Image: Eva la Cour, still from the video essay (Re)Turning to Emilie Demant Hatt
The exhibition runs from 5 September 2026 to 9 January 2027 in Plan 1 and Konstverkstan. It brings together Emilie Demant Hatt’s paintings and graphics with a new video essay by Eva la Cour. La Cour’s video essay, ‘(Re)Turning to Emilie Demant Hatt,’ returns to the collaboration between Demant Hatt and Johan Turi through archival material, historical reflections and speculative interpretations, following how their relationship shaped the making of Turi’s book and changed them both.
The exhibition highlights the practical acts through which Demant Hatt helped make the book possible: translating, editing, organising and giving material form. It presents the collaboration as both a creative and emotional exchange and a relationship marked by unequal conditions. Demant Hatt was also situated within a colonial system that granted her privileges unavailable to Turi and the Sámi families with whom she lived.
The exhibition’s central figure is Emilie Demant Hatt (1873–1958), an artist and self-taught anthropologist from Skive and Copenhagen. A chance meeting with the Sámi wolf hunter and artist Johan Turi on the Malmbanan railway in 1904 changed both their lives and initiated their collaboration. Demant Hatt learned Sámi and later lived for a period with reindeer-herding families in the areas around Torneträsk and Karesuando.
As a promoter, transcriber, editor and translator, Demant Hatt contributed to completing Turi’s book ‘Muitalus sámiid birra’. Her editorial and translation work helped the book be completed and published in 1910; it was the first book about Sámi conditions written in Sámi by a Sámi author. Her own artistic practice received only limited recognition during her lifetime, while her position was also complex: she worked in a period when ideas about the artist, researcher and explorer were largely shaped by men.
‘I spåren av ett möte: Emilie Demant Hatt och Eva la Cour’ is shown in parallel with the separate exhibition ‘Om det fula och det vackra: Johan Turi, Outi Pieski och Johanna Minde’ on Plan 2.
