Torkställ / Suonjir

Lena Stenberg grew up in the Sámi village of Laevas outside Kiruna, where the mining industry has long set the conditions for both landscape and life. Her family experienced the involuntary displacements of the early 1900s, when Sámi families were forced to leave their grazing lands in Karesuando. As a young girl, she looked through her grandmother’s photo album and encountered stories of families that had been scattered and placed in new contexts. In Drying Rack / Suonjir, she returns to a form that was once an indispensable part of life in Sámi homes, where clothing and tools were dried and stored close to nature. The drying rack raises questions about land, belonging and borders that still shape our lives today.