Video: Joar Nango, Artist Talk [SSS]

Our first speaker in the 2019 STAGES Speakers Series is architect, builder, artist, and self-publisher Joar Nango. Nango’s work often parses out the division between design, architecture, and visual art and uses improvisation as method and process. Belonging to the indigenous peoples from Sápmi, the traditional territories of Sámi, improvisation is a cultural disposition for several communities like his, where the climate is merciless and resources are scarce. As such, Nango’s sculptural practice is stirred by chance, experimentation with localized raw materials, DIY aesthetics, and an in-tuned relationship to place. He creates actions and interventions; makeshift as well as permanent ones, that ultimately add up to our knowledge and connectedness to the environment we stand and thrive on.

A long proponent of printed matter and its political potential to mobilize larger social transformations, Nango along with collaborators have fulfilled publication projects including The Indigenuity Project, The Normadic Library and the self-published zine series Sámi Huksendáidda: the Fanzine. Nango has been part of a number of exhibition projects throughout Canada and elsewhere. Among which includes, the Ottawa Art Gallery, Vancouver’s Western Front, Gallery Deluxe in Halifax, and The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway and Sydhavn Station in Copenhagen, Denmark. He recently presented European Everything at Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017.