A River Runs Beneath: Indigenous AR Projects from the Circumpolar World to Umeje/Umeå

Local and visiting artists from Sapmi and Inuit Nunaat invite Summit attendees to seek out the QR codes for A River Runs Beneath throughout the city and be the first to experience these thoughtful, fun, and dynamic works in person before they are shared with the world. Visit camp or hit up a disco, dress up in Arctic fashion, and experience language and culture like you never have before.

To create these original works for the Summit, Indigenous artists from across the North and working in all media came together for artistic incubator residencies in Canada and Sweden in 2025 and 2026. Post your AR selfies with the hashtag #AAS_ARiver to be featured online.

Artists

Ida Boman (b. 1981, Umeå, Sweden) is an active artist in Västerbotten with both South Sámi roots and heritage from the Swedish southern regions of Småland and Blekinge. She has a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s degree of International Conflict and Crisis Management from Umeå University. She also has academic education in Creative Writing, Feminist Theory and History. In recent years, Boman had solo exhibitions at Konsthall Väst på fjället, Bjurholm 2024 and Galleri Alva, Umeå 2025, and she has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including at Bildmuseet, Umeå 2024, Västerbottens Museum, Umeå 2022 and Liljevalchs konsthall, Stockholm 2021. She has been awarded the Region Västerbotten scholarship for graduating students at Umeå University’s Academy of Fine Arts and the The Royal Academy of Fine Arts scholarships for art students and young artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Ida Boman has a curatorial practice where she has curated several exhibitions and she has worked as a guest teacher in sculpture and installation at ABF Umeå Art School since 2024. She currently holds a position as a temporary operations manager at the People’s Movements for Art Promotion, Konstfrämjandet Västerbotten in Umeå.

Monica L Edmonson belongs to the Lule Sámi area of Sábme/Sápmi. The issues she wants to explore in her art work, and the stories she would like to tell, indicate the use of materials and techniques. However, glass is the material she knows best and it is often used to express the coexisting notions of fragility and strength in her people, us humans and our land. Public artwork and collaborations with architects are just as important in her practice as hands-on glass work and extensive art projects. It is a story hidden in each vessel of glass, sculpture in stone, urban glass façade or installation. It can be a story to remind us of our own – as well as natures’ – fragility and strength, a story which explores questions of identity and migration or a story to connect personal or local history with contemporary art. After a visual arts degree from Canberra School of Art Australia (1999), she established a glass workshop and studio in Tärnaby north Sweden. Her work is part of national and international art collections, for example at the National Gallery of Australia and Nationalmuseet Stockholm, and have been exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada and Koganezaki Glass Museum Shizuoka Japan, amongst others.

Glenn Gear is an Indigiqueer filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist of Inuit and Newfoundland heritage living in Montréal. He is originally from Corner Brook Newfoundland and has family throughout Nunatsiavut. His research-creation practice is shaped by Inuit ways of learning and knowing – employing a hands-on and tactile approach through animation, video projection, collage, photography, painting, and work with traditional materials such as sealskin and beads. His work often employs a multi-layered approach, combining a materials-based practice with storytelling, archival moments, and embodied experience. Many of his installations create dynamic spaces of audio and visual connection to land, water, and animals; sites that reveal movement, patterns, and life cycles alongside everyday magic. He currently teaches at Queens University in the Film & Media Department and continues to facilitate low-budget, DIY animation workshops with Inuit and Indigenous youth across Canada and abroad. His films have screened throughout Canada and around the world.

Guná is of Dákha/Tlingit Khwáan ancestry from the Dahk’laweidi Clan. She honors her ancestral Tlingit art form while merging formline into a bold contemporary vision. Trained by masters such as William Wadsen and Mike Dangelo, and educated at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, she channels her culture into art that challenges and confronts, shaping her unique approach to visual storytelling. Her work, which has been recognized with awards like the William and Meredith Sanderson Prize for Emerging Canadian Artists, and longlisted for the Yukon Art Prize and national Sobey Award, has been exhibited in galleries across Canada. Guná has shared her knowledge through lectures and workshops at institutions such as Princeton, Emily Carr, and Stellenbosch, where she explores themes of cultural theft, decolonization, and healing. For Guná, art is activism – a call to respect, protect, and empower. She is committed to utilizing her art as a powerful voice for Tilingit sovereignty, thereby inviting audiences to honor Indigenous resilience.

Trine Samuelsen Hansen is a Norwegian and Sea Sámi architect, artist, and musician from Skiervá in Northern Troms on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between architecture, spatial installation, performance, and sound, exploring how Indigenous knowledge, place, and collective memory can shape contemporary artistic and architectural practice.Rooted in Sea Sámi cultural traditions, Hansen’s work investigates how space can function as a framework for listening, gathering, and dialogue. Central to her practice is the concept of árran—firepace—understood not only as a physical structure but as a social and spiritual centre for conversation, storytelling, and community. Through ritual-based and participatory approaches, she develops spatial situations that invite audiences to engage with questions of belonging and cultural continuity in Sápmi. Her diploma project Ságastallaárran – A Sea-Sámi Ritual-Based Architecture, developed at the Bergen School of Architecture in 2025, proposes a ceremonial architectural practice grounded in Indigenous methodologies. Presented as a full-scale installation and building manual, the project enables a conversational gathering space to be assembled in different locations, opening possibilities for dialogue across communities and contexts. Alongside her artistic research, Hansen has worked with the international art triennial Bergen Assembly in both 2022 and 2025, contributing as an exhibition technician, builder, and collaborator on large-scale installations. She has also participated as a singer and joiker in performance and radio works presented at institutions including Bergen Kunsthall. Through her practice, Hansen seeks to create spaces that nurture trust, reflection, and shared learning—where architecture becomes a living process of relationship-building between people, land, and history.

Tilde-Ristin Kuoljok (b. 1996) lives and works in Burgávrre, Jåhkåmåhkke, Sábme (Purkijaur, Jokkmokk, Sweden). She belongs to the reindeer herding community of Sirges and comes from a line of Sámi duodje practitioners. Kuoljok grew up learning traditional knowledge and handicraft practices within her family before pursuing formal studies. She is a Lule Sámi duodjár (traditional Sámi handicrafter), textile artist and trained conservator, educated at Sámij Åhpadusguovdásj in Jåhkåmåhkke and at the University of Gothenburg. Kuoljok’s practice is grounded in traditional Lule Sámi duodje, working primarily with textiles, fur and leather – most often sourced from the reindeer. Through her work she investigates materiality, form and process, extending ancestral knowledge systems into contemporary textile art. Her practice moves between tradition and experimentation, exploring duodje as both cultural continuity and contemporary artistic expression, and as a method for engaging with past, present and future. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at KIN Museum for Contemporary Art, Oulu Art Museum, Rovaniemi Art Museum and Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum, among others. In addition to her textile practice, Kuoljok has designed and produced stage costumes for Aira Dance Company. She has been awarded several grants and residencies, including the Region Västernorrland Sámi Artist Residency (2025) and Sápmi Art (2022).

Coco Apunnguaq Lynge is a multidisciplinary Kalalleq Inuk artist, working within graphic design, character concept art, fashion design, book illustration and art exhibition. Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, she is a graduate of The Animation Workshop in Denmark, and has also studied multimedia design and fashion design.Her illustrations are printed in several books published across Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, France, Canada and England. She has worked on several AAA games as a character artist and illustrated for board games. Coco’s work has also been published on stamps in Greenland. In 2024 she became an award winning illustrator, for her work on Mythical Monsters of Greenland: A Survival Guide.

Julia Rensberg is a vytnesjäjja and artist from the southern part of Sápmi, currently living outside Jokkmokk where she has her workshop. She primarily works with traditional duodji in wood and antler, while also creating larger-scale art works. Her life and practice are closely connected to reindeer and reindeer herding, which shape everyday life in Sápmi. The reindeer’s grazing lands are part of a larger living landscape where forests, waters, animals, and people are interconnected. These lands support rich biodiversity, and their protection is essential not only for Sámi culture and reindeer herding, but for the health of nature itself. Her work reflects on what it means to live in relationship with the land and asks how we can protect and care for it. Just as land cares for us. She works from the understanding that we are not separate from the natural world, but part of it — a worldview where body, mind, and spirit are inseparable from the land.

Taalrumiq is an Inuvialuk fashion designer, artist and content creator from Tuktuuyaqtyuuq, Inuvialuit Settlement Region. Raised on the shores of the arctic ocean with her Inuvialuit family and community, she was named at birth according to Inuvialuit custom, after her great-grandmother Taalrumiq. She graduated from the University of Alberta with a Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Education degrees, and is currently a 2nd year graduate student in the Master of Fine Art low residency program at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, where she is researching and creating a body of work based on ancestral Inuvialuit Fashion.

Notably her work appears in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, she was a featured Designer on 7TH GEN and Project Runway Canada 2025.

Curators

Dr. Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk-Newfoundlander and Nunatsiavut Beneficiary, is the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices at the University of Victoria, BC, where she is a Professor in the Visual Arts Department. Heather has been a curator since 2005 and has worked on more than thirty curatorial projects; she was recently the Curator of the 2025 Bonavista Biennale: String Games. Her curatorial work has been recognized by The Hnatyshyn Foundation with the Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2021). Igloliorte publishes frequently on Indigenous art and curatorial practice, especially regarding Circumpolar arts, including her co-edited volumes Arctic Prisms: Indigenous Arts of the Circumpolar World (2023) and Qummut qukiria!: Art, Culture, and Sovereignty across Inuit Nunaat and Sápmi: Mobilizing the Circumpolar North (2022). Igloliorte has served on many museum and gallery advisories, councils and juries. She is Past President of the board of the Inuit Art Foundation, and was the first Indigenous person in Canada to be awarded a Royal Canadian Academy of Arts Medal for her service to Indigenous art and artists, also in 2021. Heather participated in the Summits in 2017 and 2019, and was the Curator of Visual Arts and Summit Coordinating Producer for the Whitehorse AAS in 2022.

Maria Svonni, based in Giron, Sápmi, is the artistic director of the Luleå Biennial, the oldest art biennial in Scandinavia. She is the founder and artistic director of Verdde, a nomadic art institution working for the inclusion of Sámi perspectives in everyday life through contemporary Sámi art. Her work is organized around collaborations, utilizing site-specific methods and activities to promote dialogue and long term change. Svonni is active as a freelance curator and writer. She was part of the team that formulated the artistic program in the winning application for Giron to become European Capital of Culture in 2029 and will be involved to make the programme come to life with a focus on Indigenous Sámi values and public art. She led the establishment of KiN art museum, the first museum focused on contemporary art in Norrbotten County, and is currently involved in creating the first dedicated space for Sámi contemporary art in the Swedish parts of Sápmi.