New Red Order x Sami Girl Gang

In connection with our current exhibition New Red Order Presents: One if by Land, Two if by Sea, we are very pleased to invite Sami Girl Gang to take over one of the public program events at Kunsthal Charlottenborg.

Sami Girl Gang operates as a platform for promoting the art of Indigenous women as well as a space for collaboration and experimentation between different art praxes. The event at Kunsthal Charlottenborg will be a cacophonic evening featuring video, music and performance lectures , including multidisciplinary artist and musician Elina Waage Mikalsen from Tromsø, Sápmi/Norway, visual artist Lada Suomenrinne from Njuorggán and performance artist Jessie Kleeman who is originally from Upernavik in northern Kalaallit Nunaat.

In correlation to the celebration of Tråante 2017 – a celebration marking the centennial of the Sámi Assembly of 1917 , in Trondheim in Norway, artist Carola Grahn and Silje Figenschou Thoresen started “Sami Girl Gang” to celebrate the female driving force behind the Sámi Assembly 1917, particularly led by the Sami activist Elsa Laula.

Sami Girl Gang was constituted with the vision of highlighting and bringing Sami women at the forefront of ‘the ‘postcolonial’ discussion. Vibrantly supported by a number of Instagram followers, the ‘gang’ started following the work of Sami women to act as a platform for Sami and Indigenous narratives driven by feminist values. They have since popped up in various occasions calling attention to innovative doudji (Sami handicraft), and have organized talks on queerness within Indigenous communities.  In Tråante with five different Sami Girl Gang t-shirts including ‘Decolonize,’ ‘Elsa Laula for president’ Reindeer <3 Unicorns,’ Sami Girl Gang has appeared playing with forms of commodities.

We hope to see you for an amazing evening in Charlottenborg Art Cinema!

The event is free and will be held in English. No need for registration but the seats will be filled by a first come first serve principle.

About the artists:

Jessie Kleemann

She is a poet and visual, performance, and theater artist based in Copenhagen. Born in Upernavik in the northwest of Kalaallit Nunaat, Kleemann regularly explores Kalaallit identity, tradition, and relationships to land and language in her work

Known for her provocative performance art, she has developed a form of ‘body art’ using her body as a living canvas, and re-enacting actions coming from ancient masque performances.

Elina Waage Mikalsen

A multidisciplinary artist and musician from Tromsø, Sápmi/Norway, she is currently based in Oslo, Norway, working within the fields of sound, video, performance, installation and text-based mediums. Her core source of material is the body, in its physical, remembering, sounding and acting capacity. She explores the woman’s body in particular, most notably in her sound work, where the possibilities and limitations of the female voice is explored in a physical, historical and gendered context. Based on this investigation, she explores the frictions and connections between the female body and the female voice, which are so often separated.

Lada Suomenrinne

Lada Suomenrinne (1995) was born in Northern Russia, but she lived most of her life in the northernmost point of Finland, Sápmi. There she was adopted by his step father into a Sámi family. Her artwork takes roots in cultural identity and belonging. She explores her strangeness in the landscape of heritage. Her inspiration comes from her curiosity about the borderland where the unseen lakes of Sáminess are. She’s having a dialogue with nature with whom she searches for the place of security as an adopted indigenous woman in the middle of Anthropocene. Currently she’s doing her Master degree in photography at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, in Helsinki.

Carola Grahn

Carola Grahn, b. 1982 in Jokkmokk, is a Sami visual artist. She does thematic, idea-based work, in large scale projects, mainly involving the materialization of text, installation strategies, and sculpture. In 2021 Grahn was awarded Asmund and Lizzie Arles Sculpture Prize and she has received several grants. Grahn is represented in the collection of Moderna Museet and Daimler Art Collection Berlin amongst other collections. She has written about Sami art for Afterall Magazine, edited the Hjärnstorm special issue about Sápmi, and self- published her novel Lo & Professorn [’Lo and the Professor’] in 2013. Her works have been shown at IAIA Museum Of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal, Southbank Centre in London, Moderna Museet Stockholm and elsewhere.