Gullat

to hear, to belong to a place

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday March 26th 6-8pm

Weinstein Hammons Gallery

908 West 46th St. South, Minneapolis

Gullat is a North Sámi word that means “to hear” and also “to belong to a place.” While these meanings may seem disparate, the relationship between hearing and belonging to a place makes profound sense in an Indigenous worldview.

In VUOIŊŊALAŠVUOHTA: An Essay on the Sámi People’s Spiritual Connection to Land, Harald Gaski writes about an aspect of the origin story of the Sámi, the People of the Sun, “…in order to give them a sense of hope and confidence in the future, the Creator placed a living, beating heart of a vuonjal, a two-year old female reindeer, into the earth, so that anytime the people felt discouraged or beleaguered, they could place their ear on the ground and listen for the sound of the beating heart deep within.”

To be able to hear the heart beating deep within the earth, requires connection to the land and a reciprocal belonging to it that is untethered from notions of ownership. This ability to hear and to belong to a place is generative, creating rings of connection to nature, community, the environment and all that shapes them. As my home, Minneapolis, faces alarming threats to peace and justice our collective ability to hear and belong is increasingly important and self evident.

An ever-present correlation between the earth and the human body is also at play in my practice. In the context of years spent examining coping mechanisms related to body-image, my efforts to hear my body becomes an intimate un-colonizing of deeply-ingrained learned instincts and behaviors that respond to patterns of dominant systems.

These works serve as my own reminder to place an ear to the earth, to hear my own heart eating, and to listen for the hope for a future we so desperately need.

INGRAIN is a new series that advances my use of geometry as a visual language. Where my previous work engaged patterns in symbolic expression of diverse individuals and groups of people who all belong to the same natural order, this new body of work summons nature herself – alongside geometry’s measuring of the earth.

The woodgrain’s voice can be seen as well as heard. In the pairing of woodgrain with geometric pattern, one may sense immediately, deeply and viscerally, my progress beyond conceptual structure in my own knowing of and reconnection to my ancestral culture.

It is through embodied belonging – physical returns to Sápmi, and ongoing relationships with Sámi peers, relatives, and elders – that this work has emerged.

- Tia Keobounpheng