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...

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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.