Marja Helander’s shortfilm Áfruvvá – Mermaid (2022) will premier at ÁRRAN 360° in Venice Biennale. ÁRRAN 360° premiers as part of The Sámi Pavilion in Venice Biennale on Friday August 26 2022.

ÁRRAN 360° is a new initiative realised by International Sámi Film Institute (ISFI) in collaboration with Norwegian Film Institute (NFI) and Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). The project will feature 360-degree screen-based works from six leading Sámi artists from across Sápmi, the Sámi homeland.

The áfruvvá is a Sámi seabeing, the ghost of a drowned person. Yearning for warmth, she emerges from the sea to a world devoid of humans and experiences humanity through an abandoned museum.

Marja Helander (b.1965) is a Finnish photographic and video artist. She graduated from the University of Art and Design in Helsinki in 1999. Her earlier work explored her own identity between the Finnish and the Sámi culture. Helander’s recent photographic work has focused on Northern landscape. The accent of the work is on the postcolonial topics in the Sámi area, focusing particularly on the global mining industry. The encounter between nature and mankind is not harmonious, but destructive. On the other hand, her video works are playful, exploring the contradiction between the traditional Sámi way of life and the modern society. Her recent short film Birds in the Earth won the Risto Jarva Prize and the main prize of the National Competition at Tampere Film Festival 2018. Marja Helander has participated in solo and group exhibitions and her works have been acquired for various public collections in Finland and abroad.

ÁRRAN 360°, The Sámi Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2022, August 26 – September 13 2022, Italy.

More information: ÁRRAN 360°.