In 1910, a reindeer herder from the borderlands of northern Scandinavia sat down to write a book he hoped would reach the king of Sweden. Johan Turi — born in Guovdageainnu, in the Norwegian part of the vast territory known as Sápmi, and later driven by the hardening of national borders to settle near Kiruna in Sweden — wanted the monarch to understand what was being lost. Settlers were arriving, mining companies were blasting into the earth, and the railway was threading its iron way through land that the Sami had navigated for centuries. Turi believed that if the king simply knew, things would change.

Most likely, the king never opened the book. And yet Muitalus sámiid birra — An Account of the Sami — became a quiet triumph, the first work by a Sami author to document Sami life in his own language. For almost a hundred years, however, Turi's drawings, paintings, writings, and examples of Duodji — the intricate tradition of Sami handicraft — were kept from public view. That long silence has now been broken by an exhibition at the Kin Museum of Contemporary Art in Kiruna, the very region where Turi once herded reindeer and sharpened his pencil against injustice.

The show, titled On the Ugly and the Beautiful after Turi's own conviction that everything — pain as much as grace — deserves to be seen, places his work alongside that of contemporary artists Outi Pieski and Johanna Minde, weaving past testimony into living artistic dialogue. The timing is deliberate and weighted with significance. This week, Sweden's Truth Commission for the Sami People delivered its long-awaited report to the government, documenting the abuses the state committed against Europe's only recognised Indigenous people. Maria Lind, the museum's director, describes Turi's book as being "about Sami life, small and big — external and inner life," a phrase that captures both the intimacy of his detailed reindeer drawings and the sweeping political ambition behind every word he wrote.