
Arctic Night LIVE can be experienced live in person or watched through the Arctic Arts Summit web page. Featuring Amund Sjølie Sveen, Sirí Paulsen, Eva Svaneblom, Erik Stifjell, and more.
(Photo by Knut Åserud)
All Day | The Many Ways We Love, Various Artists; Sjadduo; organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love
13-17 June 2026
Sjadduo
Website
Organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love draws on the essay of the same title by the late Iñupiaq artist Jenny Irene, in which Jenny – whose life and work is celebrated for their deep commitment to storytelling, Indigenous, Queer, and Two-Spirit communities – expresses a desire to see a future where all expressions of gender and sexuality are celebrated, and where everyone can freely express the many ways we love, anywhere in the North. We undertake this project with the support of Jenny’s partner, Nora, and her friends and family in Alaska.
The Many Ways We Love features Queer, Trans, Non-Binary, and/or Two-Spirit (or LGBTI) artists across all visual art disciplines, including images of performance art, by Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, Black people, People of Colour and other artists originally from or currently residing in the North. The artworks are prominently displayed outdoors in a banner installation encircling one of the main public venues. It is co-curated by the research team of Curating Change, a project that focuses on expanding decolonial and inter-cultural exhibition practices, in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices.
Artists:
Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Especially experimental & abstract art, processes, collectivity, periphery, interpersonal relations, family history & the work of the hand. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer.
Arngasaq is a Black Inuk artist that specializes in multimedia arts, aiming to create for self expression– their pieces touch subjects in all forms; trauma, politics, and cultural storytelling. Their art pieces are made from self interests– with the main themes being supernatural, cultural and horror oriented.
Embla is a dancer and performer based in Iceland and her work is rooted in disability and Queer pride. With an academic background in sociology, she has researched disability in relation to sexuality, shame, pleasure, and affect. In her artistic practice, she brings these themes into performance through dance, movement, storytelling, and devised theatre, aiming to present unapologetic and sensual representations of disability and Queerness on stage.
Ethan/Kayaaní J Lauesen is a visual artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2019. Their body of work focuses on their Denaakk’e Koyukon Athabaskan and Lingít cultural backgrounds, their Queer identity, and how they are perceived in Alaskan communities. The prints, paintings, and drawings they produce are an intimate response to public perceptions of their Indigenous and Queer identities, encapsulating their personal narrative and experiences documenting cultural change.
Eva Svaneblom (she/her), born in 1987, is a Tornedalian dance artist, based in Tromsø, Norway since 2020. Her artistic practice revolves around the situated body—how the body is shaped through encounters with its physical and sociocultural environments. She often work by playing with and reshaping stereotypes, where her Tornedalian background meets her Queer identity. In these fields of tension, new attitudes and expressions emerge that inspire and drive my creative work forward. Aesthetics are a central part of her work, both in choreography and performance, as well as in visual elements such as costume and scenography. She frequently uses references from pop culture and seeks expressions that can speak to a wide audience. A common thread in her practice is collectivity and community—she explores how art can create shared spaces and foster understanding across different experiences. Eva’s work takes many forms: from performances in gallery spaces or outdoors, to short videos on social media, and full-length productions in black box theatres. She works both solo and collaboratively, often across disciplines. She usually has both solo and collaborative projects running simultaneously. Eva also explores drag as an art form through the non-binary drag king Ei Ei. Ei Ei is fabulously Queer and extra Tornedalian! Since 2021, curating performing arts is also an extended part of her practice.
Hans-Henrik (HH) Suersaq Poulsen is an actor, singer, seamster, and artist, who graduated from The National Theatre School. He sings contemporary music infused with traditional elements such as throat singing and drum dancing. HH carries into the 21st century the living spirit of Kalaallit Nunaat´s ancient traditions, weaving them seamlessly into contemporary expression. HH also designs and creates contemporary and traditional garments (look out for his Anoraqs!). He has deeply explored other Inuit languages—making him able to communicate in the Inugguit dialect (North Greenlandic), Iivit dialect (East Greenlandic), as well as Inuktitut (the Canadian Inuit dialect).
Fox Sandberg (they/them) is a nonbinary, autistic South Sámi artist, based in Lïkssjuo, Sweden. Fox’s family has roots in Vualtjere, Sápmi, and Scotland. They hold a BA in Sequential Arts from the University of Gävle, and have worked as an illustrator and author, focusing in particular on South Sámi and Queer narratives, alongside a life-long passion for animals, in a number of different mediums. In 2017, they published Elsas Väg mot Tråante, and illustrated the Sámi radio theatre Elsa i Saajvoe-kungens rike. Over the years, they have provided public art for Umeå University, Lycksele Zoo and Lycksele Municipality. As an autistic, Indigenous nonbinary artist, Fox has battled social anxiety, body dysphoria and depression all their life. This has had an impact on their ability to work, and produce art in a fast-paced, often hostile work environment. Nonetheless, art, human rights and animals remain a strong and unyielding passion, which can often be seen in their works. Having been diagnosed as autistic as an adult, Fox is currently learning how to accept their limitations and unlearn years of harmful masking practices to attempt to fit into societal norms, which led to chronic fatigue and burnout. Through their art, they wish to highlight decolonial practices and uplift Queer, neurodivergent and Indigenous voices on a local as well as global stage.
Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest Alaska, creates artwork that reflects Yup’ik identity in both traditional and modern forms. His work is influenced by his Yup’ik ancestors and Indigenous artists all over Turtle Island. As a self-taught artist, Oscar has produced a variety of garments, from footwear to headwear. Living in a Western society, he challenges perspectives of what a Yup’ik lifestyle looks like.
Oscar also emphasizes digital art, such as graphic design and digital photography. Through the lens of the Indigenous perspective, his main goal is to Indigenize Western spaces, creating a welcoming environment for current and future Native artists in conquering the ongoing Western assimilation.
Ida Isak Westerberg (b. 1986, Sunderbyn) has a degree in higher textile craft education at Friends of Handicraft and is living and working as a textile artist in Luleå and Övertorneå. Westerberg works with site-specific processes where creation takes shape, nuances and woven qualities through a dynamic harmony between materials and how they react in relation to specific environments. Through collaboration with nature, with the bog Sompasenvuorna in Tornedalen as a recurring co-creator, Westerberg’s sculptural weaves bear tactile traces of history, but also on questions of belonging, our changing desires and Queer identities.
Jia Illusia Juvani (b. 1988) is a non-binary body, trans and queer artivist originally from Ylitornio, Finland. As a child, their idol was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. At the core of their work you can find subjects like queer, feminism, death, lust, poetry, love, hate, stereotypes, worn out clichés and general silliness. Their main mediums are video, photography, sound, objects and text. They currently live and work in Hyvinkää, Finland.
Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak (they/she) lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. They create works using a variety of materials, including soapstone, permanent marker, sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the connections and ruptures between existence within and outside Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on the expression of gender and sexuality, the desire to make people laugh, and everyday life. Their work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award (2020), the 2019 Sobey Art Award (semi-finalist) representing the Prairies and the North, the 2021 and 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (semi-finalist), the 2023 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award, the Gattuso Award and the prestigious 2023 Sobey Art Award.
Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) artist and curator from Treaty 8 territory and belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Kimble’s photographic practice revolves around acts of self-care, self-repair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Holding both a degree in Acting from Vancouver Film School as well as a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design Kimble imbues his work with a sense of theatricality and levity, which are core principles in their practice. Through a clever subversion of the everyday aesthetics Kimble also plays with language and ambiguity – something that comes natural with them being a two-spirited artist. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange, offering an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that they too may exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost.
Michael Richardt (DK/NE) is a performance artist specialising in time-based and long-durational performance. His practice includes video, film, photography, choreography, sculpture, writing, installation, painting, drawings, prints, artist books, collages and music. Richardt is a matriarchal thinker and creates work using a self-developed system anchored in spectral colours and the physical body. His performances have lasted from 13 consecutive days to a split second. In 2017, the documentary My Mother Is Pink focused on Richardt’s durational, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary artwork RULE PINK, and was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. In 2018, he worked for Marina Abramović performing Imponderabilia and Freeing the Voice at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Freeing Series at Norway’s Henie Onstad Art Centre. His work was recently exhibited at the Kunsthal Nikolaj in Denmark as well as the Reykjanes Art Museum, Gerðasafn Art Museum, the Nordic House in Iceland, and Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Norway. In 2024 he performed the concert performance POPera, composed by Pussy Riot’s Diana Burkot, with his character and lyrics, at Reykjavík Arts Festival, with 7 brass and flute players, conductor and sign language interpreter. The show will be shown in an electronic version at Tjanarbío Theatre in Reykjavik in September 2026, and he’ll exhibit and perform at the group show Cancel Culture Club and Spa, at Södertälje Art Gallery in Sweden from October 2026.
Prim (Pasa Mangiok) is a fourth generation artist, originally from Ivujivik, Nunavut but now residing in Montreal for their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Their great-grandmother was a seamstress, their grandmother, Passa Mangiuk, was a lino printer, painter and graphic artist, while their father, Thomassie Mangiok, is a graphic designer and illustrator. Prim identifies as Two Spirited, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Prim is a mixed Inuit and Atikamekw artist, Prim mainly focuses on creating artwork to challenge what Inuit art is, and what it can be, and their mediums vary from beading, sewing, sculptures, and experimenting with materials, along with paintings and drawings. They are interested in combining both their Atikamekw and Inuit heritage in their artwork, and further plans to research deeper in Inuit shamanism and Indigenous spirituality.
Salomon H Simonsen is a Greenlandic Inuk writer based in Denmark. Their work explores displacement, trans identity, exile, belonging, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Through poetry and prose, they reflect on what it means to long for home while feeling separated from it.
Sebastian Blind (1986) works with reweaving himself to his Sámi heritage and his relationship to the noaidi as a bearer of knowledge, with a deepened connection to the drum as a ritual and historical tool for healing, communication, and navigation between different world levels.
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq is an awarded multimedia artist and Indigenous rights advocate from the Inuit community of Kalaallit Nunaat and has spent most of their life exploring their identity as a Queer Inuk in many different ways.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her Ph.D. in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Since her return to Canada, she has joined the board of Indigenous Curatorial Collective, an indigenous run and led non-for profit. Dr. McGeough serves on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation. An international organization that provides financial support through grants to organizations that fight for economic justice, health and representation for self-identified LGBTQ girls and women in both Canada and the USA. She is also a founding member of Shushkitew Collective, an organization of Métis artists and scholars who are working towards Métis equity in the arts.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
Photo Credits:
Jake Kimble (Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) – Deninu K’ue First Nation), Calling My Spirits Back, 2023, Archival inkjet print, photography
Eva Svaneblom (Tornedalian), Queerilainen, 2024, dance/performance, photo: Courtney B Ropp, choreography/performer: Eva Svaneblom
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq (Inuit, Kalaallit Nunaat), Stay Deadly, 2024, digital art
All Day | A River Runs Beneath, Various Artists; Various Locations, organized by the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath: Indigenous AR Projects from the Circumpolar World to Umeje/Umeå
13 June – 20 June
Various Locations
Organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath is a Northern international Augmented Reality project created to debut at the Arctic Arts Summit and, specifically, Ubmeje. Titled in reference to the river running beneath the city centre, the artists in this exhibition contribute works that think through confluences, movement, shared histories, place-making, site-specificity, language, land and waterways. Local and visiting artists from Sapmi and Inuit Nunaat invite Summit attendees to seek out the QR codes for A River Runs Beneath throughout the city and be the first to experience these thoughtful, fun, and dynamic works in person before they are shared with the world. Visit camp or hit up a disco, dress up in Arctic fashion, and experience language and culture like you never have before.
To create these original works for the Summit, Indigenous artists from across the North and working in all media came together for artistic incubator residencies in Canada and Sweden in 2025 and 2026. Post your AR selfies with the hashtag #AAS_ARiver to be featured online.
Artists
Ida Boman (b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden) is an active artist in Västerbotten with both South Sámi roots and heritage from the Swedish southern regions of Småland and Blekinge. She has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s degree of International Conflict and Crisis Management from Umeå University. She also has academic education in Creative Writing, Feminist Theory and History. In recent years, Boman had solo exhibitions at Konsthall Väst på fjället, Bjurholm 2024 and Galleri Alva, Umeå 2025, and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at Bildmuseet, Umeå 2024, Västerbottens Museum, Umeå 2022 and Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2021. She has been awarded the Region Västerbotten scholarship for graduating students at Umeå University’s Academy of Fine Arts and the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts scholarships for art students and young artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Ida Boman has a curatorial practice where she has curated several exhibitions and she has worked as a guest teacher in sculpture and installation at ABF Umeå Art School since 2024. She currently holds a position as a temporary operations manager at the People’s Movements for Art Promotion, Konstfrämjandet Västerbotten in Umeå.
Monica L Edmonson belongs to the Lule Sámi area of Sábme/Sápmi. The issues she wants to explore in her art work, and the stories she would like to tell, indicate the use of materials and techniques. However, glass is the material she knows best and it is often used to express the coexisting notions of fragility and strength in her people, us humans and our land. Public artwork and collaborations with architects are just as important in her practice as hands-on glass work and extensive art projects. It is a story hidden in each vessel of glass, sculpture in stone, urban glass façade or installation. It can be a story to remind us of our own – as well as natures’ – fragility and strength, a story which explores questions of identity and migration or a story to connect personal or local history with contemporary art. After a visual arts degree from Canberra School of Art Australia (1999), she established a glass workshop and studio in Tärnaby north Sweden. Her work is part of national and international art collections, for example at the National Gallery of Australia and Nationalmuseet Stockholm, and have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and Koganezaki Glass Museum Shizuoka Japan, amongst others.
Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage living in Montréal. He is originally from Corner Brook Newfoundland and has family throughout Nunatsiavut. His research-creation practice is shaped by Inuit ways of learning and knowing – employing a hands-on and tactile approach through animation, video projection, collage, photography, painting, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin and beads. His work often employs a multi-layered approach, combining a materials-based practice with storytelling, archival moments, and embodied experience. Many of his installations create dynamic spaces of audio and visual connection to land, water, and animals; sites that reveal movement, patterns, and life cycles alongside everyday magic. He currently teaches at Queens University in the Film & Media Department and continues to facilitate low-budget, DIY animation workshops with Inuit and Indigenous youth across Canada and abroad. His films have screened throughout Canada and around the world.
Guná is of Dákha/Tlingit Khwáan ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honors her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters such as William Wadsen and Mike Dangelo, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling. Her work, which has been recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, and longlisted for the Yukon Art Prize and national Sobey Award, has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, and healing. For Guná, art is activism – a call to respect, protect, and empower. She is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tilingit sovereignty, thereby inviting audiences to honor Indigenous resilience.
Trine Samuelsen Hansen is a Norwegian and Sea Sámi architect, artist, and musician from Skiervá in Northern Troms on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between architecture, spatial installation, performance, and sound, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, place, and collective memory can shape contemporary artistic and architectural practice.Rooted in Sea Sámi cultural traditions, Hansen’s work investigates how space can function as a framework for listening, gathering, and dialogue. Central to her practice is the concept of árran—firepace—understood not only as a physical structure but as a social and spiritual centre for conversation, storytelling, and community. Through ritual-based and participatory approaches, she develops spatial situations that invite audiences to engage with questions of belonging and cultural continuity in Sápmi. Her diploma project Ságastallaárran – A Sea-Sámi Ritual-Based Architecture, developed at the Bergen School of Architecture in 2025, proposes a ceremonial architectural practice grounded in Indigenous methodologies. Presented as a full-scale installation and building manual, the project enables a conversational gathering space to be assembled in different locations, opening possibilities for dialogue across communities and contexts. Alongside her artistic research, Hansen has worked with the international art triennial Bergen Assembly in both 2022 and 2025, contributing as an exhibition technician, builder, and collaborator on large-scale installations. She has also participated as a singer and joiker in performance and radio works presented at institutions including Bergen Kunsthall. Through her practice, Hansen seeks to create spaces that nurture trust, reflection, and shared learning—where architecture becomes a living process of relationship-building between people, land, and history.
Tilde-Ristin Kuoljok (b. 1996) lives and works in Burgávrre, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sábme (Purkijaur, Jokkmokk, Sweden). She belongs to the reindeer herding community of Sirges and comes from a line of Sámi duodje practitioners. Kuoljok grew up learning traditional knowledge and handicraft practices within her family before pursuing formal studies. She is a Lule Sámi duodjár (traditional Sámi handicrafter), textile artist and trained conservator, educated at Sámij Åhpadusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke and at the University of Gothenburg. Kuoljok’s practice is grounded in traditional Lule Sámi duodje, working primarily with textiles, fur and leather – most often sourced from the reindeer. Through her work she investigates materiality, form and process, extending ancestral knowledge systems into contemporary textile art. Her practice moves between tradition and experimentation, exploring duodje as both cultural continuity and contemporary artistic expression, and as a method for engaging with past, present and future. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, among others. In addition to her textile practice, Kuoljok has designed and produced stage costumes for Aira Dance Company. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Region Västernorrland Sámi Artist Residency (2025) and Sápmi Art (2022).
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a multidisciplinary Kalalleq Inuk artist, working within graphic design, character concept art, fashion design, book illustration and art exhibition. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she is a graduate of The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and has also studied multimedia design and fashion design.Her illustrations are printed in several books published across Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, France, Canada and England. She has worked on several AAA games as a character artist and illustrated for board games. Coco’s work has also been published on stamps in Greenland. In 2024 she became an award winning illustrator, for her work on Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide.
Julia Rensberg is a vytnesjäjja and artist from the southern part of Sápmi, currently living outside Jokkmokk where she has her workshop. She primarily works with traditional duodji in wood and antler, while also creating larger-scale art works. Her life and practice are closely connected to reindeer and reindeer herding, which shape everyday life in Sápmi. The reindeer’s grazing lands are part of a larger living landscape where forests, waters, animals, and people are interconnected. These lands support rich biodiversity, and their protection is essential not only for Sámi culture and reindeer herding, but for the health of nature itself. Her work reflects on what it means to live in relationship with the land and asks how we can protect and care for it. Just as land cares for us. She works from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world, but part of it — a worldview where body, mind, and spirit are inseparable from the land.
Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuk fashion designer, artist and content creator from Tuktuuyaqtyuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Raised on the shores of the arctic ocean with her Inuvialuit family and community, she was named at birth according to Inuvialuit custom, after her great-grandmother Taalrumiq. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees, and is currently a 2nd year graduate student in the Master of Fine Art low residency program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she is researching and creating a body of work based on ancestral Inuvialuit Fashion.
Notably her work appears in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, she was a featured Designer on 7TH GEN and Project Runway Canada 2025.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Maria Svonni, based in Giron, Sápmi, is the artistic director of the Luleå Biennial, the oldest art biennial in Scandinavia. She is the founder and artistic director of Verdde, a nomadic art institution working for the inclusion of Sámi perspectives in everyday life through contemporary Sámi art. Her work is organized around collaborations, utilizing site-specific methods and activities to promote dialogue and long term change. Svonni is active as a freelance curator and writer. She was part of the team that formulated the artistic program in the winning application for Giron to become European Capital of Culture in 2029 and will be involved to make the programme come to life with a focus on Indigenous Sámi values and public art. She led the establishment of KiN art museum, the first museum focused on contemporary art in Norrbotten County, and is currently involved in creating the first dedicated space for Sámi contemporary art in the Swedish parts of Sápmi.
All Day | I Saw You, Carola Grahn, Various Locations, organized by the Arctic Arts Summit
All Day | The Reindeer-Lion, NORDTING; Renmarkstorget, organized by UmArts
All Day | This is Arctic Land, NORDTING; Tráhppie (Helena Elisabeths väg 4), UmArts Studio (Östra Strandgatan 32D) and Västa Ràdhusgatan, organized by UmArts in collaboration with Tráhppie
All Day | Melting Barricades, Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen: Renmarkstorget; organized by Nuuk Art Museum
Melting Barricades
16-18 June
Location: Renmarkstorget
By Inuk Silis Høegh (KAL) and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK)
Defend your country! Join the Greenlandic army today!
In 2004, two officers marched through the pedestrian street in Nuuk, megaphones in hand, recruiting citizens for a new national military. Volunteers were measured, weighed, and asked about their dog sledding, hunting and snowmobile skills. Hot seal soup was served after enrolment. For those hours, the Greenlandic military was a reality.
This spectacular recruitment campaign was the beginning of Melting Barricades — an art project in which artists Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen assumed the roles of Major General and Lieutenant Colonel. Two years later, the newly formed army invaded Denmark, congratulating Copenhageners on their new citizenship in the United States of Greenland.
The campaign did not stop at the street. Military recruitment posters were plastered across bus stops throughout Nuuk — the same everyday public spaces where citizens encounter advertising and news. Standing here in Umeå, you are now part of that same tradition.
With humour, irony and theatrical force, the project raises urgent questions about sovereignty, colonialism, defence policy and geopolitical power — questions that have only grown more pressing since.
Melting Barricades is presented here as a pop-up exhibition in connection with the Arctic Arts Summit, Umeå, June 2026. Curated by Nuuk Art Museum.
All Day | I SAW YOU, Carola Grahn, Renmarkstorget, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
I SAW YOU
Carola Grahn
During the Arctic Arts Summit 2026, Sámi artist Carola Grahn transforms the urban landscape of Ubmeje/Umeå through I SAW YOU — a large-scale public art intervention unfolding across the city.
Originally created in 2016, the work takes the form of a love letter placed in unexpected everyday locations: gas stations, roadsides, and transient public spaces. In Umeå, the text will appear on a monumental wall installation in the city centre, across selected petrol stations and in physical letters given to the Arctic Art Summit participants. A Dodge van is also specially decorated by the artist as a moving extension of the work itself.
Blending intimacy, humour, melancholy, and sharp social observation, I SAW YOU reflects on belonging, mobility, class, desire, and the emotional geography of the North. Addressed to an unnamed former lover encountered at a gas station, the text unfolds as a meditation on two fundamentally different relationships to place: one person who could never leave, and another who could never stay.
By bringing this vulnerable and cinematic narrative into public space, Grahn challenges conventional ideas of where art belongs — and who it speaks to. The work moves between contemporary art, roadside culture, Sámi experience, and northern everyday life, inviting audiences to encounter art not only in institutions, but in the ordinary spaces people pass through every day.
About the Artist:
Carola Grahn is a South Sámi artist from Jåhkåmåhkke/Jokkmokk and holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Through her artistic practice, she critically examines humanity’s alienation from nature and the destructive legacy of colonialism, which continues to cause suffering for both people and the environment. In her work, she weaves together references from Western art history and popular culture with Sámi traditions and the rural landscapes of northern Sweden—often with a dark underlying humour.
9.00–21.30 | The Rhizome Room Installation, Multisalen, Väven, organized by Silence Organization
Marja Helander (Artist Talk)
Talk: Meet the artist: Marja Helander
Date: Tuesday 16. June (16:30-17:00)
Location: the Rhizome Room (Multisalen)
At 17:00 on Tuesday 16. June, Art Organisation Silence presents a film programme dedicated to the artistic works of Marja Helander. The films will be screened in the cinema space in Vaven, and there will be the chance to meet the artist ahead of the screenings for a short and informal Q&A session held in The Rhizome Room (multisal) at 16:30.
Marja Helander (b. 1965) is a Sámi photographer and video artist. She graduated from her Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design in 1999. In her earlier works, she has explored her own identity as it straddles Sámi and Finnish cultures. Recently, she has focused on depicting the bleak post-colonial landscapes of Sápmi and observing, in particular, the traces left on the environment by extraction and the global mining industry. The encounter between nature and humanity has not been harmonious, but rather destructive. On the other hand, Helander’s video works are humorous and playfully examine the conflict between the traditional Sámi way of life and modern society.
Marjo Selin, Harri Kuusijärvi & Matti Aikio
Performance:
Date: Tuesday
Time: 20:05 & 20:25
Location: The Rhizome Room (Multisalen)
Marjo Selin graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the Department of Dance at the University of the Arts in Helsinki in 1999. Since then she has worked at Dance Theater Hurjaruuth and she has also undertaken a number of freelance projects since 2001. Marjo is a founding member of Piste Kollektiivi and is actively involved in Rasa Collective. She has worked with choreographers such as Marjo Kuusela, Sato Endo, Simo Kellokumpu, and Carl Knif. As a dance artist, Marjo is interested in exploring themes of body language and linguistic expression, as well as investigating the relationship between humans and their environment. Through her art, she aims to promote the principles of regional equality and equity, and she performs and works as an artist in places like daycare centres, schools, care facilities, and other public spaces. Marjo Selin will perform alongside Harri Kuusijärvi at 20:05 & 20:25 on Tuesday 16. June in The Rhizome Room.
Harri Kuusijärvi is a distinctive voice in modern accordion, redefining his instrument through improvisation, electronics, and bold sound worlds. Drawing on a background in classical contemporary music, his work bridges contemporary jazz, electroacoustics, and global influences. Harri Kuusijärvi will perform alongside Marjo Selin at 20:00 on Tuesday 16. June in The Rhizome Room, and alongside Jaakko Laitinen at the tent stage on Wednesday 17. June.
Matti Aikio is a visual artist, coming from an Indigenous Sámi reindeer herding culture. His main mediums are moving image, text, sound, photography and installation, focusing on the Indigenous relationship with nature & its conflict with that of modern industrialised society’s relationship with nature, and he also performs as a DJ. In all of his works, he is especially drawn to the idea that human cultures at large are much more shaped by nature and influenced by other species than modern society is aware of. Matti Aikio provides the mixtape for The Rhizome Room on Tuesday 16 June as well as visuals for the performance by Harri Kuusijärvi and Marjo Selin. He will also perform as part of Avant Joik on Wednesday 17. June.
Performance: DJ Hulluella
Date: Tuesday 16. June
Time: 21:00-22:30
Location:
Eleonora Alariesto is a Sámi DJ, artist, and producer, best known for her project DJ Hulluella. Based in Rovaniemi, Northern Finland, she is also a freelance journalist, host of the Sámi podcast “Mii gullo…?”, a project planner, and a soon-to-graduate Arctic World Politics major at the University of Lapland. DJ Hulluella performs live at the Arctic Arts Summit on Tuesday 16. June (21:00-22:30), and also provides an ambient mixtape for The Rhizome Room on Wednesday 17. of June. Instagram & SoundCloud: @djhulluella
10.00–19.00 | ARcTic: Art, Land, Power Exhibition: Umeå Konsthall, Väven, organized by Umeå kommun in collaboration with Aejlies - the Sámi Centre
ARcTic: Art, Land, Power
June 15th – September 6th 2026
Location: Väven, Umeå konsthall, 3rd floor
To coincide with the Arctic Arts Summit in Ubmeje/ Umeå, Umeå konsthall is opening an exhibition featuring works that reflect experiences related to the summit’s themes – art, land and power. Here, these themes are explored in greater depth and take on new forms through art. Different perspectives, expressions, and voices are given a voice in the exhibition. History is interwoven with the present and the future.
The participating artists have various connections to the geographical region of Sábmie. This encompasses parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sábmie is and has always been inhabited by the Indigenous Sámi people.
A big thank you to all the participants and to Aejlies – the Sámi Centre in Tärnaby – which, through a generous collaboration, has contributed a selection from its collection of duöjjie/Sámi handicrafts.
Participating Artists:
Victoria Andersson, Linnéa Axelsson, Sebastian Blind, Monica L Edmondsson, Per Enoksson, Carola Grahn, Olof Marsja , Lena Stenberg, Katarina Pirak Sikku and Katarina Spik Skum.
A video by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo will be available from June 15th to June 18th.
Represented through the Aejlies collection:
Birgitta Andersson, Cecilia Andersson, Sabina Baer, William Hallin, Ingemar Israelsson, Marja-Kari Omma, Anders Östergren Njajta and Lena Njaita.
10.00–19.00 | Flags from Suialaa Exhibition: Folkets Hus, organized by Suialaa Arts Festival
12.00–16.00 and 10.00–19.00 | Real Arctic: Tráppihe and Kommunhörnan, Väven, organized by Tráppihe and UmArts
12.15–13.15 and 16.30–17.30 | Lavvobottos, Behind Väven, organized by Elle Sofe Company
14.00–18.00 | FUTURE CARTEOGRAPHIES, Galerie Verkligheten, organized by UmArts
14.00–18.00 | House_FLOW Counter Move, UmArts. Organized by UmArts
15.30–17.30 | Rörelser (with English subtitles), Tagnig, Väven
16.00–17.00 | Artist Talk: Tomas Colbengtson: Västerbottens Museum, organized by Västerbottens Museum
16.00–17.00 | Artist Talk with Film Screening: Oska Östergren Njajta; Tagnig, Väven, organized by Film i Västerbotten and FolketsBio
16.00–16.45 | Blue Snow, Tystnad, Väven, organized by Freeze Productions
16.00–18.00 | qiaqsutuq, Ordet, Väven, organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
qiaqsutuq
Artists: Coco Apunnguaq Lynge (Kalaaleq Inuk), Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Denaa and Iñupiaq), Jamesie Fournier (Nunavummik), Malayah Enooyah Maloney (Nunavummiuk) and Taqralik Partridge (Nunavimmiuk)
Curated by: Dr. Heather Igloliorte (Nunatsiavummiuk), Alysa Procida, Dr. Carla Taunton
16 June 2026: 16.00-18.00
17 June 2026: 16.00-18.00
Location: Ordet, Väven
In Inuktitut, qiaqsutuq is the sound of the whistling wind and the sound of crying. In this immersive, virtual reality experience based on a multimedia installation by artists from across Inuit Nunaat (from their Inuit homelands in Alaska, Canada and Greenland) qiaqsutuq is critically imagined as a lament for nuna, tariuq, and sila, a chorus of its Arctic inhabitants from the land, sea and sky. As glaciers melt, permafrost warms, floods abound and smoke billows north from forest fires, weather becomes unpredictable, and thus dangerous, in the Arctic. Featuring the distinct perspectives on the impacts of climate change by Iguttaq (Bee Woman), Tuktu (Caribou), Nanuq (Polar Bear), Tulugak (Raven) and Natchik (Seal), these harbingers warn of the fast approaching consequences of our collective inaction on the precious life throughout Inuit Nunaat.
qiaqsutuq was first created as a mixed-media installation at an artist incubator at NSCAD University, produced by Inuit Futures and the Inuit Art Foundation in 2023 in Kjipuktuk/ Halifax, NS, Canada. It premiered at Nocturne Night Festival in 2023, and has been remounted in Victoria, BC, Canada before being turned into a virtual reality experience in 2026 by MX50.
The artists and curators are grateful for the assistance of Aghalingiak (Nunavummit), Matthew Brulotte, Aningaaq Rosing Carlsen (Kalaaleq Inuk), Julie Grenier (Nunavimmiuk), Jordan Hill (T’Sou-ke Nation), Laura Hodgins, Yi Fan Liu, Dr. Isla Myers-Smith, Danielle Aimée Miles, Holliss Roberts, Nathan Ryan (Ta’an Kwächän/Kwanlin Dün First Nations), Taqramiut Nipingat Inc, Dominic Tibault and Nils Ailo Utsi (Sámi), who provided technical and coordination assistance.
Artists
Jamesie Fournier is an Inuk educator and award-winning author from the NWT. His debut horror book, The Other Ones, is currently being made into a stop-motion film. His poetry collection, Elements, was published in Inuktitut and English. His children’s book, Lemming’s First Christmas, was recently animated in English and Inuktitut. He designed the Nanualuk exhibit with the Montreal Science Centre which won a CASCADE award in 2026. He divides his time between Nunavut, Ontario, and the NWT.
Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich is a Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq Carver and Interdisciplinary Artist living, working, and subsisting in the subarctic climate of South-Central Alaska. Honoring her arctic and subarctic ancestral homelands, Ivalu’s work represents what has tied her and her ancestors to the North. Through carved, painted, and beaded sculpture and mask forms Ivalu creates representations of the revered wild relatives that have provided for her, her family, and her ancestors for generations. Continuing the viewpoint of seeing these resources from homelands as gifts given to the worthy who reciprocate respect and care for the land and wild relatives that share it. Connection to the realities of subsistence lifeways and arctic survival is vital to Ivalu’s work that mirrors what keeps us fed, warm and present in the North. With ancestral ties to the communities of Nulato, Nome and Utqiagvik; Ivalu currently resides between the Denaʼina Homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska. Most recently Ivalu was selected for the 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and a 2025 Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Native Arts fellowship.
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a Kalaaleq Inuk and Danish artist who brings a fusion of culture and creativity to every piece she creates. With experience in character concept art for AAA games and a portfolio showcased in multiple countries, she has collaborated with major companies, studios and publishers such as Lego, Respawn, Crytek, Sharkmob and Gearbox among others.
Malayah Enooyah Maloney is a multidisciplinary Inuk artist from the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, with maternal roots in Mittimatalik and paternal roots in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, she is currently completing a degree in First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. Working across photography, textiles, beading, and hand-poke tattooing, Malayah creates work inspired by memory, mixed heritage, Inuit identity, and Indigenous storytelling. Her practice is deeply informed by family teachings, northern upbringing, and a passion for culturally grounded creative expression.
Taqralik Partridge is a writer, artist and curator from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, QC, based in Ottawa, ON. Partridge’s artistic work focuses on and celebrates Inuit life in the North and in the South. Partridge has held positions as Editor-at-Large for the Inuit Art Quarterly, Director of the Nordic Lab at SAW Gallery, Adjunct Curator at the Art Gallery of Guelph and Associate Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2024.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Igloliorte participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
16.00–17.00 | When We Were Sámi: How a Graphic Novel Made a Difference to the Ume Sámi Language, Women's History Museum, Väven, organized by Tjállegoahte
When We Were Sámi – how a graphic novel made a difference to the Ume Sámi language
Location: Women’s History Museum, Väven
Time: 16 June, 16.00-17.00
August-nominated graphic novel When We Were Sámi (2021) by Mats Jonsson is an autobiographical story about reclaiming one’s history. As an adult, Mats learns that he is descended from a family of Forest Sámi in the Malå area. Why has it been a secret? Why did they stop being Sámi? And why do they know so little about their history?
In the fall of 2024, the book was turned into a theatrical performance by Västerbottensteatern in collaboration with Åarjelhsaemien teatere. Both theaters operate in the Ume Sámi area, and Ume Sámi was the mother tongue of Mats’ Sámi relatives. The performance used both Ume Sámi and Swedish as the stage language – the first time ever a professional play was performed in Ume Sámi. In 2025, the play was adapted for television and broadcast on Swedish Television.
Now, the play has been turned back into a book, making the Ume Sámi text available for the Ume Sámi speaking community. It is one of the biggest translation works carried out in Ume Sámi.
In this artist talk, you will hear author Mats Jonsson reflect, together with playwright Tora von Platen and Ume Sámi translator Henrik Barruk, on the new dimensions that the Ume Sámi translation added to the original book and what impact the project had in the Ume Sámi language work. They will also talk about the process of adapting a graphic novel into a bilingual stage play.
Mats Jonsson
Mats Jonsson is a prominent Swedish comics artist and author. He debuted in 1998 and has since published a number of acclaimed and award-winning autofictional works for both adults and children.
Tora von Platen
Tora von Platen is a dramaturge and playwright who has written plays and adaptations for theatres as the National Swedish Touring Theatre and Nationaltheatret in Oslo.
Henrik Barruk
Henrik Barruk is a translator and Ume Sámi language pioneer. He is the author of the Ume Sámi – Swedish Dictionary (2018) and awarded for his work to save the Ume Sámi language.
17.00–18.00 | Marja Helander Artist Talk and Film Screenings, Tystnad, Väven, organized by Silence Organization
Marja Helander
Date: Tuesday 16. June
Time: 17:00 -18:00
Location: Vävenscenen
At 17:00 on Tuesday 16. June, Art Organisation Silence presents a film programme dedicated to the artistic works of Marja Helander. The films will be screened in the cinema space in Vaven, and there will be the chance to meet the artist ahead of the screenings for a short and informal Q&A session held in The Rhizome Room (multisal) at 16:30
Dolastallat [To Have a Campfire] (2016)
5 mins. 45 sec.
Production Team: Mauri Lähdesmäki (Cinematographer), Marja Helander (Screenwriter), Mauri Lähdesmäki (Editor), Marja Helander (Director), Tapani Rinne (Composer), Marja Helander (Writer), Marja Helander (Producer), Kai Tuomola (Sound Designer), Pekka Aikio (Sound Designer), Mauri Lähdesmäki (Assistant Director), Kai Tuomola (Assistant Director), Marja Helander (Performer).
Eatnanvuloš lottit – [Birds in the Earth] (2018)
10 mins. 35 sec.
Production Team: Mauri Lähdesmäki (Cinematographer), Marja Helander (Screenwriter), Mauri Lähdesmäki (Editor), Marja Helander (Director), Wimme Saari (Composer), Tapani Rinne (Composer), Marja Helander (Writer), Marja Helander (Producer), Konsta Muffler Mikkonen (Sound Design), Pekka Aikio (Sound Design), Pekka Kumpulainen (Sound Design), Outi Pieski (Assistant), Birit Haarla (Choreographer), Katja Haarla (Choreographer), Katja Haarla (Dance), Birit Haarla (Dance).
Áfruvvá [Mermaid] (2023)
12 min. 20sec.
Production Team: Marja Helander (Director, Artist), Mauri Lähteenmäki (Artist).
In My Hand (2025)
23 mins. 20 sec.
Production Team: Liselotte Wajstedt (Director, Screenwriter) & Marja Helander (Director), Mauri Lähdesmäki (Producer), Suvi Autio (Cinematographer).
Marja Helander (b. 1965) is a Sámi photographer and video artist. She graduated from her Master of Arts degree from the University of Art and Design in 1999. In her earlier works, she has explored her own identity as it straddles Sámi and Finnish cultures. Recently, she has focused on depicting the bleak post-colonial landscapes of Sápmi and observing, in particular, the traces left on the environment by extraction and the global mining industry. The encounter between nature and humanity has not been harmonious, but rather destructive. On the other hand, Helander’s video works are humorous and playfully examine the conflict between the traditional Sámi way of life and modern society.
Mauri Lähdesmäki (b. 1983) is a film and video artist from Rovaniemi. He has worked extensively as a cinematographer, director, and editor on numerous video art and film productions. His work has received both national and international recognition and awards. In recent years, Lähdesmäki has increasingly focused on documentary film, but his expression also spans the realms of poetic and metaphorical cinema, as well as video art. Lähdesmäki’s works are characterised by an exploration of contemporary themes from a timeless perspective. He has a mastery of the language of cinema, yet he is constantly seeking new ways to expand and deepen his expression. In his view, a work of art is, in part, self-generating. Mauri Lähdesmäki has been involved as a cinematographer, artist and producer in the works of Marja Helander, which will be screened in the cinema space at Vaven on Tuesday 16. June at 17:00.
18.00–19.50 | The Love that Remains (with English subtitles), Tagnig, Väven
18.30–19.50 | Folkrace Film Screening, Tystnad, Väven
20.15–21.50 | Films from the North: On the Edge Short Films Screening, Tystnad, Väven
20.00–22.30 | Opening Night Program: Väven, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
Bjällran (The Bell) Bjällran is a movement based work created for the opening evening At its core is the sound of the reindeer bell: a practical tool that carries across vast landscapes, heard by anyone who shares the space. Even without sight, the bell makes presence known. There is something enduring in this sound. It holds traces of movement, of memory and history, while always existing in the present moment. Its resonance travels forward, shifting with terrain, distance, and time. The bell’s sound becomes a reminder: of being, of continuity, and of something that moves quietly but persistently into the future.
Emelie Boman is a dance artist and filmmaker born in Västerbotten with Sámi and Småland roots, based in Umeå. She explores movement through various formats, often creating site-specific works that venture beyond the traditional stage. With a background in both film and dance, Emelie’s works often carry a cinematic sensitivity, aiming to engage multiple senses through interdisciplinary collaborations. Her artistry is guided by an inventive curiosity -a quality highlighted in her Minerva Award motivation, which describes her as being “deeply committed to developing dance as an art form both inside and outside traditional settings.”
Through thoughtfully crafted details and subtle humor, Emelie remains a dedicated force in the northern cultural landscape, inviting audiences to experience movement and presence in new, unexpected ways. Since 2021, her practice has been closely linked to Danskonst i Norr/Nomodaco (Northern Movement Dance Company). This collaboration serves as a vital platform for her latest productions, such as BLÖT and BUBBLAN, allowing her to further her exploration of contemporary dance throughout the north.
Deppa is a punk band from Umeå that combines the raw and strong energy of 70s and 80s punk with other musical styles. With poetic lyrics, distorted instruments, fast drums and melancholic melodies, you can expect to be blown away!
Maxida Märak: A Force of Nature
A true force of nature, Maxida Märak has been an ever-present and multi-faceted artist over the last decade. With her unique blend of music, acting, and fierce social activism, she has left an indelible mark on the Swedish cultural landscape. Now, she takes a new and unexpected step in her creative journey.
In the spring of 2025, she released the album Lånat (Borrowed), where she interprets Swedish folk ballads (visor) with a personal and modern touch. These songs serve as a musical bridge between “then” and “now.” While Maxida preserves the soul of the traditional ballad, she infuses it with her own signature sound, where the joik always holds a natural and essential place. This is not a rewrite of the past, but a respectful stewardship and evolution of a timeless tradition.
“It feels incredibly exciting to switch tracks for a while. Even though I haven’t released anything like this before, I’m not unfamiliar with this type of music. But it’s only now that I feel the time is right to do something completely new, and it’s a beautiful feeling to breathe new life into already beloved songs,” says Maxida Märak.
Poromaa sings about his family’s experiences as forest farmers and Meänkieli speakers in the Torne Valley. Pär Poromaa Isling was previously a lyricist and singer in the folk pop band Väärt. His debut album Maa vettää (The Earth Pulls) was released in September 2024. On Maa vettää his mother, Rita Poromaa, and his aunt, Mary Poromaa, contribute with their voices. All songs are recorded and produced by Axel Andersson Utsi in Tajgan Studios, Akkavare. The performance will feature guitarist Viktor Krutrök.
20.15–21.49 | Life Beyond the City short film screening, Tagnig, Väven
All Day | The Many Ways We Love, Various Artists; Sjadduo; organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love
13-17 June 2026
Sjadduo
Website
Organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love draws on the essay of the same title by the late Iñupiaq artist Jenny Irene, in which Jenny – whose life and work is celebrated for their deep commitment to storytelling, Indigenous, Queer, and Two-Spirit communities – expresses a desire to see a future where all expressions of gender and sexuality are celebrated, and where everyone can freely express the many ways we love, anywhere in the North. We undertake this project with the support of Jenny’s partner, Nora, and her friends and family in Alaska.
The Many Ways We Love features Queer, Trans, Non-Binary, and/or Two-Spirit (or LGBTI) artists across all visual art disciplines, including images of performance art, by Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, Black people, People of Colour and other artists originally from or currently residing in the North. The artworks are prominently displayed outdoors in a banner installation encircling one of the main public venues. It is co-curated by the research team of Curating Change, a project that focuses on expanding decolonial and inter-cultural exhibition practices, in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices.
Artists:
Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Especially experimental & abstract art, processes, collectivity, periphery, interpersonal relations, family history & the work of the hand. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer.
Arngasaq is a Black Inuk artist that specializes in multimedia arts, aiming to create for self expression– their pieces touch subjects in all forms; trauma, politics, and cultural storytelling. Their art pieces are made from self interests– with the main themes being supernatural, cultural and horror oriented.
Embla is a dancer and performer based in Iceland and her work is rooted in disability and Queer pride. With an academic background in sociology, she has researched disability in relation to sexuality, shame, pleasure, and affect. In her artistic practice, she brings these themes into performance through dance, movement, storytelling, and devised theatre, aiming to present unapologetic and sensual representations of disability and Queerness on stage.
Ethan/Kayaaní J Lauesen is a visual artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2019. Their body of work focuses on their Denaakk’e Koyukon Athabaskan and Lingít cultural backgrounds, their Queer identity, and how they are perceived in Alaskan communities. The prints, paintings, and drawings they produce are an intimate response to public perceptions of their Indigenous and Queer identities, encapsulating their personal narrative and experiences documenting cultural change.
Eva Svaneblom (she/her), born in 1987, is a Tornedalian dance artist, based in Tromsø, Norway since 2020. Her artistic practice revolves around the situated body—how the body is shaped through encounters with its physical and sociocultural environments. She often work by playing with and reshaping stereotypes, where her Tornedalian background meets her Queer identity. In these fields of tension, new attitudes and expressions emerge that inspire and drive my creative work forward. Aesthetics are a central part of her work, both in choreography and performance, as well as in visual elements such as costume and scenography. She frequently uses references from pop culture and seeks expressions that can speak to a wide audience. A common thread in her practice is collectivity and community—she explores how art can create shared spaces and foster understanding across different experiences. Eva’s work takes many forms: from performances in gallery spaces or outdoors, to short videos on social media, and full-length productions in black box theatres. She works both solo and collaboratively, often across disciplines. She usually has both solo and collaborative projects running simultaneously. Eva also explores drag as an art form through the non-binary drag king Ei Ei. Ei Ei is fabulously Queer and extra Tornedalian! Since 2021, curating performing arts is also an extended part of her practice.
Hans-Henrik (HH) Suersaq Poulsen is an actor, singer, seamster, and artist, who graduated from The National Theatre School. He sings contemporary music infused with traditional elements such as throat singing and drum dancing. HH carries into the 21st century the living spirit of Kalaallit Nunaat´s ancient traditions, weaving them seamlessly into contemporary expression. HH also designs and creates contemporary and traditional garments (look out for his Anoraqs!). He has deeply explored other Inuit languages—making him able to communicate in the Inugguit dialect (North Greenlandic), Iivit dialect (East Greenlandic), as well as Inuktitut (the Canadian Inuit dialect).
Fox Sandberg (they/them) is a nonbinary, autistic South Sámi artist, based in Lïkssjuo, Sweden. Fox’s family has roots in Vualtjere, Sápmi, and Scotland. They hold a BA in Sequential Arts from the University of Gävle, and have worked as an illustrator and author, focusing in particular on South Sámi and Queer narratives, alongside a life-long passion for animals, in a number of different mediums. In 2017, they published Elsas Väg mot Tråante, and illustrated the Sámi radio theatre Elsa i Saajvoe-kungens rike. Over the years, they have provided public art for Umeå University, Lycksele Zoo and Lycksele Municipality. As an autistic, Indigenous nonbinary artist, Fox has battled social anxiety, body dysphoria and depression all their life. This has had an impact on their ability to work, and produce art in a fast-paced, often hostile work environment. Nonetheless, art, human rights and animals remain a strong and unyielding passion, which can often be seen in their works. Having been diagnosed as autistic as an adult, Fox is currently learning how to accept their limitations and unlearn years of harmful masking practices to attempt to fit into societal norms, which led to chronic fatigue and burnout. Through their art, they wish to highlight decolonial practices and uplift Queer, neurodivergent and Indigenous voices on a local as well as global stage.
Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest Alaska, creates artwork that reflects Yup’ik identity in both traditional and modern forms. His work is influenced by his Yup’ik ancestors and Indigenous artists all over Turtle Island. As a self-taught artist, Oscar has produced a variety of garments, from footwear to headwear. Living in a Western society, he challenges perspectives of what a Yup’ik lifestyle looks like.
Oscar also emphasizes digital art, such as graphic design and digital photography. Through the lens of the Indigenous perspective, his main goal is to Indigenize Western spaces, creating a welcoming environment for current and future Native artists in conquering the ongoing Western assimilation.
Ida Isak Westerberg (b. 1986, Sunderbyn) has a degree in higher textile craft education at Friends of Handicraft and is living and working as a textile artist in Luleå and Övertorneå. Westerberg works with site-specific processes where creation takes shape, nuances and woven qualities through a dynamic harmony between materials and how they react in relation to specific environments. Through collaboration with nature, with the bog Sompasenvuorna in Tornedalen as a recurring co-creator, Westerberg’s sculptural weaves bear tactile traces of history, but also on questions of belonging, our changing desires and Queer identities.
Jia Illusia Juvani (b. 1988) is a non-binary body, trans and queer artivist originally from Ylitornio, Finland. As a child, their idol was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. At the core of their work you can find subjects like queer, feminism, death, lust, poetry, love, hate, stereotypes, worn out clichés and general silliness. Their main mediums are video, photography, sound, objects and text. They currently live and work in Hyvinkää, Finland.
Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak (they/she) lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. They create works using a variety of materials, including soapstone, permanent marker, sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the connections and ruptures between existence within and outside Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on the expression of gender and sexuality, the desire to make people laugh, and everyday life. Their work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award (2020), the 2019 Sobey Art Award (semi-finalist) representing the Prairies and the North, the 2021 and 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (semi-finalist), the 2023 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award, the Gattuso Award and the prestigious 2023 Sobey Art Award.
Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) artist and curator from Treaty 8 territory and belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Kimble’s photographic practice revolves around acts of self-care, self-repair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Holding both a degree in Acting from Vancouver Film School as well as a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design Kimble imbues his work with a sense of theatricality and levity, which are core principles in their practice. Through a clever subversion of the everyday aesthetics Kimble also plays with language and ambiguity – something that comes natural with them being a two-spirited artist. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange, offering an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that they too may exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost.
Michael Richardt (DK/NE) is a performance artist specialising in time-based and long-durational performance. His practice includes video, film, photography, choreography, sculpture, writing, installation, painting, drawings, prints, artist books, collages and music. Richardt is a matriarchal thinker and creates work using a self-developed system anchored in spectral colours and the physical body. His performances have lasted from 13 consecutive days to a split second. In 2017, the documentary My Mother Is Pink focused on Richardt’s durational, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary artwork RULE PINK, and was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. In 2018, he worked for Marina Abramović performing Imponderabilia and Freeing the Voice at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Freeing Series at Norway’s Henie Onstad Art Centre. His work was recently exhibited at the Kunsthal Nikolaj in Denmark as well as the Reykjanes Art Museum, Gerðasafn Art Museum, the Nordic House in Iceland, and Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Norway. In 2024 he performed the concert performance POPera, composed by Pussy Riot’s Diana Burkot, with his character and lyrics, at Reykjavík Arts Festival, with 7 brass and flute players, conductor and sign language interpreter. The show will be shown in an electronic version at Tjanarbío Theatre in Reykjavik in September 2026, and he’ll exhibit and perform at the group show Cancel Culture Club and Spa, at Södertälje Art Gallery in Sweden from October 2026.
Prim (Pasa Mangiok) is a fourth generation artist, originally from Ivujivik, Nunavut but now residing in Montreal for their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Their great-grandmother was a seamstress, their grandmother, Passa Mangiuk, was a lino printer, painter and graphic artist, while their father, Thomassie Mangiok, is a graphic designer and illustrator. Prim identifies as Two Spirited, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Prim is a mixed Inuit and Atikamekw artist, Prim mainly focuses on creating artwork to challenge what Inuit art is, and what it can be, and their mediums vary from beading, sewing, sculptures, and experimenting with materials, along with paintings and drawings. They are interested in combining both their Atikamekw and Inuit heritage in their artwork, and further plans to research deeper in Inuit shamanism and Indigenous spirituality.
Salomon H Simonsen is a Greenlandic Inuk writer based in Denmark. Their work explores displacement, trans identity, exile, belonging, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Through poetry and prose, they reflect on what it means to long for home while feeling separated from it.
Sebastian Blind (1986) works with reweaving himself to his Sámi heritage and his relationship to the noaidi as a bearer of knowledge, with a deepened connection to the drum as a ritual and historical tool for healing, communication, and navigation between different world levels.
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq is an awarded multimedia artist and Indigenous rights advocate from the Inuit community of Kalaallit Nunaat and has spent most of their life exploring their identity as a Queer Inuk in many different ways.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her Ph.D. in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Since her return to Canada, she has joined the board of Indigenous Curatorial Collective, an indigenous run and led non-for profit. Dr. McGeough serves on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation. An international organization that provides financial support through grants to organizations that fight for economic justice, health and representation for self-identified LGBTQ girls and women in both Canada and the USA. She is also a founding member of Shushkitew Collective, an organization of Métis artists and scholars who are working towards Métis equity in the arts.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
Photo Credits:
Jake Kimble (Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) – Deninu K’ue First Nation), Calling My Spirits Back, 2023, Archival inkjet print, photography
Eva Svaneblom (Tornedalian), Queerilainen, 2024, dance/performance, photo: Courtney B Ropp, choreography/performer: Eva Svaneblom
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq (Inuit, Kalaallit Nunaat), Stay Deadly, 2024, digital art
All Day | A River Runs Beneath, Various Artists; Various Locations, organized by the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath: Indigenous AR Projects from the Circumpolar World to Umeje/Umeå
13 June – 20 June
Various Locations
Organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath is a Northern international Augmented Reality project created to debut at the Arctic Arts Summit and, specifically, Ubmeje. Titled in reference to the river running beneath the city centre, the artists in this exhibition contribute works that think through confluences, movement, shared histories, place-making, site-specificity, language, land and waterways. Local and visiting artists from Sapmi and Inuit Nunaat invite Summit attendees to seek out the QR codes for A River Runs Beneath throughout the city and be the first to experience these thoughtful, fun, and dynamic works in person before they are shared with the world. Visit camp or hit up a disco, dress up in Arctic fashion, and experience language and culture like you never have before.
To create these original works for the Summit, Indigenous artists from across the North and working in all media came together for artistic incubator residencies in Canada and Sweden in 2025 and 2026. Post your AR selfies with the hashtag #AAS_ARiver to be featured online.
Artists
Ida Boman (b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden) is an active artist in Västerbotten with both South Sámi roots and heritage from the Swedish southern regions of Småland and Blekinge. She has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s degree of International Conflict and Crisis Management from Umeå University. She also has academic education in Creative Writing, Feminist Theory and History. In recent years, Boman had solo exhibitions at Konsthall Väst på fjället, Bjurholm 2024 and Galleri Alva, Umeå 2025, and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at Bildmuseet, Umeå 2024, Västerbottens Museum, Umeå 2022 and Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2021. She has been awarded the Region Västerbotten scholarship for graduating students at Umeå University’s Academy of Fine Arts and the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts scholarships for art students and young artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Ida Boman has a curatorial practice where she has curated several exhibitions and she has worked as a guest teacher in sculpture and installation at ABF Umeå Art School since 2024. She currently holds a position as a temporary operations manager at the People’s Movements for Art Promotion, Konstfrämjandet Västerbotten in Umeå.
Monica L Edmonson belongs to the Lule Sámi area of Sábme/Sápmi. The issues she wants to explore in her art work, and the stories she would like to tell, indicate the use of materials and techniques. However, glass is the material she knows best and it is often used to express the coexisting notions of fragility and strength in her people, us humans and our land. Public artwork and collaborations with architects are just as important in her practice as hands-on glass work and extensive art projects. It is a story hidden in each vessel of glass, sculpture in stone, urban glass façade or installation. It can be a story to remind us of our own – as well as natures’ – fragility and strength, a story which explores questions of identity and migration or a story to connect personal or local history with contemporary art. After a visual arts degree from Canberra School of Art Australia (1999), she established a glass workshop and studio in Tärnaby north Sweden. Her work is part of national and international art collections, for example at the National Gallery of Australia and Nationalmuseet Stockholm, and have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and Koganezaki Glass Museum Shizuoka Japan, amongst others.
Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage living in Montréal. He is originally from Corner Brook Newfoundland and has family throughout Nunatsiavut. His research-creation practice is shaped by Inuit ways of learning and knowing – employing a hands-on and tactile approach through animation, video projection, collage, photography, painting, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin and beads. His work often employs a multi-layered approach, combining a materials-based practice with storytelling, archival moments, and embodied experience. Many of his installations create dynamic spaces of audio and visual connection to land, water, and animals; sites that reveal movement, patterns, and life cycles alongside everyday magic. He currently teaches at Queens University in the Film & Media Department and continues to facilitate low-budget, DIY animation workshops with Inuit and Indigenous youth across Canada and abroad. His films have screened throughout Canada and around the world.
Guná is of Dákha/Tlingit Khwáan ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honors her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters such as William Wadsen and Mike Dangelo, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling. Her work, which has been recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, and longlisted for the Yukon Art Prize and national Sobey Award, has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, and healing. For Guná, art is activism – a call to respect, protect, and empower. She is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tilingit sovereignty, thereby inviting audiences to honor Indigenous resilience.
Trine Samuelsen Hansen is a Norwegian and Sea Sámi architect, artist, and musician from Skiervá in Northern Troms on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between architecture, spatial installation, performance, and sound, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, place, and collective memory can shape contemporary artistic and architectural practice.Rooted in Sea Sámi cultural traditions, Hansen’s work investigates how space can function as a framework for listening, gathering, and dialogue. Central to her practice is the concept of árran—firepace—understood not only as a physical structure but as a social and spiritual centre for conversation, storytelling, and community. Through ritual-based and participatory approaches, she develops spatial situations that invite audiences to engage with questions of belonging and cultural continuity in Sápmi. Her diploma project Ságastallaárran – A Sea-Sámi Ritual-Based Architecture, developed at the Bergen School of Architecture in 2025, proposes a ceremonial architectural practice grounded in Indigenous methodologies. Presented as a full-scale installation and building manual, the project enables a conversational gathering space to be assembled in different locations, opening possibilities for dialogue across communities and contexts. Alongside her artistic research, Hansen has worked with the international art triennial Bergen Assembly in both 2022 and 2025, contributing as an exhibition technician, builder, and collaborator on large-scale installations. She has also participated as a singer and joiker in performance and radio works presented at institutions including Bergen Kunsthall. Through her practice, Hansen seeks to create spaces that nurture trust, reflection, and shared learning—where architecture becomes a living process of relationship-building between people, land, and history.
Tilde-Ristin Kuoljok (b. 1996) lives and works in Burgávrre, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sábme (Purkijaur, Jokkmokk, Sweden). She belongs to the reindeer herding community of Sirges and comes from a line of Sámi duodje practitioners. Kuoljok grew up learning traditional knowledge and handicraft practices within her family before pursuing formal studies. She is a Lule Sámi duodjár (traditional Sámi handicrafter), textile artist and trained conservator, educated at Sámij Åhpadusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke and at the University of Gothenburg. Kuoljok’s practice is grounded in traditional Lule Sámi duodje, working primarily with textiles, fur and leather – most often sourced from the reindeer. Through her work she investigates materiality, form and process, extending ancestral knowledge systems into contemporary textile art. Her practice moves between tradition and experimentation, exploring duodje as both cultural continuity and contemporary artistic expression, and as a method for engaging with past, present and future. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, among others. In addition to her textile practice, Kuoljok has designed and produced stage costumes for Aira Dance Company. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Region Västernorrland Sámi Artist Residency (2025) and Sápmi Art (2022).
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a multidisciplinary Kalalleq Inuk artist, working within graphic design, character concept art, fashion design, book illustration and art exhibition. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she is a graduate of The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and has also studied multimedia design and fashion design.Her illustrations are printed in several books published across Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, France, Canada and England. She has worked on several AAA games as a character artist and illustrated for board games. Coco’s work has also been published on stamps in Greenland. In 2024 she became an award winning illustrator, for her work on Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide.
Julia Rensberg is a vytnesjäjja and artist from the southern part of Sápmi, currently living outside Jokkmokk where she has her workshop. She primarily works with traditional duodji in wood and antler, while also creating larger-scale art works. Her life and practice are closely connected to reindeer and reindeer herding, which shape everyday life in Sápmi. The reindeer’s grazing lands are part of a larger living landscape where forests, waters, animals, and people are interconnected. These lands support rich biodiversity, and their protection is essential not only for Sámi culture and reindeer herding, but for the health of nature itself. Her work reflects on what it means to live in relationship with the land and asks how we can protect and care for it. Just as land cares for us. She works from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world, but part of it — a worldview where body, mind, and spirit are inseparable from the land.
Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuk fashion designer, artist and content creator from Tuktuuyaqtyuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Raised on the shores of the arctic ocean with her Inuvialuit family and community, she was named at birth according to Inuvialuit custom, after her great-grandmother Taalrumiq. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees, and is currently a 2nd year graduate student in the Master of Fine Art low residency program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she is researching and creating a body of work based on ancestral Inuvialuit Fashion.
Notably her work appears in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, she was a featured Designer on 7TH GEN and Project Runway Canada 2025.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Maria Svonni, based in Giron, Sápmi, is the artistic director of the Luleå Biennial, the oldest art biennial in Scandinavia. She is the founder and artistic director of Verdde, a nomadic art institution working for the inclusion of Sámi perspectives in everyday life through contemporary Sámi art. Her work is organized around collaborations, utilizing site-specific methods and activities to promote dialogue and long term change. Svonni is active as a freelance curator and writer. She was part of the team that formulated the artistic program in the winning application for Giron to become European Capital of Culture in 2029 and will be involved to make the programme come to life with a focus on Indigenous Sámi values and public art. She led the establishment of KiN art museum, the first museum focused on contemporary art in Norrbotten County, and is currently involved in creating the first dedicated space for Sámi contemporary art in the Swedish parts of Sápmi.
All Day | I Saw You, Carola Grahn, Various Locations, organized by the Arctic Arts Summit
All Day | The Reindeer-Lion, NORDTING; Renmarkstorget, organized by UmArts
All Day | This is Arctic Land, NORDTING; Tráhppie (Helena Elisabeths väg 4), UmArts Studio (Östra Strandgatan 32D) and Västa Ràdhusgatan, organized by UmArts in collaboration with Tráhppie
All Day | Melting Barricades, Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen: Renmarkstorget; organized by Nuuk Art Museum
Melting Barricades
16-18 June
Location: Renmarkstorget
By Inuk Silis Høegh (KAL) and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK)
Defend your country! Join the Greenlandic army today!
In 2004, two officers marched through the pedestrian street in Nuuk, megaphones in hand, recruiting citizens for a new national military. Volunteers were measured, weighed, and asked about their dog sledding, hunting and snowmobile skills. Hot seal soup was served after enrolment. For those hours, the Greenlandic military was a reality.
This spectacular recruitment campaign was the beginning of Melting Barricades — an art project in which artists Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen assumed the roles of Major General and Lieutenant Colonel. Two years later, the newly formed army invaded Denmark, congratulating Copenhageners on their new citizenship in the United States of Greenland.
The campaign did not stop at the street. Military recruitment posters were plastered across bus stops throughout Nuuk — the same everyday public spaces where citizens encounter advertising and news. Standing here in Umeå, you are now part of that same tradition.
With humour, irony and theatrical force, the project raises urgent questions about sovereignty, colonialism, defence policy and geopolitical power — questions that have only grown more pressing since.
Melting Barricades is presented here as a pop-up exhibition in connection with the Arctic Arts Summit, Umeå, June 2026. Curated by Nuuk Art Museum.
All Day | I SAW YOU, Carola Grahn, Renmarkstorget, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
I SAW YOU
Carola Grahn
During the Arctic Arts Summit 2026, Sámi artist Carola Grahn transforms the urban landscape of Ubmeje/Umeå through I SAW YOU — a large-scale public art intervention unfolding across the city.
Originally created in 2016, the work takes the form of a love letter placed in unexpected everyday locations: gas stations, roadsides, and transient public spaces. In Umeå, the text will appear on a monumental wall installation in the city centre, across selected petrol stations and in physical letters given to the Arctic Art Summit participants. A Dodge van is also specially decorated by the artist as a moving extension of the work itself.
Blending intimacy, humour, melancholy, and sharp social observation, I SAW YOU reflects on belonging, mobility, class, desire, and the emotional geography of the North. Addressed to an unnamed former lover encountered at a gas station, the text unfolds as a meditation on two fundamentally different relationships to place: one person who could never leave, and another who could never stay.
By bringing this vulnerable and cinematic narrative into public space, Grahn challenges conventional ideas of where art belongs — and who it speaks to. The work moves between contemporary art, roadside culture, Sámi experience, and northern everyday life, inviting audiences to encounter art not only in institutions, but in the ordinary spaces people pass through every day.
About the Artist:
Carola Grahn is a South Sámi artist from Jåhkåmåhkke/Jokkmokk and holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Through her artistic practice, she critically examines humanity’s alienation from nature and the destructive legacy of colonialism, which continues to cause suffering for both people and the environment. In her work, she weaves together references from Western art history and popular culture with Sámi traditions and the rural landscapes of northern Sweden—often with a dark underlying humour.
9.00–19.00 | The Rhizome Room Installation, Multisalen, Väven
Jaakko Laitinen & Harri Kuusijärvi
Date: Wednesday 17. June
Time: 20:00
Location: Tent Stage
Harri Kuusijärvi is a distinctive voice in modern accordion, redefining his instrument through improvisation, electronics, and bold sound worlds. Drawing on a background in classical contemporary music, his work bridges contemporary jazz, electroacoustics, and global influences. Harri Kuusijärvi will perform alongside Marjo Selin at 20:00 on Tuesday 16. June in The Rhizome Room, and alongside Jaakko Laitinen at the tent stage on Wednesday 17. June.
Jaakko Laitinen is a musician and songwriter from Rovaniemi, best known for his band Jaakko Laitinen & Väärä raha. The band is known as an electrifying live act whose music blends Balkan rhythms with northern musical traditions. In addition to music, Jaakko Laitinen has worked on various film and stage productions and has been actively involved in Rovaniemi’s cultural life. Jaakko Laitinen will perform alongside Harri Kuusijärvi at the tent stage on Wednesday 17. June.
10.00–19.00 | ARcTic: Art, Land, Power Exhibition: Umeå Konsthall, Väven, organized by Umeå kommun in collaboration with Aejlies - the Sámi Centre
ARcTic: Art, Land, Power
June 15th – September 6th 2026
Location: Väven, Umeå konsthall, 3rd floor
To coincide with the Arctic Arts Summit in Ubmeje/ Umeå, Umeå konsthall is opening an exhibition featuring works that reflect experiences related to the summit’s themes – art, land and power. Here, these themes are explored in greater depth and take on new forms through art. Different perspectives, expressions, and voices are given a voice in the exhibition. History is interwoven with the present and the future.
The participating artists have various connections to the geographical region of Sábmie. This encompasses parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sábmie is and has always been inhabited by the Indigenous Sámi people.
A big thank you to all the participants and to Aejlies – the Sámi Centre in Tärnaby – which, through a generous collaboration, has contributed a selection from its collection of duöjjie/Sámi handicrafts.
Participating Artists:
Victoria Andersson, Linnéa Axelsson, Sebastian Blind, Monica L Edmondsson, Per Enoksson, Carola Grahn, Olof Marsja , Lena Stenberg, Katarina Pirak Sikku and Katarina Spik Skum.
A video by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo will be available from June 15th to June 18th.
Represented through the Aejlies collection:
Birgitta Andersson, Cecilia Andersson, Sabina Baer, William Hallin, Ingemar Israelsson, Marja-Kari Omma, Anders Östergren Njajta and Lena Njaita.
10.00–19.00 | Flags from Suialaa Exhibition: Folkets Hus, organized by Suialaa Arts Festival
12.00–16.00 and 10.00–19.00 | Real Arctic: Tráppihe and Kommunhörnan, Väven, organized by Tráppihe and UmArts
12.00-21.30 | Guhte gullá, Vita kuben, Norrlandsoperan, organized by Norrlandsoperan
Guhte gullá / Here to hear
17 June: 12.00-21.30
18 June: 12.00-14.00
Location: Vita kuben, Norrlandsoperan
Outi Pieski is one of the leading Sámi artists working today, having shown at Tate Modern (2025), MARKK, Hamburg (2023-24), the Venice Biennale (2019), Gwangjubiennale (2021), the Sydney Biennale (2022) and GIBCA – Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2023).
In Guhte gullá (2021), a multichannel video installation, young people dance to escape the angst of world destruction, summoning the aid of the forgotten Sámi earth deities Uksáhkká, Juoksáhkká and Sáráhkká. We are losing our connection with the earth and our ancestors who rest beneath the soil. It is time for us to reconnect with the sacredness deep within the earth.
In their work Guhte gullá / Here to hear, women of different generations listen to the voices of their foremothers through dance and duodji, traditional Sámi handicrafts. The mother-daughter relationship between Outi Pieski and Biret Haarla Pieski and Gáddjá Haarla Pieski chimes aptly with the theme of their first joint artistic collaboration. The space is filled with Tuomo Puranen’s ritual-beating electronic music and Mari Boine’s joik, which inviting us to listen, reflect, and pay attention to the message of the foremothers.
Credits:
Directors: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski & Outi Pieski
Cinematographer, Editor: Mauri Lähdesmäki
Choreography: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski
Performers: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski
Music: Mari Boine, Tuomo Puranen
Sound Design: Pekka Aikio
Costume Designer: Auri Lukkarinen, Outi Pieski
Film Assistant: Maria Duncker
Sound recording: Svein Schultz
Commissioned by HAM/Helsinki Biennial 2021
Thank you: Teuri Haarla, P.A.R.T.S – Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, Angel Films.
12.15–13.15 and 15.30–16.30 | Lavvobottos, Behind Väven, organized by Elle Sofe Company
14.00–18.00 | FUTURE CARTEOGRAPHIES, Galerie Verkligheten, organized by UmArts
14.00–18.00 | House_FLOW Counter Move, UmArts. Organized by UmArts
16.00–16.45 | ČSV, Outside Väven, organized by Suialaa Arts Festival
16.00–17.00 | Artist Talk: Tomas Colbengston: Västerbottens Museum, organized by Västerbottens Museum
Tomas Colbengtson MFA
www.colbengtson.com
Tomas is Sámi, born and grown up in a small village Björkvattnet Tärna, at the border of Norway/Sweden. In Tomas artwork, he asks how colonial heritage has changed indigenous lives and landscapes, both of the sami and other indigenous peoples. Struggling to revitalize his mother tongue, south Sami language, he works with visual art, using Sami history and collective memory as the source to his art.
His work with printed art on different materia that cast shadows can be read as a metaphor for governmental invisibility of Sami people and culture.
In his art Tomas seeks to assemble a language to formulate the loss but also rejuvenation of Sami identity. Questions that is a global and effect everybody in one or another way.
Colbengtson is initiator of one of the first art residence for indigenous artists “Sapmi Salasta 2018.
Exhibitions:
Colbengston has exhibited in 26 countries
Colbengtson is represented amongst others in:
British museum, London, U.K.
The National Museum, Oslo, Norway
The National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden
Kiasma, modern museum, Helsinki, Finland
Sami parlament of Norway
The Royal House of Norway
West collection, Oaks, Pennsylvania, U.S.
National Nordic museum, Seattle
2024 Recipiant of the Queen Sonja Print Award
Public works:
Glass sculpture, Östersund city hall, Sweden
Commissioned by City of Östersund, 2023
Biessie giebnie, South Samie museum Snåsa, Norway
Commissioned by KORO, 2021
Tsigle-Pathfinder, glassculpture, Saxnäs, Sweden
Commissioned by Konstvägen 7 älvar
Initiator and curator of “Arctic Highway”, Indigenous art exhibition that is touring in USA and Canada 2022–2024
Education:
Konstfack. National college of Arts Craft and Design, Stockholm 1986-91 MFA Painting
Valand Academy of Art, Gothenburg 1995-9
Tomas published books:
2024 ”Soejvene” ISBN 978-91-89945-12-8 Publisher: Korpen
2019 ”Faamoe” ISBN 978-91-98513-00-4 Publisher: Gaaltije
16.00–17.30 | Avant Joik, Norrlandsoperan, organized by Norrlandsoperan and Bildmuseet
Avant Joik
17 June at 16:00
Location: Stora Scenen, Norrlandsoperan
Avant Joik is a pan-Sámi and Nordic ensemble that creates an expressive and intuitive fusion of vuöllie [joik], avant-garde vocal expression, electronic music, and visual experiments. Their multi-sensory and improvisational working method is shaped by the three members’ diverse backgrounds.
Katarina Barruk, raised in Lusspie [Storuman] and Gajhrege [Gardfjäll] and now based in Oslo, combines vuöllie with contemporary pop and breathes new life into the critically endangered Ume Sámi language through music. Composer Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje from Tråante [Trondheim] uses the voice as an instrument in her practice. Her work ranges from avant-garde vocal techniques to compositions for orchestra, opera and political sound art. Matti Aikio, an artist and activist from the Finnish Sápmi, works with installation and video. His art revolves around indigenous peoples’ relationship to nature, land rights and the ecological consequences of colonialism.
This performance was commissioned by Bildmuseet and Gaaltije Saemien Museume as part of the Art and Truth-Telling year-long and multi-sited project marking the process of the Truth Commission for the Sámi people on the Swedish side of Sábmie. It is presented here in collaboration with the Arctic Art Summit and Norrlandsoperan.
Image caption: Avant Joik, performance at Hebbel am Ufer, 2019
Other photo credit: Knut Utler
16.00–18.00 | qiaqsutuq, Ordet, Väven, organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
qiaqsutuq
Artists: Coco Apunnguaq Lynge (Kalaaleq Inuk), Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Denaa and Iñupiaq), Jamesie Fournier (Nunavummik), Malayah Enooyah Maloney (Nunavummiuk) and Taqralik Partridge (Nunavimmiuk)
Curated by: Dr. Heather Igloliorte (Nunatsiavummiuk), Alysa Procida, Dr. Carla Taunton
16 June 2026: 16.00-18.00
17 June 2026: 16.00-18.00
Location: Ordet, Väven
In Inuktitut, qiaqsutuq is the sound of the whistling wind and the sound of crying. In this immersive, virtual reality experience based on a multimedia installation by artists from across Inuit Nunaat (from their Inuit homelands in Alaska, Canada and Greenland) qiaqsutuq is critically imagined as a lament for nuna, tariuq, and sila, a chorus of its Arctic inhabitants from the land, sea and sky. As glaciers melt, permafrost warms, floods abound and smoke billows north from forest fires, weather becomes unpredictable, and thus dangerous, in the Arctic. Featuring the distinct perspectives on the impacts of climate change by Iguttaq (Bee Woman), Tuktu (Caribou), Nanuq (Polar Bear), Tulugak (Raven) and Natchik (Seal), these harbingers warn of the fast approaching consequences of our collective inaction on the precious life throughout Inuit Nunaat.
qiaqsutuq was first created as a mixed-media installation at an artist incubator at NSCAD University, produced by Inuit Futures and the Inuit Art Foundation in 2023 in Kjipuktuk/ Halifax, NS, Canada. It premiered at Nocturne Night Festival in 2023, and has been remounted in Victoria, BC, Canada before being turned into a virtual reality experience in 2026 by MX50.
The artists and curators are grateful for the assistance of Aghalingiak (Nunavummit), Matthew Brulotte, Aningaaq Rosing Carlsen (Kalaaleq Inuk), Julie Grenier (Nunavimmiuk), Jordan Hill (T’Sou-ke Nation), Laura Hodgins, Yi Fan Liu, Dr. Isla Myers-Smith, Danielle Aimée Miles, Holliss Roberts, Nathan Ryan (Ta’an Kwächän/Kwanlin Dün First Nations), Taqramiut Nipingat Inc, Dominic Tibault and Nils Ailo Utsi (Sámi), who provided technical and coordination assistance.
Artists
Jamesie Fournier is an Inuk educator and award-winning author from the NWT. His debut horror book, The Other Ones, is currently being made into a stop-motion film. His poetry collection, Elements, was published in Inuktitut and English. His children’s book, Lemming’s First Christmas, was recently animated in English and Inuktitut. He designed the Nanualuk exhibit with the Montreal Science Centre which won a CASCADE award in 2026. He divides his time between Nunavut, Ontario, and the NWT.
Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich is a Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq Carver and Interdisciplinary Artist living, working, and subsisting in the subarctic climate of South-Central Alaska. Honoring her arctic and subarctic ancestral homelands, Ivalu’s work represents what has tied her and her ancestors to the North. Through carved, painted, and beaded sculpture and mask forms Ivalu creates representations of the revered wild relatives that have provided for her, her family, and her ancestors for generations. Continuing the viewpoint of seeing these resources from homelands as gifts given to the worthy who reciprocate respect and care for the land and wild relatives that share it. Connection to the realities of subsistence lifeways and arctic survival is vital to Ivalu’s work that mirrors what keeps us fed, warm and present in the North. With ancestral ties to the communities of Nulato, Nome and Utqiagvik; Ivalu currently resides between the Denaʼina Homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska. Most recently Ivalu was selected for the 2025 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship and a 2025 Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian Native Arts fellowship.
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a Kalaaleq Inuk and Danish artist who brings a fusion of culture and creativity to every piece she creates. With experience in character concept art for AAA games and a portfolio showcased in multiple countries, she has collaborated with major companies, studios and publishers such as Lego, Respawn, Crytek, Sharkmob and Gearbox among others.
Malayah Enooyah Maloney is a multidisciplinary Inuk artist from the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut, with maternal roots in Mittimatalik and paternal roots in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, she is currently completing a degree in First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia. Working across photography, textiles, beading, and hand-poke tattooing, Malayah creates work inspired by memory, mixed heritage, Inuit identity, and Indigenous storytelling. Her practice is deeply informed by family teachings, northern upbringing, and a passion for culturally grounded creative expression.
Taqralik Partridge is a writer, artist and curator from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik, QC, based in Ottawa, ON. Partridge’s artistic work focuses on and celebrates Inuit life in the North and in the South. Partridge has held positions as Editor-at-Large for the Inuit Art Quarterly, Director of the Nordic Lab at SAW Gallery, Adjunct Curator at the Art Gallery of Guelph and Associate Curator of Indigenous Art at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2024.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Igloliorte participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
16.00–17.30 and 20.00–21.30 | STILLA, Women's History Museum, Väven
16.15–18.00 | TIRRV. Divided, Tystnad, Väven, organized by Pikene på Broen
15.15–16.00 | Witness Films Screening, Tystnad, Väven, organized by Arctic Indigenous Film Fund
WITNESS FILMS
Date: 17 June 2026
Time: 15.15-16.00
Location: Tystnad, Väven
Host:
Witness is a global mentorship initiative by the Arctic Indigenous Film Fund (AIFF) for Indigenous filmmakers across the Arctic, including Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Sápmi. Participants create 3–5 minute films exploring the intersection of climate change and community reality. Grounded in the principle of Indigenous authorship, Witness fosters partnerships that transcend colonial borders. By strengthening cross-regional networks and building professional capacity, the program creates new pathways for authentic storytelling and shared Indigenous sovereignty in cinema.
TAMATTA ATAQATIGIIPPUGUT (WE ARE ALL CONNECTED)
GREENLAND / 2026 / 5 MIN. / KALAALLISUT
Director: Arina Kleist (Inuk)
Producer: Arina Kleist, Princess Daazhraii Johnson (Neet’saii Gwich’in)
A reflection on ancestral spirits and our broken bond with Nature, told through compelling imagery and a Greenlandic perspective.
Arina Kleist, a filmmaker based in Qaqortoq, South Greenland, is a media freelancer focused on video storytelling. Her debut short,Ivikkisartoq Kingulleq, won Best Short Film at the Nuuk International Film Festival, marking her as a rising talent.
Princess Johnson, a writer, director, producer, and actor from Lower Tanana Dene lands, Alaska, centers Indigenous voices. She is Emmy®-nominated for Molly of Denali, a producer on the award-winning True Detective: Night Country, and serves on multiple Indigenous boards.
SUKKAILLUTIT UQARUK (SAY IT SLOWLY)
CANADA | 2026 | 5 MIN | INUKTITUT, ENGLISH
Director: Ashley Qilavaq-Savard (Inuk)
Producer: Sara Beate Eira (Sámi), Ashley Qilavaq-Savard
A moving parallel between language loss and climate change, highlighting personal and communal resilience.
Ashley Qilavaq-Savard, a writer, artist, and filmmaker from Iqaluit, Nunavut, creates poetry and films exploring decolonization and Indigenous narratives. Her previous shorts include the award-winning horror film Reclaim and the documentary Lessons From Our Grandfather.
Sara Beate Eira, a Sámi producer and filmmaker, Based in Guovdageaidnu, brings a background in journalism and political advocacy to her work. A former editor-in-chief of Ávvir and core team member on Ellos Eatnu – Let the River Flow, she develops documentary and fiction slates that share Sámi stories globally.
VUOGÁIDUVVAN (ADAPTATION)
SÁPMI, FINLAND | 2026 | 5 MIN | SÁMI
Director: Aslak Paltto (Sámi)
Producer: Sadetło Scott (Tłıc̨ hǫ Dene), Marc Fussing Rosbach (Inuk), Aslak Paltto
Across shifting seasons, a reindeer herder reveals how climate change and government neglect erode the land, the herd, and the identity that defines his life.
Hánno Heaika Ásllat Ánde, also known as Aslak Paltto, is a Sámi filmmaker, reindeer herder and journalist from Leammi in Northern Finland. His films include Through a Reindeer Herder’s Eyes and Eat, Feed, Sleep, Repeat, as well as his latest feature for the Sámi Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Reindeer.
Marc Fussing Rosbach, a Greenlandic filmmaker and composer, is known for blending Greenlandic culture with genre storytelling. Founder of Furos Image, he writes, directs, and scores his own work, including the Akornatsinniittut series. His award-winning films and soundtracks highlight his innovation in independent cinema and visual effects.
DENEEGE LEŁ GHU KK’OTS’EEDENEEYH TE HEŁ HOOZOONH TS’E DENOTS’EDENEEYH (WE GET BETTER WHEN WE TAN MOOSE HIDES)
UNITED STATES | 2026 | 5 MIN | DENAAKK’E
Director: Brittany Woods-Orrison (Koyukon Dene)
Producer: Sadetło Scott (Tłıc̨ hǫ Dene), Brittany Woods-Orrison
Enduring the chaos happening to their peoples and homelands, a group of Alaskan Dene women find strength and hope in reviving the ancestral practice of brain tanning hides.
Brittany Woods-Orrison, a filmmaker from Dleł Taneets, began her journey with Native Movement’s Alaska Native Filmmakers Intensive, creating her first film, The Land and I Heal One Another. She has worked on Tribally-Owned Broadband, This is a Story About Salmon, and co-host the podcast Half Smoke.
Sadetło Scott, a Tłıc̨ hǫ Dené filmmaker from Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. She explores Indigenous language and lived experience through film and holds a degree in Indigenous Governance with certificates in film production. Through her company, Zahk’e Productions, she creates work like nihtâwikihew and Edaxàdets’eetè, supporting cultural revitalization and storytellin
18.45–20.30 | Ninan Auassat: We, the Children, Tystnad, Väven
19.00–21.00 | "Vidderna inom mig" - Sámi Oratorio: Umeå City Church (100 tickets available for purchase at the entrance)
19.00–20.20 | Films from the North: On the Edge, Tagnig, Väven
20.00–21.30 | Ávus, Norrlandsoperan, organized by Norrlandsoperan and Bildmuseet
Ávus
17 June at 20:00
Location: Stora Scenen, Norrlandsoperan
Electronic music and Sámi vuöllie [joik] merge in Ávus – an Ume Sámi word that stands for both space and happiness. The group was formed by the Grammy-winning saxophonist Jonas Knutsson, known from collaborations with the likes of Avicii. Knutsson is joined by Ingá-Máret Gaup-Juuso from Gárasavvon [Karesuando], an established voice in the new generation of Sámi musicians; Jörgen Stenberg, an Ume Sámi joiker, a cultural worker, an oral storyteller and a reindeer herder active within the Máláge [Malå] Sámi community, as well as the percussionist Mikael Emsing and the synthesizer Andreas Estensen. Together they offer a magical and emotional show where vuöllie [joik] takes centre stage.
This concert is supported by Bildmuseet in collaboration with the Arctic Art Summit and Norrlandsoperan.
Photo credits: Ávus, photograph by Maria Fäldt
19.00–22.00 | Sjadduo Live!, Sjadduo, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
All Day | The Many Ways We Love, Various Artists; Sjadduo; organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love
13-17 June 2026
Sjadduo
Website
Organized by Curating Change and Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
The Many Ways We Love draws on the essay of the same title by the late Iñupiaq artist Jenny Irene, in which Jenny – whose life and work is celebrated for their deep commitment to storytelling, Indigenous, Queer, and Two-Spirit communities – expresses a desire to see a future where all expressions of gender and sexuality are celebrated, and where everyone can freely express the many ways we love, anywhere in the North. We undertake this project with the support of Jenny’s partner, Nora, and her friends and family in Alaska.
The Many Ways We Love features Queer, Trans, Non-Binary, and/or Two-Spirit (or LGBTI) artists across all visual art disciplines, including images of performance art, by Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, Black people, People of Colour and other artists originally from or currently residing in the North. The artworks are prominently displayed outdoors in a banner installation encircling one of the main public venues. It is co-curated by the research team of Curating Change, a project that focuses on expanding decolonial and inter-cultural exhibition practices, in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices.
Artists:
Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Especially experimental & abstract art, processes, collectivity, periphery, interpersonal relations, family history & the work of the hand. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer.
Arngasaq is a Black Inuk artist that specializes in multimedia arts, aiming to create for self expression– their pieces touch subjects in all forms; trauma, politics, and cultural storytelling. Their art pieces are made from self interests– with the main themes being supernatural, cultural and horror oriented.
Embla is a dancer and performer based in Iceland and her work is rooted in disability and Queer pride. With an academic background in sociology, she has researched disability in relation to sexuality, shame, pleasure, and affect. In her artistic practice, she brings these themes into performance through dance, movement, storytelling, and devised theatre, aiming to present unapologetic and sensual representations of disability and Queerness on stage.
Ethan/Kayaaní J Lauesen is a visual artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2019. Their body of work focuses on their Denaakk’e Koyukon Athabaskan and Lingít cultural backgrounds, their Queer identity, and how they are perceived in Alaskan communities. The prints, paintings, and drawings they produce are an intimate response to public perceptions of their Indigenous and Queer identities, encapsulating their personal narrative and experiences documenting cultural change.
Eva Svaneblom (she/her), born in 1987, is a Tornedalian dance artist, based in Tromsø, Norway since 2020. Her artistic practice revolves around the situated body—how the body is shaped through encounters with its physical and sociocultural environments. She often work by playing with and reshaping stereotypes, where her Tornedalian background meets her Queer identity. In these fields of tension, new attitudes and expressions emerge that inspire and drive my creative work forward. Aesthetics are a central part of her work, both in choreography and performance, as well as in visual elements such as costume and scenography. She frequently uses references from pop culture and seeks expressions that can speak to a wide audience. A common thread in her practice is collectivity and community—she explores how art can create shared spaces and foster understanding across different experiences. Eva’s work takes many forms: from performances in gallery spaces or outdoors, to short videos on social media, and full-length productions in black box theatres. She works both solo and collaboratively, often across disciplines. She usually has both solo and collaborative projects running simultaneously. Eva also explores drag as an art form through the non-binary drag king Ei Ei. Ei Ei is fabulously Queer and extra Tornedalian! Since 2021, curating performing arts is also an extended part of her practice.
Hans-Henrik (HH) Suersaq Poulsen is an actor, singer, seamster, and artist, who graduated from The National Theatre School. He sings contemporary music infused with traditional elements such as throat singing and drum dancing. HH carries into the 21st century the living spirit of Kalaallit Nunaat´s ancient traditions, weaving them seamlessly into contemporary expression. HH also designs and creates contemporary and traditional garments (look out for his Anoraqs!). He has deeply explored other Inuit languages—making him able to communicate in the Inugguit dialect (North Greenlandic), Iivit dialect (East Greenlandic), as well as Inuktitut (the Canadian Inuit dialect).
Fox Sandberg (they/them) is a nonbinary, autistic South Sámi artist, based in Lïkssjuo, Sweden. Fox’s family has roots in Vualtjere, Sápmi, and Scotland. They hold a BA in Sequential Arts from the University of Gävle, and have worked as an illustrator and author, focusing in particular on South Sámi and Queer narratives, alongside a life-long passion for animals, in a number of different mediums. In 2017, they published Elsas Väg mot Tråante, and illustrated the Sámi radio theatre Elsa i Saajvoe-kungens rike. Over the years, they have provided public art for Umeå University, Lycksele Zoo and Lycksele Municipality. As an autistic, Indigenous nonbinary artist, Fox has battled social anxiety, body dysphoria and depression all their life. This has had an impact on their ability to work, and produce art in a fast-paced, often hostile work environment. Nonetheless, art, human rights and animals remain a strong and unyielding passion, which can often be seen in their works. Having been diagnosed as autistic as an adult, Fox is currently learning how to accept their limitations and unlearn years of harmful masking practices to attempt to fit into societal norms, which led to chronic fatigue and burnout. Through their art, they wish to highlight decolonial practices and uplift Queer, neurodivergent and Indigenous voices on a local as well as global stage.
Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest Alaska, creates artwork that reflects Yup’ik identity in both traditional and modern forms. His work is influenced by his Yup’ik ancestors and Indigenous artists all over Turtle Island. As a self-taught artist, Oscar has produced a variety of garments, from footwear to headwear. Living in a Western society, he challenges perspectives of what a Yup’ik lifestyle looks like.
Oscar also emphasizes digital art, such as graphic design and digital photography. Through the lens of the Indigenous perspective, his main goal is to Indigenize Western spaces, creating a welcoming environment for current and future Native artists in conquering the ongoing Western assimilation.
Ida Isak Westerberg (b. 1986, Sunderbyn) has a degree in higher textile craft education at Friends of Handicraft and is living and working as a textile artist in Luleå and Övertorneå. Westerberg works with site-specific processes where creation takes shape, nuances and woven qualities through a dynamic harmony between materials and how they react in relation to specific environments. Through collaboration with nature, with the bog Sompasenvuorna in Tornedalen as a recurring co-creator, Westerberg’s sculptural weaves bear tactile traces of history, but also on questions of belonging, our changing desires and Queer identities.
Jia Illusia Juvani (b. 1988) is a non-binary body, trans and queer artivist originally from Ylitornio, Finland. As a child, their idol was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. At the core of their work you can find subjects like queer, feminism, death, lust, poetry, love, hate, stereotypes, worn out clichés and general silliness. Their main mediums are video, photography, sound, objects and text. They currently live and work in Hyvinkää, Finland.
Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak (they/she) lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. They create works using a variety of materials, including soapstone, permanent marker, sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the connections and ruptures between existence within and outside Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on the expression of gender and sexuality, the desire to make people laugh, and everyday life. Their work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award (2020), the 2019 Sobey Art Award (semi-finalist) representing the Prairies and the North, the 2021 and 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (semi-finalist), the 2023 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award, the Gattuso Award and the prestigious 2023 Sobey Art Award.
Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) artist and curator from Treaty 8 territory and belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Kimble’s photographic practice revolves around acts of self-care, self-repair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Holding both a degree in Acting from Vancouver Film School as well as a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design Kimble imbues his work with a sense of theatricality and levity, which are core principles in their practice. Through a clever subversion of the everyday aesthetics Kimble also plays with language and ambiguity – something that comes natural with them being a two-spirited artist. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange, offering an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that they too may exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost.
Michael Richardt (DK/NE) is a performance artist specialising in time-based and long-durational performance. His practice includes video, film, photography, choreography, sculpture, writing, installation, painting, drawings, prints, artist books, collages and music. Richardt is a matriarchal thinker and creates work using a self-developed system anchored in spectral colours and the physical body. His performances have lasted from 13 consecutive days to a split second. In 2017, the documentary My Mother Is Pink focused on Richardt’s durational, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary artwork RULE PINK, and was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. In 2018, he worked for Marina Abramović performing Imponderabilia and Freeing the Voice at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Freeing Series at Norway’s Henie Onstad Art Centre. His work was recently exhibited at the Kunsthal Nikolaj in Denmark as well as the Reykjanes Art Museum, Gerðasafn Art Museum, the Nordic House in Iceland, and Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Norway. In 2024 he performed the concert performance POPera, composed by Pussy Riot’s Diana Burkot, with his character and lyrics, at Reykjavík Arts Festival, with 7 brass and flute players, conductor and sign language interpreter. The show will be shown in an electronic version at Tjanarbío Theatre in Reykjavik in September 2026, and he’ll exhibit and perform at the group show Cancel Culture Club and Spa, at Södertälje Art Gallery in Sweden from October 2026.
Prim (Pasa Mangiok) is a fourth generation artist, originally from Ivujivik, Nunavut but now residing in Montreal for their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Their great-grandmother was a seamstress, their grandmother, Passa Mangiuk, was a lino printer, painter and graphic artist, while their father, Thomassie Mangiok, is a graphic designer and illustrator. Prim identifies as Two Spirited, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Prim is a mixed Inuit and Atikamekw artist, Prim mainly focuses on creating artwork to challenge what Inuit art is, and what it can be, and their mediums vary from beading, sewing, sculptures, and experimenting with materials, along with paintings and drawings. They are interested in combining both their Atikamekw and Inuit heritage in their artwork, and further plans to research deeper in Inuit shamanism and Indigenous spirituality.
Salomon H Simonsen is a Greenlandic Inuk writer based in Denmark. Their work explores displacement, trans identity, exile, belonging, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Through poetry and prose, they reflect on what it means to long for home while feeling separated from it.
Sebastian Blind (1986) works with reweaving himself to his Sámi heritage and his relationship to the noaidi as a bearer of knowledge, with a deepened connection to the drum as a ritual and historical tool for healing, communication, and navigation between different world levels.
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq is an awarded multimedia artist and Indigenous rights advocate from the Inuit community of Kalaallit Nunaat and has spent most of their life exploring their identity as a Queer Inuk in many different ways.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her Ph.D. in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Since her return to Canada, she has joined the board of Indigenous Curatorial Collective, an indigenous run and led non-for profit. Dr. McGeough serves on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation. An international organization that provides financial support through grants to organizations that fight for economic justice, health and representation for self-identified LGBTQ girls and women in both Canada and the USA. She is also a founding member of Shushkitew Collective, an organization of Métis artists and scholars who are working towards Métis equity in the arts.
Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.
Photo Credits:
Jake Kimble (Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) – Deninu K’ue First Nation), Calling My Spirits Back, 2023, Archival inkjet print, photography
Eva Svaneblom (Tornedalian), Queerilainen, 2024, dance/performance, photo: Courtney B Ropp, choreography/performer: Eva Svaneblom
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq (Inuit, Kalaallit Nunaat), Stay Deadly, 2024, digital art
All Day | A River Runs Beneath, Various Artists; Various Locations, organized by the Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath: Indigenous AR Projects from the Circumpolar World to Umeje/Umeå
13 June – 20 June
Various Locations
Organized by Taqsiqtuut Indigenous Research-Creation Lab
A River Runs Beneath is a Northern international Augmented Reality project created to debut at the Arctic Arts Summit and, specifically, Ubmeje. Titled in reference to the river running beneath the city centre, the artists in this exhibition contribute works that think through confluences, movement, shared histories, place-making, site-specificity, language, land and waterways. Local and visiting artists from Sapmi and Inuit Nunaat invite Summit attendees to seek out the QR codes for A River Runs Beneath throughout the city and be the first to experience these thoughtful, fun, and dynamic works in person before they are shared with the world. Visit camp or hit up a disco, dress up in Arctic fashion, and experience language and culture like you never have before.
To create these original works for the Summit, Indigenous artists from across the North and working in all media came together for artistic incubator residencies in Canada and Sweden in 2025 and 2026. Post your AR selfies with the hashtag #AAS_ARiver to be featured online.
Artists
Ida Boman (b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden) is an active artist in Västerbotten with both South Sámi roots and heritage from the Swedish southern regions of Småland and Blekinge. She has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s degree of International Conflict and Crisis Management from Umeå University. She also has academic education in Creative Writing, Feminist Theory and History. In recent years, Boman had solo exhibitions at Konsthall Väst på fjället, Bjurholm 2024 and Galleri Alva, Umeå 2025, and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at Bildmuseet, Umeå 2024, Västerbottens Museum, Umeå 2022 and Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2021. She has been awarded the Region Västerbotten scholarship for graduating students at Umeå University’s Academy of Fine Arts and the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts scholarships for art students and young artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Ida Boman has a curatorial practice where she has curated several exhibitions and she has worked as a guest teacher in sculpture and installation at ABF Umeå Art School since 2024. She currently holds a position as a temporary operations manager at the People’s Movements for Art Promotion, Konstfrämjandet Västerbotten in Umeå.
Monica L Edmonson belongs to the Lule Sámi area of Sábme/Sápmi. The issues she wants to explore in her art work, and the stories she would like to tell, indicate the use of materials and techniques. However, glass is the material she knows best and it is often used to express the coexisting notions of fragility and strength in her people, us humans and our land. Public artwork and collaborations with architects are just as important in her practice as hands-on glass work and extensive art projects. It is a story hidden in each vessel of glass, sculpture in stone, urban glass façade or installation. It can be a story to remind us of our own – as well as natures’ – fragility and strength, a story which explores questions of identity and migration or a story to connect personal or local history with contemporary art. After a visual arts degree from Canberra School of Art Australia (1999), she established a glass workshop and studio in Tärnaby north Sweden. Her work is part of national and international art collections, for example at the National Gallery of Australia and Nationalmuseet Stockholm, and have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and Koganezaki Glass Museum Shizuoka Japan, amongst others.
Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage living in Montréal. He is originally from Corner Brook Newfoundland and has family throughout Nunatsiavut. His research-creation practice is shaped by Inuit ways of learning and knowing – employing a hands-on and tactile approach through animation, video projection, collage, photography, painting, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin and beads. His work often employs a multi-layered approach, combining a materials-based practice with storytelling, archival moments, and embodied experience. Many of his installations create dynamic spaces of audio and visual connection to land, water, and animals; sites that reveal movement, patterns, and life cycles alongside everyday magic. He currently teaches at Queens University in the Film & Media Department and continues to facilitate low-budget, DIY animation workshops with Inuit and Indigenous youth across Canada and abroad. His films have screened throughout Canada and around the world.
Guná is of Dákha/Tlingit Khwáan ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honors her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters such as William Wadsen and Mike Dangelo, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling. Her work, which has been recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, and longlisted for the Yukon Art Prize and national Sobey Award, has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, and healing. For Guná, art is activism – a call to respect, protect, and empower. She is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tilingit sovereignty, thereby inviting audiences to honor Indigenous resilience.
Trine Samuelsen Hansen is a Norwegian and Sea Sámi architect, artist, and musician from Skiervá in Northern Troms on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between architecture, spatial installation, performance, and sound, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, place, and collective memory can shape contemporary artistic and architectural practice.Rooted in Sea Sámi cultural traditions, Hansen’s work investigates how space can function as a framework for listening, gathering, and dialogue. Central to her practice is the concept of árran—firepace—understood not only as a physical structure but as a social and spiritual centre for conversation, storytelling, and community. Through ritual-based and participatory approaches, she develops spatial situations that invite audiences to engage with questions of belonging and cultural continuity in Sápmi. Her diploma project Ságastallaárran – A Sea-Sámi Ritual-Based Architecture, developed at the Bergen School of Architecture in 2025, proposes a ceremonial architectural practice grounded in Indigenous methodologies. Presented as a full-scale installation and building manual, the project enables a conversational gathering space to be assembled in different locations, opening possibilities for dialogue across communities and contexts. Alongside her artistic research, Hansen has worked with the international art triennial Bergen Assembly in both 2022 and 2025, contributing as an exhibition technician, builder, and collaborator on large-scale installations. She has also participated as a singer and joiker in performance and radio works presented at institutions including Bergen Kunsthall. Through her practice, Hansen seeks to create spaces that nurture trust, reflection, and shared learning—where architecture becomes a living process of relationship-building between people, land, and history.
Tilde-Ristin Kuoljok (b. 1996) lives and works in Burgávrre, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sábme (Purkijaur, Jokkmokk, Sweden). She belongs to the reindeer herding community of Sirges and comes from a line of Sámi duodje practitioners. Kuoljok grew up learning traditional knowledge and handicraft practices within her family before pursuing formal studies. She is a Lule Sámi duodjár (traditional Sámi handicrafter), textile artist and trained conservator, educated at Sámij Åhpadusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke and at the University of Gothenburg. Kuoljok’s practice is grounded in traditional Lule Sámi duodje, working primarily with textiles, fur and leather – most often sourced from the reindeer. Through her work she investigates materiality, form and process, extending ancestral knowledge systems into contemporary textile art. Her practice moves between tradition and experimentation, exploring duodje as both cultural continuity and contemporary artistic expression, and as a method for engaging with past, present and future. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, among others. In addition to her textile practice, Kuoljok has designed and produced stage costumes for Aira Dance Company. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Region Västernorrland Sámi Artist Residency (2025) and Sápmi Art (2022).
Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a multidisciplinary Kalalleq Inuk artist, working within graphic design, character concept art, fashion design, book illustration and art exhibition. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she is a graduate of The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and has also studied multimedia design and fashion design.Her illustrations are printed in several books published across Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, France, Canada and England. She has worked on several AAA games as a character artist and illustrated for board games. Coco’s work has also been published on stamps in Greenland. In 2024 she became an award winning illustrator, for her work on Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide.
Julia Rensberg is a vytnesjäjja and artist from the southern part of Sápmi, currently living outside Jokkmokk where she has her workshop. She primarily works with traditional duodji in wood and antler, while also creating larger-scale art works. Her life and practice are closely connected to reindeer and reindeer herding, which shape everyday life in Sápmi. The reindeer’s grazing lands are part of a larger living landscape where forests, waters, animals, and people are interconnected. These lands support rich biodiversity, and their protection is essential not only for Sámi culture and reindeer herding, but for the health of nature itself. Her work reflects on what it means to live in relationship with the land and asks how we can protect and care for it. Just as land cares for us. She works from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world, but part of it — a worldview where body, mind, and spirit are inseparable from the land.
Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuk fashion designer, artist and content creator from Tuktuuyaqtyuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Raised on the shores of the arctic ocean with her Inuvialuit family and community, she was named at birth according to Inuvialuit custom, after her great-grandmother Taalrumiq. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees, and is currently a 2nd year graduate student in the Master of Fine Art low residency program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she is researching and creating a body of work based on ancestral Inuvialuit Fashion.
Notably her work appears in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, she was a featured Designer on 7TH GEN and Project Runway Canada 2025.
Curators
Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.
Maria Svonni, based in Giron, Sápmi, is the artistic director of the Luleå Biennial, the oldest art biennial in Scandinavia. She is the founder and artistic director of Verdde, a nomadic art institution working for the inclusion of Sámi perspectives in everyday life through contemporary Sámi art. Her work is organized around collaborations, utilizing site-specific methods and activities to promote dialogue and long term change. Svonni is active as a freelance curator and writer. She was part of the team that formulated the artistic program in the winning application for Giron to become European Capital of Culture in 2029 and will be involved to make the programme come to life with a focus on Indigenous Sámi values and public art. She led the establishment of KiN art museum, the first museum focused on contemporary art in Norrbotten County, and is currently involved in creating the first dedicated space for Sámi contemporary art in the Swedish parts of Sápmi.
All Day | I Saw You, Carola Grahn, Various Locations, organized by the Arctic Arts Summit
All Day | The Reindeer-Lion, NORDTING; Renmarkstorget, organized by UmArts
All Day | This is Arctic Land, NORDTING; Tráhppie (Helena Elisabeths väg 4), UmArts Studio (Östra Strandgatan 32D) and Västa Ràdhusgatan, organized by UmArts in collaboration with Tráhppie
All Day | Melting Barricades, Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen: Renmarkstorget; organized by Nuuk Art Museum
Melting Barricades
16-18 June
Location: Renmarkstorget
By Inuk Silis Høegh (KAL) and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK)
Defend your country! Join the Greenlandic army today!
In 2004, two officers marched through the pedestrian street in Nuuk, megaphones in hand, recruiting citizens for a new national military. Volunteers were measured, weighed, and asked about their dog sledding, hunting and snowmobile skills. Hot seal soup was served after enrolment. For those hours, the Greenlandic military was a reality.
This spectacular recruitment campaign was the beginning of Melting Barricades — an art project in which artists Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen assumed the roles of Major General and Lieutenant Colonel. Two years later, the newly formed army invaded Denmark, congratulating Copenhageners on their new citizenship in the United States of Greenland.
The campaign did not stop at the street. Military recruitment posters were plastered across bus stops throughout Nuuk — the same everyday public spaces where citizens encounter advertising and news. Standing here in Umeå, you are now part of that same tradition.
With humour, irony and theatrical force, the project raises urgent questions about sovereignty, colonialism, defence policy and geopolitical power — questions that have only grown more pressing since.
Melting Barricades is presented here as a pop-up exhibition in connection with the Arctic Arts Summit, Umeå, June 2026. Curated by Nuuk Art Museum.
All Day | I SAW YOU, Carola Grahn, Renmarkstorget, organized by Arctic Arts Summit
I SAW YOU
Carola Grahn
During the Arctic Arts Summit 2026, Sámi artist Carola Grahn transforms the urban landscape of Ubmeje/Umeå through I SAW YOU — a large-scale public art intervention unfolding across the city.
Originally created in 2016, the work takes the form of a love letter placed in unexpected everyday locations: gas stations, roadsides, and transient public spaces. In Umeå, the text will appear on a monumental wall installation in the city centre, across selected petrol stations and in physical letters given to the Arctic Art Summit participants. A Dodge van is also specially decorated by the artist as a moving extension of the work itself.
Blending intimacy, humour, melancholy, and sharp social observation, I SAW YOU reflects on belonging, mobility, class, desire, and the emotional geography of the North. Addressed to an unnamed former lover encountered at a gas station, the text unfolds as a meditation on two fundamentally different relationships to place: one person who could never leave, and another who could never stay.
By bringing this vulnerable and cinematic narrative into public space, Grahn challenges conventional ideas of where art belongs — and who it speaks to. The work moves between contemporary art, roadside culture, Sámi experience, and northern everyday life, inviting audiences to encounter art not only in institutions, but in the ordinary spaces people pass through every day.
About the Artist:
Carola Grahn is a South Sámi artist from Jåhkåmåhkke/Jokkmokk and holds a Master’s degree from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Through her artistic practice, she critically examines humanity’s alienation from nature and the destructive legacy of colonialism, which continues to cause suffering for both people and the environment. In her work, she weaves together references from Western art history and popular culture with Sámi traditions and the rural landscapes of northern Sweden—often with a dark underlying humour.
12.00–16.00 and 10.00–16.00 | Real Arctic: Tráppihe and Kommunhörnan, Väven, organized by Tráppihe and UmArts
10.00–19.00 | ARcTic: Art, Land, Power Exhibition: Umeå Konsthall, Väven, organized by Umeå kommun in collaboration with Aejlies - the Sámi Centre
ARcTic: Art, Land, Power
June 15th – September 6th 2026
Location: Väven, Umeå konsthall, 3rd floor
To coincide with the Arctic Arts Summit in Ubmeje/ Umeå, Umeå konsthall is opening an exhibition featuring works that reflect experiences related to the summit’s themes – art, land and power. Here, these themes are explored in greater depth and take on new forms through art. Different perspectives, expressions, and voices are given a voice in the exhibition. History is interwoven with the present and the future.
The participating artists have various connections to the geographical region of Sábmie. This encompasses parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Sábmie is and has always been inhabited by the Indigenous Sámi people.
A big thank you to all the participants and to Aejlies – the Sámi Centre in Tärnaby – which, through a generous collaboration, has contributed a selection from its collection of duöjjie/Sámi handicrafts.
Participating Artists:
Victoria Andersson, Linnéa Axelsson, Sebastian Blind, Monica L Edmondsson, Per Enoksson, Carola Grahn, Olof Marsja , Lena Stenberg, Katarina Pirak Sikku and Katarina Spik Skum.
A video by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo will be available from June 15th to June 18th.
Represented through the Aejlies collection:
Birgitta Andersson, Cecilia Andersson, Sabina Baer, William Hallin, Ingemar Israelsson, Marja-Kari Omma, Anders Östergren Njajta and Lena Njaita.
10.00–19.00 | Flags from Suialaa Exhibition: Folkets Hus, organized by Suialaa Arts Festival
9.00–15.00 | The Rhizome Room Installation, Multisalen, Väven
12.00–14.00 | Guhte gullá, Vita kuben, Norrlandsoperan, organized by Norrlandsoperan
Guhte gullá / Here to hear
17 June: 12.00-21.30
18 June: 12.00-14.00
Location: Vita kuben, Norrlandsoperan
Outi Pieski is one of the leading Sámi artists working today, having shown at Tate Modern (2025), MARKK, Hamburg (2023-24), the Venice Biennale (2019), Gwangjubiennale (2021), the Sydney Biennale (2022) and GIBCA – Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2023).
In Guhte gullá (2021), a multichannel video installation, young people dance to escape the angst of world destruction, summoning the aid of the forgotten Sámi earth deities Uksáhkká, Juoksáhkká and Sáráhkká. We are losing our connection with the earth and our ancestors who rest beneath the soil. It is time for us to reconnect with the sacredness deep within the earth.
In their work Guhte gullá / Here to hear, women of different generations listen to the voices of their foremothers through dance and duodji, traditional Sámi handicrafts. The mother-daughter relationship between Outi Pieski and Biret Haarla Pieski and Gáddjá Haarla Pieski chimes aptly with the theme of their first joint artistic collaboration. The space is filled with Tuomo Puranen’s ritual-beating electronic music and Mari Boine’s joik, which inviting us to listen, reflect, and pay attention to the message of the foremothers.
Credits:
Directors: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski & Outi Pieski
Cinematographer, Editor: Mauri Lähdesmäki
Choreography: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski
Performers: Biret Haarla Pieski, Gáddjá Haarla Pieski
Music: Mari Boine, Tuomo Puranen
Sound Design: Pekka Aikio
Costume Designer: Auri Lukkarinen, Outi Pieski
Film Assistant: Maria Duncker
Sound recording: Svein Schultz
Commissioned by HAM/Helsinki Biennial 2021
Thank you: Teuri Haarla, P.A.R.T.S – Performing Arts Research and Training Studios, Angel Films.
14.00–18.00 | FUTURE CARTEOGRAPHIES, Galerie Verkligheten, organized by UmArts
14.00–18.00 | House_FLOW Counter Move, UmArts. Organized by UmArts
16.15–18.10 | Life Beyond the City Short Film Screenings, Tagnig, Väven
18.00–19.30 | Resilient Radio screening with directors Astrid Ardagh and Helena Wikström, Tystnad, Väven
18.30–21.40 | Den seglivade byn, Tagnig, Väven
