The Collection 2

Anastasia Bogomolova, Salad Hilowle, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Elle Hansa/Hans Ragnar Mathiesen, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Oleksandra Ravska, Aqui Thami, Jon Tomas Utsi and Lena Ylipää

Kin Museum of Contemporary Art has an expanding collection of over two hundred artworks dating from the 1960s to the present day. With the Barents region as its geographical starting point, the museum collects and displays contemporary art in a diversity of artistic expressions, media, and practices. Kin’s guiding principle is to “dig where you stand”—to start from one’s immediate context and then reach outward to engage with other perspectives, fostering a cross-fertilization between the nearby and the distant. The local is intertwined with the regional, national, and global in an ongoing conversation. Thus, the collection grows with artworks that reflect the museum’s exhibitions and other art projects that have taken place at Kin or have been initiated by the museum.

In the second presentation of Kin’s collection, since Kin’s relaunch in February 2024, we encounter, among other things, the Jokkmokk- based artist Katarina Pirak Sikkus’s photography taken in the footsteps of racial biologists, in the areas where her Sámi relatives once lived. Lena Ylipää from Lainio presents delicate pencil drawings of everyday objects. The video work Sylwan by Salad Hilowle, who was born in Mogadishu, raised in Gävle, and now resides in Stockholm, takes its starting point from Swedish Television’s classic adaptation of Pippi Longstocking and tells the unknown story of an Afro-Swedish artist family. Also on display is a painting by Oleksandra Ravska, which she created when she arrived at the Artists’ Collective Workshop in Luleå from war-torn Odesa in early 2023.

This presentation of Kin’s collection includes a “mini-exhibition” of Britta Marakatt-Labba’s embroidered images and several graphic works based on textile works, where she weaves together personal experiences from life in the North, with the climate crisis affecting the entire planet. For five decades, the artist has been crafting rich, poetic narratives about the Sámi—the only Indigenous people of the European continent—and their ongoing struggle for land and cultural survival. Her textile piece, In the Footsteps of the Stars III (2024), from her retrospective exhibition at Kin, is featured here. In connection with the exhibition, indigenous artist Aqui Thami from the Himalayas was invited for a residency at Kin, and one of her photographic works was incorporated into the collection. Three of Elle-Hánsa/Hans Ragnar Mathisen’s fantastic maps, drawn from a Sámi perspective, are also included. The Sámi traditional craft, duodji, is exemplified by a knife and bowl featuring characteristic North Sámi decorations, crafted by Jon Tomas Utsi.

Above all this, five banners with colorful photographs by Anastasia Bogomolova from Yekaterinburg float in space where body parts are intertwined with tree branches and roots. Like Mathiesen’s maps that distort familiar geographical perspectives, Bogomolova shows how the human body and its boundaries should not be taken for granted.

Image 2: Installation view.
Image 2: Britta Marakatt-Labba, North, West, East, South. Embroidery and print, 2002