Where Each Stitch Breathes: The Embroidered World of Britta Marakatt-Labba
At the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the exhibition Where Each Stitch Breathes / Juohke sákkaldat vuoigŋá (14 June – 30 November 2025) presents a retrospective of Sámi artist Britta Marakatt-Labba. For nearly five decades, her needle and thread have carried stories of Sámi life, memory, and endurance, tracing both the intimate and the political in fine, deliberate stitches.
To embroider, for Marakatt-Labba, is an act of reflection — “a voyage in time and space where each stitch breathes experience and insight.” Her works reveal a world where the everyday and the spiritual coexist: reindeer drift across snow-laden plains, ancestral figures move through daily life, and traces of colonisation surface in the landscape itself.
Britta Marakatt-Labba, a sectiom from "Historjá", 2003–2007 © Britta Marakatt-Labba / BONO. Photo: KORO / Cathrine Wang
At the heart of the exhibition lies Historjá (2003–2007), a 24-metre-long embroidery often compared to the Bayeux Tapestry. Stitched over four years, it tells the story of the Sámi people — their mythology, livelihoods, and endurance — in hundreds of thousands of stitches. Beyond its intricate surface lies quiet defiance: Marakatt-Labba’s work also chronicles episodes like the 1852 Kautokeino rebellion, a pivotal moment in the fight for Sámi self-determination.
Britta Marakatt-Labba, Garjját (The Crows), 1981 Photo: Andreas Harvik/Nasjonalmuseet © Britta Marakatt-Labba
Her activism began early. As a member of the artist collective Mázejoavku in the late 1970s, Marakatt-Labba joined the protests against the damming of the Alta River — an environmental and cultural flashpoint she later immortalised in Garjját (The Crows) (1981). Today, her art continues to inspire younger generations to defend Sámi rights and the northern landscape.
Britta Marakatt-Labba, Deddon (Nightmare), 1984 Photo: Hans-Olof Utsi/Galleri Helle Knudsen © Britta Marakatt-Labba
Born in 1951 in Idivuoma, Sápmi, and now living in Övre Soppero, Marakatt-Labba’s life and work remain deeply connected to the Arctic environment. Through embroidery, graphic art, installations, and sculpture, she traces stories shaped by the land — a place where weather, memory, and tradition are closely interwoven. The exhibition brings together around sixty works spanning her career, forming a catalogue of methods and moments that speak across decades of daily life, ceremony, and change. Together, they reveal the timekeeping within her practice — how repetition, scale, and sequence record what official histories often leave out. Here, meaning accumulates slowly, stitch by stitch.
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Further Information:
Where Each Stitch Breathes / Juohke sákkaldat vuoigŋá
is on now at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm until 30 November 2025
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Image Credits:
Lead: Britta Marakatt-Labba, Čáliimet reivve (We Wrote a Letter) (Detail), 1995 Photo: Hans-Olof Utsi/Galleri Helle Knudsen © Britta Marakatt-Labba
All further images as credited in photo captions.