Online Lecture: Sámi Art, Poetics and Politics of Norwegian Art History

In Norsk kunsthistorie (1927), one of the first Norwegian Art History textbooks, a “statuette of a Lapp”, i.e., of a Sámi, is praised for its realism: its “sympathetic naturalness” makes it resemble an “ethnographic illustration.” Unlike the other sculptures discussed in this book, the one representing a Sámi is the only one explicitly associated with the field of ethnography. Fast forward a hundred years, and the Sámi art of duodji is still primarily presented by museums of cultural history or by ethnographic museums, and not by art museums. How is the prevailing representation of Sámi art as ethnographic material related to the politics of nation building in the nineteenth and early twentieth century?

This lecture will address the representation of Sámi artefacts, practices, materialites, actors, and themes in Norwegian Art History. I will attempt to uncover some of the established disciplinary mechanisms and narratives. My method is historiography in combination with fieldwork in archives and museums, aimed at doing art historiography in the expanded field – to go beyond the traditional textual focus and incorporate visuality and materiality in the inquiry.

Monica Grini is Senior Lecturer in Media and Documentation Studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She holds a PhD in Art History. Her research interests include historiography and museology, especially articulations and receptions of Sámi art. She participates in several international research projects and research groups, like The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories, based at the University of Copenhagen, and Worlding Northern Art, based at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Recent article: “Sámi (Re)Presentation in a Differentiating Museumscape. Revisiting the Art-Culture System.” Nordisk Museologi, 3/2019, pp. 169–185. Forthcoming book: Samisk kunst og norsk kunsthistorie. Delvise forbindelser, Stockholm University Press. 2021.

Image: Illustration from Yngvar Nielsen, Universitetets Lappiske Samlinger 1857-1911 (Christiania: Fabritius, 1911).

Dr. Grini’s lecture is a part of the lecture series Whose North? Art History and Visual Studies Lecture Series, IFIKK/University of Oslo, Spring 2021

The lecture series, “Whose North?” invites three pioneering scholars, each questioning the canonical art historical narrative of the Nordic region through the framework of colonial encounters both in the region itself and the Nordic countries’ own colonial practices on a global scale. These lectures invite us to consider how citizenship, identity, and personhood are framed in the visual and material culture of this region. In a different way, each of these groundbreaking lectures brings to the fore the erasure of colonial encounters and the artistic and visual culture of indigenous persons in the Nordic art historical narrative, museological practices, and archival history.

This spring’s AHVS lecture series is a collaboration between University of Oslo, Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, Wellesley College, Art History Department, and Indiana University Bloomington, Department of Art History. Program committee: Øystein Sjåstad, Patricia Berman, and MaryClaire Pappas.

Enquiries: [email protected]

Programme:

March 30, 7pm Cyprus Time
Sámi Art and the Poetics and Politics of Norwegian Art History
Dr. Monica Grini

April 7, 7pm Cyprus Time 
Redrawing Borders: Methodological Nationalism and the Redistribution of Responsibilities in Nordic Colonial Art Histories
Dr. Mathias Danbolt