ArtistSwedish
Britta Marakatt-Labba
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Born in 1951 in Idivuoma, a small village in Karesuando on the Swedish side of Sápmi, Britta Marakatt-Labba grew up as one of nine children in a reindeer-herding family. Her father died when she was five, leaving her mother to raise the children alone. North Sámi was her mother tongue; Swedish came later, after Meänkieli and Norwegian. That layered relationship to language and belonging would inform everything that followed.
She studied at Sunderby Folk High School from 1971 to 1973, then at the School of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg from 1974 to 1978, where the encounter with textile art clarified her direction. As she later described it: 'It suddenly clicked that this was what I wanted to make - that I am going to work like a painter, but with thread.' From 1999 to 2002 she continued studies at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway.
Her mature practice centres on narrative embroidery: figures, animals, dwellings, and trees stitched onto white fabric that stands in for the ice and snow of the north. The imagery draws from Sámi cosmology, seasonal cycles, and collective memory, but runs alongside a sustained political engagement. As a founding member of the artist collective Mázejoavku (the Máze Group) in the 1970s, she took part in the protests against the damming of the Alta River in Norway, one of the defining conflicts of the Sámi rights movement. The 1981 work 'Garjját' (The Crows) emerged from that struggle.
Her 24-metre embroidery 'Historja' - a panoramic account of Sámi history from creation myths to the present - became the focal point of her international breakthrough at documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2017. In 2025, Artnews listed it among the 100 best artworks of the 21st century. The work subsequently toured widely, and in 2022 Marakatt-Labba participated in the Venice Biennale's main exhibition 'The Milk of Dreams', curated by Cecilia Alemani. A commissioned bronze sculpture, 'Urmodern', was installed on the High Line in New York in 2025.
Her work enters major collections: the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm acquired 'Máilmmi liegganeapmi' (Global Warming II), and Moderna Museet mounted a major solo exhibition in 2025 titled 'Where Each Stitch Breathes'. The Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo presented a retrospective titled 'Moving the Needle' in 2024. She received an honorary doctorate from Umeå University in 2014, the Illis Quorum from the Swedish government in 2017, the Stig Dagerman Prize in 2019, and the Prince Eugen Medal in 2020. She was the subject of Nationalmuseum's Portrait of Honour in 2022.
Across prints, paintings, installations, and sculpture, the embroideries remain her core medium. They operate simultaneously as personal testimony, historical archive, and political statement - insisting on Sámi visibility in a language that is both intimately handmade and monumental in scope.