Decolonizing the Museum: Unhighlighting Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’s Iconic Laestadius Teaching Laplanders (1840)

Abstract

This essay presents a decolonial analysis of the French painter François-Auguste Biard’s <i>Le Pasteur Laestadius instruisant des Lapons</i> (1840). A highlight at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Northern Norway Art Museum) in Romsa/Tromsø, Biard’s work represents the pastor Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–1861) preaching to a group of Sámi people outside their <i>goahtis</i> in winter. Exhibited in 1841 at the Salon (1667–present) in Paris, the painting originates in sketches Biard did during his travels with the French expedition <i>La Recherche</i> to Scandinavia and Spitsbergen in 1839. Taking this centrepiece from Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum’s collections as a reference point, I discuss the original colonial context in which it was painted, with particular focus on Laestadius’s role in assisting the French explorers with the collecting of Sámi human remains in the name of science. I then make a leap in time to the museum’s acquisition of the work in 2002 and its subsequent display in Romsa. At that time, the painting represented the institution’s costliest acquisition, and substantial media coverage and fundraising were used to come up with the funding to secure it. Once in-house, <i>Laestadius Teaching Laplanders</i> was immediately presented in a “neutral” display as one of the museum’s most treasured works. My analysis applies decoloniality as a framework for acknowledging institutional blind spots, countering museum neutrality, and recognizing the interwoven complexities of Indigenous and settler coexistence. It aims to intervene in art museum practices to emphasize the ongoing need for healing from colonial trauma through reconciliation and reparation. By exposing the museum’s disregard for and implication in the colonial legacy of this work, I will insist on the ethical inability of neutrality in museum displays and the inherent need to “unhighlight” <i>Laestadius Teaching Laplanders</i> and other art with similar problematic histories and contexts.