Johan Turi exhibition opens alongside Sami truth report — SkimNews
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- Johan Turi's 1910 book Muitalus sámiid birra (An Account of the Sami) — widely regarded as the first Sami-authored work about Sami life in the Sami language — anchors the exhibition "On the Ugly and the Beautiful" at the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, his works not having been on display for almost 100 years.
- The Truth Commission for the Sami People will hand its report on abuses committed by the Swedish state against the Sami to the government on Wednesday at Mid Sweden University in Staare, with the document intended to form the basis for reparation and reconciliation discussions.
- Contemporary artists Outi Pieski and Johanna Minde exhibit alongside Turi; Pieski, who lives on the Finnish side of Sápmi, said Turi's writings effectively started the current truth and reconciliation process by documenting Sami life from an Indigenous point of view.
- Pieski and Eeva-Kristiina Nylander's research on the ládjogahpir — a traditional Sami women's hat — has helped revive its use, which Pieski called a "new symbol for decolonial feminism."
- Museum director Maria Lind said Turi wrote the book hoping the Swedish king would read it so conditions would improve for the Sami; "most likely the king did not read his book, but it became a success," she added.
- Industrial pressures on reindeer herding — including mining for rare earth minerals and wind energy expansion — and rising anti-Sami rhetoric from political leaders mirror the settler encroachment Turi documented a century ago, according to the exhibition framing, with climate change adding a new pressure on Arctic and northern regions.
- Similar truth commissions have also been held in Norway and Finland, placing Sweden's report within a broader Nordic reckoning with state treatment of the Sami, Europe's only recognised Indigenous people.
Why it matters: The exhibition deliberately pairs Turi's 1910 documentation of Sami dispossession with the handover of Sweden's first formal truth commission report on state abuses — a state-level acknowledgement that the land, resource and rhetorical struggles Turi catalogued a century ago remain unresolved as rare-earth mining, wind power and anti-Sami political rhetoric intensify.
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