Counter Cartographies: Living the Land ARTISTS

This series of films follows Canadian artist Amalie Atkins’ 86-year-old aunt Agatha as she performs rituals of growing and harvesting on her farm in rural Manitoba. It unfolds in four parts that will change seasonally, creating an ephemeral experience of Agatha’s activities as she responds to changes in the weather and the needs of daily life. Atkins says that the film “reflects my desire to communicate the healing that can unfold through a connection with nature, and the stabilizing power of repetitive actions as we move into the constantly shifting future.”

Agatha continues to live on the family farm her father purchased from Mennonite homesteaders in the 1940s. Atkins uses quilts, colorful fabrics, and cocoon-like benches to replicate elements of Agatha’s physical world in the gallery space. Through this work, Atkins attempts to capture “the undercurrent of invisible history that can be felt but not seen, bringing up questions about what it means to live in a space, and connect to the fractured histories and stories held in the land.”

Amalie Atkins website 

Triangle Trade is a collaboration between the artists Cauleen Smith, Jérôme Havre, and Camille Turner. The film explores Black identity, diaspora, colonialism, and relationships to homeland. Together, the artists create multiple imagined worlds by combining their respective practices: Havre his puppetry, Smith their film, and Turner her performance. Puppet avatars of the artists travel across three distinct landscapes created to represent themselves—a desert island, a volcano, and an icy planet. Animated by the artists and the film crew, the puppets navigate landscapes that at once isolate them and offer the possibility of transformative connection. As they interact with their constructed worlds, they reflect on blackness as a state of becoming, a mode of experience that reaches simultaneously into multiple futures and histories.

Born in Jamaica and France respectively, both Turner and Havre are immigrants to Canada. Smith was born in the US. Each artist reflects on how their identities and relationships to place have been shaped by displacement and violence but also by love and resistance. Turner describes her experience of land as “tempered by a feeling of loss.” She says: “I am a displaced person. When I journey to the Motherland, it is with the understanding that I am a displaced person there as well. My relationship is tenuous even though this land gave birth to my ancestors. I imagine all land as not my land. However, I had an experience when I went to Jamaica, the land where my mother was born and her mother before her. It was the only place where I felt a sense of belonging, and yet, it rightly belongs to someone else that I do not know, someone whose family line has been severed due to colonization. This deep questioning of land and belonging leads back to the central question of what and where is home.”

CamilLe TurneR WEBSITE
Jérôme Havre WEBSITE
Cauleen Smith WEBSITE 

Dan Mills creates map-based paintings based on observations of historical and current events. He began incorporating maps into his work in the early 1990s while researching the 500-year anniversary of what is euphemistically referred to as ‘The First Encounter’—the arrival of European colonizers on the eastern shores of what is now known as the United States. To create his painted and collaged works, Mills conducts research on topics affecting global populations, such as current wars and conflicts and shifting colonial histories and agendas. His artworks visualize the data he gathers, while also alluding to processes of erasure and collective amnesia through heavy over-painting and obfuscation of detail.

Dan Mills Website

Chinese-American artist Gaye Chan was born in Hong Kong and currently lives in Hawai‘i. Her installation Apophenia consists of printer spreads culled from discarded atlases. Chan disassembles each atlas, removing pages from their sequence in binding. In book publications, two types of spreads are found. ‘Reader spreads’ flow in numerical sequence (page 1, 2/3, 4/5, 6/7…), while the logic of ‘printer spreads’ is entirely dictated by the mechanics of book production (page 8/1, 2/7, 6/3, 4/5…). Thus, the content on paired halves of a ‘printer spread’ is happenstance, creating serendipitous and unexpected combinations. Chan is interested in the “imaginary geographies and alternative geopolitics” these maps suggest.

The title of the work, Apophenia, refers to the tendency to find connection or meaning in random phenomena. Displayed in such a way that the viewer can freely move through the installation and view the maps in a variety of physical orientations, Chan challenges us to unlearn habituated ways of seeing the world. She says, “Maps have long trained us on how and what to see. They supplant our memory of ourselves and knowledge of others. Lines are drawn across nonexistent boundaries allocating differences between people, demarcating states of belonging, regulating mobilities. The 'maps' of Apophenia are nonsense. There is no top, no bottom. No north, no south. No west, no east. Like all maps, they are pieces of paper.”

Gaye ChaN WEBSITE

Norway-based Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen’s maps serve as counter narratives to ‘official’ histories, providing insights into Sámi culture and Indigenous resistance to the forces of colonization.

Mathisen’s maps incorporate traditional Sámi symbols and references to Sámi history, literature, and contemporary culture. Sámi handicraft and needlework patterns are referenced in many of the map’s visual embellishments. Mathisen does not delineate countries using colors, lines, or grids; there are no borders in his maps. This deliberate absence reveals the importance of migration in the traditional Sámi way of life, which is based on a reciprocal relationship with land that does not recognize concepts of private property or land ownership.

Many of Mathisen’s maps appear to be upside down, with Scandinavia positioned at the center, or even showing the Arctic as the center of the world. The sizes of landmasses are often skewed as well, with Sápmi (the Sámi homeland, stretching across northern regions of Russia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden) appearing larger than the rest of Scandinavia, and the other continents shrinking in comparison to Europe. Several maps feature Sápmi as a continent of its own.

Each variation calls on the viewer to reconsider where the center of the world is located. The earth is spherical and, theoretically, any point could be considered its center. By altering typical understandings of cardinal directions, Mathisen invites the viewer to think about the world from the Sámi perspective, where land and free movement of people and animals across the land are of central importance.

Hans Ragnar Mathisen Website

World Processor is an ongoing project by German artist Ingo Günther that uses illuminated globes to visualize data. Topics encompass a broad array of issues, such as exportation of weapons, agricultural land use, bird migration, urban expansion, and life expectancy. More than 1,000 globes have been created representing over 400 unique topic areas.

Each globe reflects data considered valid at the time of its creation. Günther often uses data provided by intergovernmental and international organizations, such as the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. For Günther, the series is an exercise in understanding. He says, "...every globe requires the invention of a new code in order to represent the data appropriately and effectively...I am challenged by the incomprehensibility of the world's totality."

Ingo Günther Website

A gumpi is a small mobile dwelling built on skis and pulled by snow machine. Used by nomadic Sámi reindeer herders, these structures allow people to follow the seasonal movements of animals across the landscape. Sámi artist and architect Joar Nango often incorporates references to Indigenous vernacular structures and objects such as the gumpi in his work, inspired by the ingenuity and improvisation embedded in items created for everyday use on the land. The way these structures reveal distinctive relationships to land, along with principles of reuse and sustainability, are central to Nango’s investigations.

In Nango’s installation, the gumpi becomes a vehicle for learning and exchange, screening episodes of the ‘improvised’ TV series Post Capitalist Architecture TV, a discussion-based exploration of the research and ideas motivating his practice. The series includes episodes on materiality and vernacular architecture, nomadism and movement, and decolonization. The final episode considers the gumpi itself, exploring the ways new technologies have changed reindeer herding, human interaction, and culture. Filmed from his van during the pandemic, Nango streams conversations with contributors from across the globe, projecting them onto a hand-sewn screen made from fish stomachs. The van’s TV studio setting, including the fireplace, draws from the aesthetics of the laavu, a traditional Sámi dwelling similar to a teepee.

Nango reflects that “through architecture, I am trying to reclaim space for the Sámi culture within the built environment, trying to make some sort of repair. I am trying to rediscover things and maybe also reimagine some of these potentials that, due to colonization, were not allowed to bloom or fulfill themselves.”

Just as photography illuminated new understandings of the physical world centuries ago, today’s 3D mapping technology reveals seemingly intangible aspects of the environment we inhabit. Ephemeral State seeks to capture the elusive qualities of water in its three physical states––liquid, solid and gas––within the Alaska environment. Using data gathered from the scientific community and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology, photogrammetry, and digital-modeling techniques, the artists create an alternative representation of the 49th state reflecting the three-dimensional characteristics of snow, ice, waves, steam, clouds and rain.

Lead Pencil Studio Website

Sámi artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen has devoted his life, art, and literary work to the defense of Indigenous culture and Indigenous rights. Marek Ranis’s film, Cartographer, explores Mathisen’s life and work and how his personal story intersects with broader movements to preserve Indigenous lifeways in the face of dramatic environmental change. Mathisen’s borderless maps of the Nordic region (the Sámi homeland, Sápmi) provoke reflection on the ways migration, climate change, natural resource extraction, and exploration are shaping life in the Arctic.

Marek Ranis website

In the Alien Hiker series, Finnish artist and researcher Maria Huhmarniemi stages ephemeral flags in the Austrian Alps using head scarves and hiking poles. The series has been updated to include three images of the Chugach Mountains surrounding Anchorage.

Flags often symbolize colonial or nationalistic agendas and carry connotations of conquest and domination. However, Huhmarniemi’s temporary scarf-flags are intended to make women’s presence visible within patriarchal structures and narratives.

Using scarves representing materials and designs from many different regions of the world, these makeshift flags signal the fluidity of culture beyond borders. Rather than tools used to divide, claim, and exclude, they aim to ‘make space’ for more inclusive and balanced relationships between people and land. The obvious impermanence of the flags speaks to an idea of sustainability predicated on movement and change.

Maria Huhmarniemi website

The five works from Niap’s Reclamation and De-Categorization series, seen and heard here, assert the rights of Quebec’s northern Indigenous peoples to their homelands. The titles of these works refer to the 1975 James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement (JBNQA), which divided lands into three categories of land rights and usage, with Indigenous peoples having different levels of access depending on the categorization.

Niap describes her painting over of photographs of her homelands by white, non-Inuk Quebecois photographer Robert Fréchette as “symbolically reclaiming the land for our people.” Fréchette and Niap are colleagues and collaborators, working together to create the work. Niap is part Euro-Quebecois (her father is white, French Canadian, while her mother is Inuit), and she sees this work as also a gesture of reconciliation and coming together through the landscape.

The soundscape that envelops the works incorporates throat singing by Niap, as well as a poem by Inuk poet Olivia Ikey. Evoking the sounds of the land, it amplifies the reclaimed territory as vital and thriving with contemporary Indigenous lifeways.

Niap website

Nikita Gale’s multimedia installations register traces of movement and sound, creating expansive, ephemeral cartographies that explore the way systems and spaces shape human experience.

DRRRUMMERRRRRR raises questions about spaces of congregation and listening—the concert hall, dance club, auditorium, and central square—and their political potential.   

Conceived to evoke a post-apocalyptic, post-human view of the world, drums and cymbals are arranged in tubs of water so that no single person could play them simultaneously. They are instead activated by water, which ‘plays’ the drum components endlessly. The work prompts a reflection on nature’s capacity to disrupt and supersede human-designed systems while also serving as a reminder, that, in Gale’s words: “Any fantasy that humanity may have about its future is circumscribed by the reality of rising sea levels and an increasingly hotter atmosphere.”  

Gale poses questions such as: What happens to human-scaled technologies when we decenter the human? What happens when other forces or materials fill the absence of the human and animate these systems in unanticipated ways that far exceed the capacity of a singular human body? 

The drums are arranged against a large-scale rubbing of the stage at Mad Myrna’s gay nightclub and cabaret in Anchorage. The rubbing reveals traces of movement and choreography. The residual stage markings and indentations suggest another kind of map that speaks of a specific space, time, and culture – one that affirms the presence of queer bodies while also demanding other ways of being read or interpreted. Both the musical score and the dance choreography alluded to in Gale’s installation provoke a questioning of dominant structures, power dynamics, and ways of interpreting sensory information.   

Nikita Gale WEBSITE

Rájácummá - Kiss from the Border is a project documenting an intervention in the landscape along the border between Norway and Finland. The Sámi artists and activists Outi Pieski, Jenni Laiti, and Niillas Holmberg strategically placed eight lines of poetry in the Deatnu River valley, in the Sápmi area of Northern Finland and Norway. Sápmi is a cultural region referring to lands inhabited by the Indigenous peoples of Norway, Finland, Sweden, and parts of Russia.

The work calls attention to issues concerning Sámi sovereignty and environmental justice. Rather than focusing on the river as a marker of the geopolitical divide between nation-states, (a boundary that divides fluidly connected Sámi lands and peoples), the artists envision Deatnu—or “Great River,” in Sámi—as an entity with its own rights.

Outi Pieski WEBSITE
Jenni Laiti WEBSITE
Niillas Holmberg WEBSITE

In her work, Icelandic artist Rúrí investigates social, political, and environmental issues impacting human rights and the natural world. Her installation consists of two works: Water Balance III, and a series of large-scale maps from her Future Cartography XI project. In conversation, these works consider the element of water from two opposing perspectives: as a sustainer of life on this planet, as well as a threat to coastal communities due to extreme weather, flooding, and sea level rise precipitated by climate change. Each glass vessel in Water Balance III represents the amount of life-sustaining water available for human beings on earth. The varying quantities of water draw attention to economic inequality and the way climate change is exacerbating these disparities. Each vessel is labeled with a number corresponding to a single individual out of the nearly eight billion people currently living on the planet.

The Future Cartography XI maps depict North America, Iceland, and Bangladesh. Rather than showing these landmasses as we currently understand them, Rúrí offers a visual study of their future shorelines.

Changes in ocean level are based on calculations of the mass of water that will be released during the decline and total melting of the Antarctic ice sheets, the Arctic ice sheet, the Greenland glacier, and all mountain glaciers of the globe. To create these maps, the artist collaborated with the geographer Gunnlaugur M. Einarsson and used data sets available in the public domain. Satellite imagery from National Aviation and Space Administration (NASA) and Japanese Space Authority (METI) were combined with information from other datasets.

Rúrí WEBSITE

Credible is a series addressing abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church in the State of Alaska. Athabascan and Iñupiaq artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs has been developing the series since 2005. Recent works represent the 35 villages with credible claims of abuse at the hands of religious officials supposedly sent to ‘save’ them. Included in the piece is a list of those accused. This information was provided by Anchorage Daily News investigative reporter Kyle Hopkins. His research was obtained from Jesuits West and supplemented with a report by the Catholic Diocese of Fairbanks listing “all known individuals, including priests, religious, lay employees and volunteers against whom a complaint of sexual abuse has been filed by one or more individuals,” and against whom the abuse has been proven, admitted, or “credibly accused,” and accepted by the Catholic Church. These are the only claims acknowledged by the Catholic Church at this time.  

Kelliher-Combs’ work has long explored the weight of secrets and the physical, emotional, and psychological burdens of trauma. In Credible, Alaska, the act of embedding and stitching human hair into vintage maps viscerally points to legacies of violence wrought by colonization. At the same time, sewing as a method of repair, coupled with her frank revelation of the names and locations of abusers, is a powerful act of truth-telling and resistance to the pernicious nature of secrecy surrounding sexual abuse.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs

Canadian Artist Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation and settler heritage, exposes and disrupts colonization of Indigenous lands, beliefs, and ways of knowing through her work. The thunderbird holds a place of importance in many North American Indigenous belief systems, signifying power and strength, however, the spirit of thunderbird has long been dismissed as myth and its image and concept widely appropriated. Willard’s print series is presented behind a blue circle, provoking a different lens on the image and evoking connection to sky, water, and land. Through Dreaming Terra Incognita, a map and accompanying artist book, Willard examines western mapping practice as a force of assimilation perpetuating ongoing violence and trauma. Contemporary geographic representation of what is now called the Americas is printed over a 15th century rendering, showing colonial measuring and domination of the land. Yet, this exacting colonial claim is countered by the text etched atop which dismantles the map as fact or truth. The book engages with assimilation of Indigenous beliefs and lifeways, past and present. In these works, Willard unsettles the colonizing forces that write over and silence Indigenous knowledge in understandings of place and land. Willard remaps meaning and power onto appropriated symbology and belief.

“Situating our resistance to the assimilation of our cultures within a context of strength and power, like the thunderbird, we find our struggles echoed in the stories of our ancestors, our old ways realities, and it is here that our power lies. We believe in our dreams, our stories, our selves,” she says.

Tania Willard website

Alutiiq artist Tanya Lunkin Linklater examines an embodied relationship to the land through ghostly language, which appears and disappears silently. Written as an event score, this text was spoken as part of presentations and lectures by the artist and presented in her first collection of poetry, Slow Scrape. Through questions and white space, the video, made entirely of poetic text, invites slow, visceral consideration of how experience is shaped by land and place. Phrases and questions open up complex histories of Indigenous stewardship and connection to Afognak, and the trauma of land loss and colonization.

Linklater says of her artistic practice:

“Grief is present in quite a lot of my work. As an Alutiiq person I can only speak about our collective history from my perspective. I think that there are a range of understandings of our history. Our strengths include our efforts to revitalize our language, our songs, our dances, our Alutiiq ways of being on the land. Growing up, I participated in subsistence activities: fishing, hunting… Those skills and those understandings of the tides, of the winds, and our land at home have continued from generation to generation, as our strength as Alutiiq people. However, the brutality of Russian colonization certainly left lasting impacts…[O]n the one hand, I feel a great hope for the future, but I also contend with this very difficult, violent history that our people have endured.”

Tanya Linklater WEBSITE