Emilie Demant Hatt's photographs - A look behind the colonial «surface»

Presentation by art historian Hanna Horsberg Hansen in connection with the exhibition ‘Alternating Routes’ at TKF.

** Presentation in Norwegian. Complimentary coffee, tea and waffles served before the presentation.**

The festival exhibition at TKF, ‘Alternating Routes’ with works by Michelle Deignan, revolves around questions of borders, landscapes and territories. The main work ‘On Common Ground’ is a fictional film about a young woman travelling alone from Germany to Ireland in the early 1800s in a romantic quest for knowledge and adventure. She has to cross many boundaries, both political and personal, on her journey.

Emilie Demant Hatt (1873-1958) travelled from Denmark to Sápmi a century later, also with a romantic dream: to experience Sámi culture. On her first journey, she met Johan Turi. He arranged for her to live with reindeer herding Sami for a year. First in the area around Jukkasjävri, and then on a move from Karesuando to Tromsdalen.

Emilie Demant Hatt was a painter and eventually became both a writer and a photographer. Some of the photographs she took on her journey are published in the book Med lapperne i højfjeldet. Through different perspectives on the photographs, Hanna Horsberg Hansen examines whether it is possible to see beyond the colonial ‘surface’ of images taken by travellers of this period. Can repatriation and artistic reappropriations activate the content of the images in new ways? she asks.

Hanna Horsberg Hansen is a professor of art history at the Academy of Fine Arts at UiT. The article she has written about Emilie Demant Hatt is available here: