The challenge as an artist is to be outside your own comfort zone.
Introduction
Gjert Rognli has established an international reputation as a photographer and filmmaker. Yet to fully understand his artmaking, it is important to consider the local context in which he grew up. He was born in the Kåfjord region of Northern Norway at a time when traditional Sámi and Kven cultures were under sustained pressure from the Norwegian state.
The Sámi culture is one of the oldest in Northern Europe, with roots in the post–Ice Age populations of northern Fennoscandia. Its worldview emphasises the interconnectedness of all things in nature, including human beings – a framework often seen to resonate with contemporary environmental thought in the importance it places on respect, reciprocity, and equilibrium. Meanwhile, the Kven are a Finnic-speaking minority group, many of whom migrated to northern Norway during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
From the mid-nineteenth century, these cultures were subjected to a policy of forced assimilation into a singular national identity. This process, known as Norwegianisation (fornorsking), actively suppressed minority languages, stories, and cultural practices resulting in profound cultural loss and intergenerational trauma. Although the policy was formally repealed in 1963, its effects persisted for decades, and it was not until 2024 that the Norwegian government issued a formal apology.
Religious life in the region further shaped this cultural landscape. Laestadianism, a conservative Lutheran revival movement founded in the 1840s by the Swedish pastor and biologist Lars Levi Laestadius – himself of Sámi heritage – spread rapidly across northern Scandinavia. Its influence was tied in part to Laestadius’ use of Sámi language and culturally familiar imagery to communicate Christian theology. At the same time, it positioned traditional Sámi animist beliefs as blasphemous. As a result, while Laestadianism offered some Sámi communities a strengthened collective identity, it also contributed to the erosion of earlier spiritual practices and reinforced a patriarchal, morally conservative social order.
Gjert Rognli, who identifies as Sámi, Kven, and queer, thus grew up within what he describes as a triple minority background – one shaped by overlapping histories of cultural suppression, religious conversion, and contested identity. Drawing on these intersecting perspectives, his photographs evoke a liminal space between contemporary art and inherited knowledge. Through themes of environment, memory, and transformation, his work reflects on human interconnectedness with the natural world, and on the enduring cycles of life and death that bind them.
Alasdair Foster
Interview
You identify as Sámi, Kven, and queer. How have those three aspects shaped your world view and, in particular, your creative focus and process?
Interpreting the world through my background in three minorities has been a wonderful gift that is woven into all my creative work. The challenge as an artist is to be outside your own comfort zone. And it can certainly be uncomfortable, but owning these identities has helped me better understand oppression, alienation, racism, exclusion… An opportunity to see the world from perspectives unavailable to many others that provides a valuable spur for creativity and growth for me as an artist.
What were your biggest influences growing up?
I grew up in Kåfjord municipality, in a Sea Sámi village in Northern Norway. It was a community that had been through the government’s crazy Norwegianisation, a forced assimilation policy aimed at wiping out Sámi and Kven languages, traditions, forms of dress, and ways of thinking, in order to engineer an ethnically and culturally homogeneous Norwegian population. But it was an exciting place in which to grow up, for here the old wisdom had been preserved in secret. A wisdom that nature carries restorative power.
And this was where I experienced the rituals that provide healing to both animals and humans. My grandfather told me about the old animist religion. He showed me the way to something other than the beaten track. The village was a place where identities and religions were juggled, where despite the enforced colonial system of Norwegianisation, vestiges of our Sámi intangible cultural heritage had been preserved. A culture that is today finally recognised by UNESCO. Its insights have given me the opportunity to interpret the world in an enlightening variety of ways, and have been a driving force for me in creating art and new stories.
Tell me about the series called ‘Somnolence’.
Life itself is a mystery with many layers. I grew up on a farm, so the cycles of life and death are familiar to me, and this series travels a liminal path between the two. But then, belonging to minorities that have been historically oppressed and, at the same time, carry a fluid understanding of gender and sexuality, is to live in a constant liminal state. You are neither completely inside nor completely outside; you find yourself in an in-between. This in-between – or threshold – is both a painful exclusion and a fertile, creative place. It is a place where the fixed categories and ‘truths’ of the majority society dissolve, and something else can emerge.
In many of my earlier photographs, I staged stories and experiences that referred to my minority background. In these photographs, I was often naked, or in a surreal setting dressed in costume and surrounded by scenographic objects, or placed in other situations that included dead or living animals. It was a rebellion against society and the treatment of minorities that I have carried with me since I was born – a way to show how raw and defenceless a person can stand before a social system that oppresses you.
Can you give an example of how this was expressed in your image making?
The photograph ‘Emotional Landscapes’ was inspired by a luovvi, a Sámi term for a raised wooden platform used for storing food. This was as challenging as it looks to create. For the two-hour trek up into the mountains to reach the plateau, we had used snowmobiles and a sled in tow to bring all the props for the project. The temperature was twenty degrees below and the wind was harsh. Once naked, the task of getting into position and filming had to be undertaken as quickly as possible.
It is an image that certainly communicates the states of vulnerability and resilience. In other work in this series, you evoke an increasingly surreal sense of the mythic. I am thinking, for example, of ‘Chasing Dreams’.
That photograph was created during the making of ‘The Forgotten Place’, a film in which I explored themes around humanity’s contradictory, at times brutal, relationship with the natural world. In doing this, I wanted to suggest ethereal landscapes in order to evoke a more spiritual representation of life.
Growing up in a contested space between the past and the future has given me the opportunity to interpret reality, nature, religion in several ways. I got to experience the conflict between the remains of the ancient animist religion and the strictures of Laestadianism. I learned much about the old religion from my grandfather, he taught me, among other things, how to stop blood, a seminal lesson that was both fascinating and terrifying. [In traditional folk medicine, stopping blood describes a range of practices, employing herbal remedies or faith-based healing, to staunch bleeding caused by traumatic injury without the use of conventional medical intervention.]
I notice that red is a colour that recurs in both this series and in later work. Is that suggestive of blood?
Back then, it was common to slaughter animals at home on the farm. As a child, my task was to stir the blood that came out of the neck of the freshly killed animal so that it wouldn’t coagulate. I always hid behind the barn when the animal was being dispatched, putting my fingers in my ears so as not to hear the sound of it. But still, this was how it was. It was completely normal, and the animals were treated with respect. Early on, these experiences brought me into close contact with life and death. I also learned that animals you had grown to love must die so that humans may survive. So, yes, for me, red is the colour of life and death. It is a colour of energy and of sadness. A reminder that these are the cycles of the universe that no one can stop.
The other body of work I would like to explore with you is ‘What Nature Knows – Dan maid luondudiehtá’. How did this begin?
This is part of a larger, two-part multidisciplinary projects in a range of mediums: photography, film, sculpture, and performance. I wanted to speak about our fragile present, to transform ordinary landscapes into peaceful and enigmatic places, to capture a fleeting moment in our time. I was inspired by my belonging to Arctic Northern Norway, to the light, the darkness, the seasons, and my Sámi cultural heritage. Over four years I wandered the countryside from late summer until the snows came in October, seeking suitable places for my photographs. These images were created at the intersection between photography, environmental art, and sculpture with an emphasis on the surreal.
The installations were designed from plastic waste, using light, geometry, and colour to suggest human disturbances in the natural world. I used several techniques, building LED light installations in the landscape or submerged under water – at times using smoke cartridges and long shutter speeds.
Essentially, this work grew out of my experiences growing up in Kåfjord municipality in the sixties and seventies. It was a very different place then from what it is today.
How did those childhood experiences help shape this work?
This is an area where ‘three tribes meet’: Kvens, Sámi, and Norwegians. Despite the brutal erasures of Norwegianisation, here the old remained entangled with the new. It was fascinating to experience shamans using nature for healing, taking a spoonful of water from a stream to perform rituals that gave that splash of liquid the power to heal. The stream, which flows from a spring in the mountain, has accompanied me throughout my life, from the magical experiences of childhood, and into my artistic work as an adult in images such as ‘Genesis’.
What ideas are you exploring in this work?
Growing up, I came to understand that reality can be approached in several different ways. I want to highlight themes such as the holistic management of the environment, about understanding natural mechanisms, functions, vulnerabilities… and that we humans are an inseparable part of nature. The way we interact with nature shapes the legacy of future generations.
Everything we need comes from nature, be it food, clothing, shelter… not to forget clean air and water. Agriculture depends on the microbes in the soil and the pollinators in the air. We depend on a well-functioning management of the natural world and its resources. Sámi culture lays significant importance on the way we connect with nature and forms of life other than ourselves. And modern science has shown that our inherent love for nature is a result of our biological evolution, a survival mechanism that the American biologist Edward O. Wilson has termed biophilia.
Yet, today, the wear and tear on the earth’s natural resources is immense, and the global population is expected to top ten billion people in the 2060s. There are major environmental challenges that await the coming generations. The ancient animist religions recognise that everything is connected with everything else. The world is a whole, a unity of which we are just one small part.
Do you see your work as a counsel of hope or despair?
For me, it is important that my creative works have a meaning, a way to provoke debate. But I also want to provide something beautiful to the viewer, something uplifting in a world that can be challenging for all of us.
Sámi culture has been developed and refined through millennia of interaction between the lives of people and the forces of nature. The Sámi people and other indigenous peoples around the world have always lived in harmony with nature. They understand the sustainable harvesting of natural resources, how to live lightly on the land, a knowledge that stretches far back in time. It is a legacy that has been passed on through storytelling. Those stories remain very relevant today… existentially so.
My experiences growing up have been important in shaping my interpretation of reality, and conveying this through my photographs and films. Nature is the driving force in my imagery, which often features animals that act as the messengers between our world and that other shamanistic realm. Animals, rivers, and nature all come with a powerful message: you are not alone, something is there, a driving force which is bigger than all of us.
What has artmaking taught you?
Making art has taught me the importance of using one’s whole story. Having a triple minority background has not always made it an easy journey. But I have come to understand that one must embrace the darkness in order to understand the light.
I have learned that making mistakes is an essential part of the process of creating art. Making mistakes shows you the path to a better result.
Art is our fifth power. It has the potential to reshape the political landscape, to bring forth new ways of seeing the world and the environment. While I believe this can apply to all conflicts and challenges we face as a global community, art cannot do this alone… but everything starts somewhere in our lives.
Biographical Notes
Gjert Rognli was born in Manndalen, a village in the Kåfjord municipality of Northern Norway, in 1966. He holds a bachelor’s degree in multimedia systems from Noroff Instituttet, Kristiansand, Norway (2004). His work has featured in seventeen solo and forty-five group exhibitions across Norway, and in Brazil, Dubai, Egypt, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the USA. In France, his work was exhibited in the Louvre, Paris.
His photographs have won numerous accolades including first place at the Fine Art Photography Awards, UK (2021); gold awards at the Tokyo International Photo Awards (2021), MUSE Photography Awards (2024), and the European Photography Awards (2024). In 2025 he was named photo-book winner at Belfast Photo Festival, gold winner at the European Photography Awards, and Platinum winner at the Muse Photography Awards. His films have won over eighty awards worldwide and have been screened at more than fifty international festivals and events including COP27 climate conference in Egypt and COP28 in Dubai.
Gjert Rognli’s photographic works are held in a number of public and private collections including Preus Museum of Photography and the Sámi Parliament, both in Norway. His images feature in the books ‘Joiki den gamlesamiskereligionen’ [Joik and the old Sámi religions] published in 2006 by Forlaget Vett & Viten, and ‘Váritleatseammát’ [and the mountains are the same] published by ČálliidLágádus in 2013. He currently lives and works in Oslo.