ArtistSwedish
Anders Sunna
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Anders Sunna was born on 11 April 1985 in the Jukkasjärvi parish of Kiruna, in Sweden's far north. He grew up in Kieksiäisvaara, a small community near the Finnish border, in a family whose livelihood depended on forest reindeer herding. That background - and the protracted legal and bureaucratic persecution his family endured at the hands of Swedish county administrative authorities - became the central subject of his entire artistic output. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Umeå and later at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, before returning north to settle in Jokkmokk, the town that sits at the heart of Sámi cultural life in Sweden.
Sunna works across painting, mural, installation, and duodji - the Sámi knowledge practice that encompasses handcrafted objects in wood, bone, and reindeer horn. In his paintings he layers thick, agitated color over imagery drawn from colonial history: forced relocations, archival photographs from the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology, land appropriations, and police confrontations. Graffiti lettering, spray paint, and printmaking techniques sit alongside references to Sámi mysticism and a tradition of sublime northern landscape painting, creating a visual language that is both confrontational and deeply rooted in place.
His profile rose sharply with The Sámi Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale, where he joined artists Pauliina Feodoroff and Máret Ánne Sara in transforming the Nordic Pavilion - for the first time in the Biennale's history - into a platform representing Sápmi rather than the Scandinavian nation-states. Sunna's contribution was the monumental painting cycle Illegal Spirits of Sápmi, a five-chapter, roughly 20-metre-long work narrating his family's conflict with Swedish authorities from the 1970s to the present. The work was subsequently acquired by Moderna Museet for its permanent collection, and a major solo presentation at Moderna Museet Malmö followed. He has also exhibited at Luleå Biennial 2024 and holds a solo show with London gallery Larkin Durey.
Duodji is woven through Sunna's practice not as a decorative supplement but as an epistemological statement. The Sámi concept of duodji is frequently reduced in Western art contexts to the word 'craft', but Sunna and other Sámi thinkers describe it as the foundational knowledge space of Sámi society - a way of understanding material, time, and land that cannot be separated from the political conditions of indigenous survival.
In the Nordic and Swedish auction market, Sunna is represented almost exclusively through his duodji objects: signed knives, lidded birch-wood boxes (lockaskar), drinking cups (kåsor), and salt flasks made from birch and reindeer horn. These works have circulated primarily through Norrlands Auktionsverk, Stadsauktion Sundsvall, and Hälsinglands Auktionsverk - regional houses serving northern Sweden. The top recorded result in the Auctionist database stands at 7,000 SEK for a signed lockask, with half-horn knives achieving 3,600-3,750 SEK. The 16 lots tracked reflect only his craft practice; his paintings trade at an entirely different scale through galleries.