Image: Kin Museum of Contemporary Art, Stockholm
The exhibition ‘Bruket av ett landskap: Norrakollektivet och Borg Mesch på Kirunas bokbuss’ runs from 23 October 2026 to 31 January 2027. It will be presented at every stop on Kiruna’s book-bus route.
The exhibition places Borg Mesch’s photographs of Kiruna’s early decades in dialogue with works by Norrakollektivet, a collective based in Luleå. Mesch’s material addresses Kiruna’s early decades, the construction of the railway to the Atlantic coast, the northern landscape and the Sámi Indigenous population.
Norrakollektivet consists of Anja Örn, Thomas Örn and Fanny Carinasdotter, who have spent many years studying the Aitik mine and its surroundings in Gällivare municipality. The collective and the exhibition share an interest in how places are used and in the encounter between industry and nature.
The exhibition brings the two practices together across a distance of 120 years, linking an earlier celebration of human engineering with a critical examination of human effects on the landscape. The project also examines how photographic archives continue to shape contemporary understandings of identity, land rights and cultural heritage in Sápmi.
The exhibition is part of Kin’s multi-year project ‘Borg Mesch: en fotograf i Sápmi under den koloniala perioden’, which takes its starting point in Mesch’s life and work and has invited seven practitioners from the field of photography to develop new works in response to his production. The project is carried out with Kiruna municipality’s culture and education administration, which manages an extensive collection of Mesch’s photographs.
