Máret Ánne Sara | The Sámi Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022

Sámi artists Anders Sunna, Máret Ánne Sara and Pauliina Feodoroff have transformed the Nordic Pavilion to highlight the continuing struggle against colonialism, discrimination and land possession faced by Europe’s only Indigenous people

Máret Ánne Sara’s visceral presentation grew out of her four-year artistic campaign Pile O ’Sápmi, alongside her brother ’s unsuccessful legal challenge to Norway ’s forced reindeer culls. That project’s most famous iteration was a vast curtain of reindeer skulls, which was exhibited at Documenta 14 in 2017 and now hangs at the National Museum of Oslo. In her studio in Guovdageaidnu in Norwegian Sápmi, Sara described how a chance conversation with a reindeer herder helped her overcome her despair over her brother’s defeat and the Sámis’ plight, and inspired her Venice works. He told her: “Seeing the first red calves when they’re newborn makes all the struggles vanish. It strengthens your body, your spirit and your visions for the future.”

For this show, Sara collected the corpses of reindeer calves and incorporated them in a dramatic spiral mobile. Half hidden among hanging birch branches and grasses, the baby corpses appear to be in motion, caught in a liminal state between life and death. Surrounding the mobile, amorphous sculptural forms composed of hand-stitched reindeer intestines reference the stomach’s function as a container of emotional knowledge and the Sámi idea of “duodji”, narrowly connoting the tradition of “craft” as well as a philosophy of life based on the absolute interconnectedness of humans, animals and nature.

Giardini
27 September – 27 November 2022

Review and interviews by ELIZABETH FULLERTON
Filmed by ELIZABETH FULLERTON and MARTIN KENNEDY