The many ways we love

The Many Ways We Love draws on the essay of the same title by the late Iñupiaq artist Jenny Irene, in which Jenny – whose life and work is celebrated for their deep commitment to storytelling, Indigenous, Queer, and Two-Spirit communities – expresses a desire to see a future where all expressions of gender and sexuality are celebrated, and where everyone can freely express the many ways we love, anywhere in the North. We undertake this project with the support of Jenny’s partner, Nora, and her friends and family in Alaska.

The Many Ways We Love features Queer, Trans, Non-Binary, and/or Two-Spirit (or LGBTI) artists across all visual art disciplines, including images of performance art, by Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, Black people, People of Colour and other artists originally from or currently residing in the North. The artworks are prominently displayed outdoors in a banner installation encircling one of the main public venues. It is co-curated by the research team of Curating Change, a project that focuses on expanding decolonial and inter-cultural exhibition practices, in collaboration with the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices.

Artists:

Anna Linder is an artist with a main focus on moving images, installations & performances. Especially experimental & abstract art, processes, collectivity, periphery, interpersonal relations, family history & the work of the hand. Linder also works as a curator and cultural producer.

Arngasaq is a Black Inuk artist that specializes in multimedia arts, aiming to create for self expression– their pieces touch subjects in all forms; trauma, politics, and cultural storytelling. Their art pieces are made from self interests– with the main themes being supernatural, cultural and horror oriented.

Embla is a dancer and performer based in Iceland and her work is rooted in disability and Queer pride. With an academic background in sociology, she has researched disability in relation to sexuality, shame, pleasure, and affect. In her artistic practice, she brings these themes into performance through dance, movement, storytelling, and devised theatre, aiming to present unapologetic and sensual representations of disability and Queerness on stage.

Ethan/Kayaaní J Lauesen is a visual artist based in Fairbanks, Alaska. They earned their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 2019. Their body of work focuses on their Denaakk’e Koyukon Athabaskan and Lingít cultural backgrounds, their Queer identity, and how they are perceived in Alaskan communities. The prints, paintings, and drawings they produce are an intimate response to public perceptions of their Indigenous and Queer identities, encapsulating their personal narrative and experiences documenting cultural change.

Eva Svaneblom (she/her), born in 1987, is a Tornedalian dance artist, based in Tromsø, Norway since 2020. Her artistic practice revolves around the situated body—how the body is shaped through encounters with its physical and sociocultural environments. She often work by playing with and reshaping stereotypes, where her Tornedalian background meets her Queer identity. In these fields of tension, new attitudes and expressions emerge that inspire and drive my creative work forward. Aesthetics are a central part of her work, both in choreography and performance, as well as in visual elements such as costume and scenography. She frequently uses references from pop culture and seeks expressions that can speak to a wide audience. A common thread in her practice is collectivity and community—she explores how art can create shared spaces and foster understanding across different experiences. Eva’s work takes many forms: from performances in gallery spaces or outdoors, to short videos on social media, and full-length productions in black box theatres. She works both solo and collaboratively, often across disciplines. She usually has both solo and collaborative projects running simultaneously. Eva also explores drag as an art form through the non-binary drag king Ei Ei. Ei Ei is fabulously Queer and extra Tornedalian! Since 2021, curating performing arts is also an extended part of her practice.

Hans-Henrik (HH) Suersaq Poulsen is an actor, singer, seamster, and artist, who graduated from The National Theatre School. He sings contemporary music infused with traditional elements such as throat singing and drum dancing. HH carries into the 21st century the living spirit of Kalaallit Nunaat´s ancient traditions, weaving them seamlessly into contemporary expression. HH also designs and creates contemporary and traditional garments (look out for his Anoraqs!). He has deeply explored other Inuit languages—making him able to communicate in the Inugguit dialect (North Greenlandic), Iivit dialect (East Greenlandic), as well as Inuktitut (the Canadian Inuit dialect).

Fox Sandberg (they/them) is a nonbinary, autistic South Sámi artist, based in Lïkssjuo, Sweden. Fox’s family has roots in Vualtjere, Sápmi, and Scotland. They hold a BA in Sequential Arts from the University of Gävle, and have worked as an illustrator and author, focusing in particular on South Sámi and Queer narratives, alongside a life-long passion for animals, in a number of different mediums. In 2017, they published Elsas Väg mot Tråante, and illustrated the Sámi radio theatre Elsa i Saajvoe-kungens rike. Over the years, they have provided public art for Umeå University, Lycksele Zoo and Lycksele Municipality. As an autistic, Indigenous nonbinary artist, Fox has battled social anxiety, body dysphoria and depression all their life. This has had an impact on their ability to work, and produce art in a fast-paced, often hostile work environment. Nonetheless, art, human rights and animals remain a strong and unyielding passion, which can often be seen in their works. Having been diagnosed as autistic as an adult, Fox is currently learning how to accept their limitations and unlearn years of harmful masking practices to attempt to fit into societal norms, which led to chronic fatigue and burnout. Through their art, they wish to highlight decolonial practices and uplift Queer, neurodivergent and Indigenous voices on a local as well as global stage.

Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest Alaska, creates artwork that reflects Yup’ik identity in both traditional and modern forms. His work is influenced by his Yup’ik ancestors and Indigenous artists all over Turtle Island. As a self-taught artist, Oscar has produced a variety of garments, from footwear to headwear. Living in a Western society, he challenges perspectives of what a Yup’ik lifestyle looks like.

Oscar also emphasizes digital art, such as graphic design and digital photography. Through the lens of the Indigenous perspective, his main goal is to Indigenize Western spaces, creating a welcoming environment for current and future Native artists in conquering the ongoing Western assimilation.

Ida Isak Westerberg (b. 1986, Sunderbyn) has a degree in higher textile craft education at Friends of Handicraft and is living and working as a textile artist in Luleå and Övertorneå. Westerberg works with site-specific processes where creation takes shape, nuances and woven qualities through a dynamic harmony between materials and how they react in relation to specific environments. Through collaboration with nature, with the bog Sompasenvuorna in Tornedalen as a recurring co-creator, Westerberg’s sculptural weaves bear tactile traces of history, but also on questions of belonging, our changing desires and Queer identities.

Jia Illusia Juvani (b. 1988) is a non-binary body, trans and queer artivist originally from Ylitornio, Finland. As a child, their idol was Ursula from The Little Mermaid. At the core of their work you can find subjects like queer, feminism, death, lust, poetry, love, hate, stereotypes, worn out clichés and general silliness. Their main mediums are video, photography, sound, objects and text. They currently live and work in Hyvinkää, Finland.

Inuvialuk artist Kablusiak (they/she) lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta. They create works using a variety of materials, including soapstone, permanent marker, sheets, felt, fur, and words. Their work explores the connections and ruptures between existence within and outside Inuit Nunangat, the impacts of colonization on the expression of gender and sexuality, the desire to make people laugh, and everyday life. Their work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award (2020), the 2019 Sobey Art Award (semi-finalist) representing the Prairies and the North, the 2021 and 2023 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award (semi-finalist), the 2023 Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Arts Award, the Gattuso Award and the prestigious 2023 Sobey Art Award.

Jake Kimble is a multidisciplinary Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) artist and curator from Treaty 8 territory and belongs to the Deninu K’ue First Nation in the Northwest Territories. Kimble’s photographic practice revolves around acts of self-care, self-repair, and gender-based ideological refusal. Holding both a degree in Acting from Vancouver Film School as well as a BFA in Photography from Emily Carr University of Art + Design Kimble imbues his work with a sense of theatricality and levity, which are core principles in their practice. Through a clever subversion of the everyday aesthetics Kimble also plays with language and ambiguity – something that comes natural with them being a two-spirited artist. Using a funny bone as a tool, Kimble excavates themes of existentialism, narcissism, and the strange, offering an invitation to the audience to examine the absurdities that exist within the everyday so that they too may exhale, unclench, and even chuckle in the spaces where laughter is often lost.

Michael Richardt (DK/NE) is a performance artist specialising in time-based and long-durational performance. His practice includes video, film, photography, choreography, sculpture, writing, installation, painting, drawings, prints, artist books, collages and music. Richardt is a matriarchal thinker and creates work using a self-developed system anchored in spectral colours and the physical body. His performances have lasted from 13 consecutive days to a split second. In 2017, the documentary My Mother Is Pink focused on Richardt’s durational, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary artwork RULE PINK, and was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. In 2018, he worked for Marina Abramović performing Imponderabilia and Freeing the Voice at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and The Freeing Series at Norway’s Henie Onstad Art Centre. His work was recently exhibited at the Kunsthal Nikolaj in Denmark as well as the Reykjanes Art Museum, Gerðasafn Art Museum, the Nordic House in Iceland, and Nitja Center for Contemporary Art in Norway. In 2024 he performed the concert performance POPera, composed by Pussy Riot’s Diana Burkot, with his character and lyrics, at Reykjavík Arts Festival, with 7 brass and flute players, conductor and sign language interpreter. The show will be shown in an electronic version at Tjanarbío Theatre in Reykjavik in September 2026, and he’ll exhibit and perform at the group show Cancel Culture Club and Spa, at Södertälje Art Gallery in Sweden from October 2026.

Prim (Pasa Mangiok) is a fourth generation artist, originally from Ivujivik, Nunavut but now residing in Montreal for their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Their great-grandmother was a seamstress, their grandmother, Passa Mangiuk, was a lino printer, painter and graphic artist, while their father, Thomassie Mangiok, is a graphic designer and illustrator. Prim identifies as Two Spirited, and is part of the LGBTQ+ community. Prim is a mixed Inuit and Atikamekw artist, Prim mainly focuses on creating artwork to challenge what Inuit art is, and what it can be, and their mediums vary from beading, sewing, sculptures, and experimenting with materials, along with paintings and drawings. They are interested in combining both their Atikamekw and Inuit heritage in their artwork, and further plans to research deeper in Inuit shamanism and Indigenous spirituality.

Salomon H Simonsen is a Greenlandic Inuk writer based in Denmark. Their work explores displacement, trans identity, exile, belonging, and the ongoing impact of colonialism. Through poetry and prose, they reflect on what it means to long for home while feeling separated from it.

Sebastian Blind (1986) works with reweaving himself to his Sámi heritage and his relationship to the noaidi as a bearer of knowledge, with a deepened connection to the drum as a ritual and historical tool for healing, communication, and navigation between different world levels.

Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq is an awarded multimedia artist and Indigenous rights advocate from the Inuit community of Kalaallit Nunaat and has spent most of their life exploring their identity as a Queer Inuk in many different ways.

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.

Originally from Amiskwaciwâskahikan, Dr. Michelle McGeough is a Métis scholar and artist. Prior to accepting her current position as an Assistant Professor at Concordia University, she taught at the University of British Columbia. Dr. McGeough received her Ph.D. in Indigenous art histories from the University of New Mexico. Since her return to Canada, she has joined the board of Indigenous Curatorial Collective, an indigenous run and led non-for profit. Dr. McGeough serves on the board of the Tegan and Sara Foundation. An international organization that provides financial support through grants to organizations that fight for economic justice, health and representation for self-identified LGBTQ girls and women in both Canada and the USA. She is also a founding member of Shushkitew Collective, an organization of Métis artists and scholars who are working towards Métis equity in the arts.

Dr. Carla Taunton, a white-settler scholar, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (NSCAD) in Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia). Her research focuses on arts-led critiques of settler colonialism systems, institutions, and logics, and aims to contribute to scholarly and curatorial activations of white-settler intergenerational responsibility, inter-cultural collaboration, and decolonial + abolitionist methodologies. Her recent publications include her co-edited PUBLIC 64: Beyond Unsettling (2022) and the Routledge Companion to Indigenous Art Histories of the United States and Canada (2023). She is currently leading Curating Change, a SSHRC funded project that underscores curatorial practice as research and aims to mobilize inter-cultural decolonial and transformative curatorial methodologies. She works as an independent curator and has curated projects at local and national artist run centres, university and regional art galleries as well as public art festivals.

Photo Credits:

Jake Kimble (Chipewyan (Dënesųłıné) – Deninu K’ue First Nation), Calling My Spirits Back, 2023, Archival inkjet print, photography
Eva Svaneblom (Tornedalian), Queerilainen, 2024, dance/performance, photo: Courtney B Ropp, choreography/performer: Eva Svaneblom
Seqininnguaq/Siqiniq (Inuit, Kalaallit Nunaat), Stay Deadly, 2024, digital art