Katarina Pirak Sikku

One tends to think of rivers as unbroken. One tends to see them as continuous flows of water. And yet this is not always the case. The region of Norrbotten in the north of Sweden, the home of the Sámi artist Katarina Pirak Sikku, has been undergoing a so-called Green Transition in recent decades. However, in the name of renewable energy production, several rivers have been dammed, cut into pieces and deprived of their fauna in order to produce carbon-free  energy. People, predominantly the indigenous Sámi population, have been displaced and the grazing lands of the reindeer destroyed. 

In recent years, Katarina Pirak Sikku has been drawing and weaving maps. Maps of discontinuity, maps of fragmented flows, maps of memories of waterfalls. When I visited her in her home town of Jokkmokk she took me for a walk to the nearby River Lule (in Sámi: Julevädno). “You are lucky”, she said, “the dams are open because there has been too much rain, you can hear and see the river as it used to be.” As we walked along the huge and sturdy current of the Julevädno, we talked about how all the green changes that the region boasts about are in fact distorting symbolic and real livelihoods on the ground. In just over a hundred years, the Lule has been cut off and imprisoned in power stations in fifteen places in order to electrify the country across hundreds of kilometres. 

The name Julevädno is derived from the Sámi word Lulij—“the one who lives in the east”—and relates to the Sámi understanding of direction, in which orientation is defined by the movement of water rather than by cardinal meridians and parallels. For the Sámi, a river is not a resource to exploit but an unstoppable living force. Despite what I saw, the river now stands still. In addition to the unauthorised destruction of a way of life and of the relationship between the Sámi and the river, most of the value extracted from hydropower has never been returned to them. In the work Julevädno, Katarina Pirak Sikku shows the ongoing transformation of the river by depicting it at different points in time, from the beginning of the 20th century to today. Her maps are a cartography of memory and of the present as well as a poetic way for the Sámi to say “we are here” and “not in our name”. 

Katarina Pirak Sikku (1965, Jokkmokk) is a Swedish artist whose work is currently being shown at Skissernas Museum in Lund. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Bildmuseet, Umeå University have featured her work in the past. Her first piece to be offered at auction was "Om jag hade stålar #04" at Göteborgs Auktionsverk in 2020. Katarina Pirak Sikku has been featured in articles for e-flux, Hyperallergic and ArtDaily. The most recent article is The Anti-Hero written for Kunstkritikk in December 2023.