This article will explore the construction of Sami national heritage by analysing works from the touring exhibition Gierdu. The 27 artworks on display in Gierdu all belong to the RiddoDuottarMuseat's (RDM's) collections, comprising 1 200 artworks acquired since the early 1970s. 1 The collections, previously called The Sami Collections, are housed in Karasjok and was the first Sami cultural institution established in Norway. It opened in 1972 in a modernist building partly designed and decorated by the late Sami artist Iver Jåks (1932-2007). The establishment of one's own cultural institutions has been part of indigenous people's self-determination; to claim the position of subject has been a strategy to counteract the previous objectification in museums and art galleries. 2 In the Norwegian part of Sápmi, both political and cultural Sami institutions have evolved in response to the cultural revitalisation the last 40 years. 3 Initially, The Sami Collections was mainly a museum of Sami cultural history, but one that also collected art. A committee of Sami artists has selected the acquisitions, and artists from all over Sápmi are represented. The art collection, funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Cultural Affairs and the Sami Parliament, is one of many examples of the institutional affirmation that have taken place. In Sami, the title Gierdu means "connection" or "circle", which relates to the traditional Sami understanding of time as cyclic rather than linear. The subtitle of the project, "Movements in the Sami Art World", addresses the project's goal to show movements in Sami art, and the dynamics and diversity in contemporary Sami art practices. 4 RDM cooperated with SKINN (Se Kunst i Nord-Norge) to curate Gierdu, which opened in 2009. 5 The objects for exploring the construction of Sami cultural heritage will be works that were on display in Gierdu, not the entire collection. The exploration

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Hansen har ph.d i kunstvitenskap (UiT, 2010) med avhandlingen «Fluktlinjer: Forståelser av samisk samtidskunst» og er en pioner innen kunsthistorisk forskning på samisk kunst. Blant hennes siste publikasjoner er «The Sámi Art Museum -There is NO or is there?», Nordlit (2020) og «Pile o'Sápmi and the Connections Between Art and Politics», Synnit (2019).

This article aims to answer two questions. The first is: What is a Sámi art museum? The second question considers whether there is no Sámi art museum, as assumed by the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum (NNKM) as the title of a museum performance and exhibition in 2017. To answer the first question, it is necessary to tell the long story of the Sámi cultural-historical museum in Karasjok, Samiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD). This museum was inaugurated in 1972 as an act of resistance against the increasing assimilation politics towards the Sámi population in the post-war period. The building that was erected became a cultural and political centre, and a living cultural institution that housed the increasing Sámi ethno-political movement and its energy. Furthermore, as I will argue, the activity that took place at the site became a part of Sámi cultural heritage. The museum has also collected art since 1972 – a collection that today comprises 1400 artworks. Since the 1980s, various plans have been made for a Sámi art museum in a separate building, somehow connected to SVD, however, none of these plans have yet been realised. The article discusses the different reasons for this, and points to the connotations embedded in the SVD building as a cultural and political centre as one of the contributing factors. To answer the question of whether there is no Sámi art museum, a critical reading of the Nordnorsk kunstmuseum’s 2017 museum performance There Is No is necessary. My answer to the question is that NNKM, unfortunately, fell into several traps in their attempt to focus on the fact that there is no physical building. One such trap, that is very common in Western museums displaying indigenous art, is their use of traditional art-historical models as interpretive lenses when displaying indigenous art. A different concept of what an art museum could be today, as a place where things happen, where we could meet counter narratives, or Sámi art and culture could be presented as being part of the present as well as the past and future, would have been closer to a Sámi art museum. I offer this conclusion both through the deeper understanding of Sámi cultural and ethno-political movements as offered in the story of SVD, and through my reading of the theories of the indigenous American scholar John Paul Rangel. While there may indeed be no physical building claiming to be a Sámi art museum, it does in fact exist through the Sámi concept of árbevierru.

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