Matti Aikio is a 2022-2023 Sámi Fellow, a joint initiative between Frame Contemporary Art Finland, the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

Aikio is interested in untangling situations of conflict between Indigenous communities and processes of settler colonialism, and specifically the clash that results from contact, and the efforts  Aikio has previously investigated conflict situations between Sámi reindeer herders and the industrial development projects in their lands. For his fellowship project, Aikio will be conducting research on the legacies of settler colonialism and counter-movements to Indigenous organizing in the United States, and will create spaces through video and programming, to allow for intersections to emerge between histories of Indigenous resistance in the United States and the Nordic countries.

Matti Aikio is a Sámi visual artist from Finnish side of the Sápmi. He has a background in Sámi reindeer herding culture. He holds an MA in contemporary art from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Aikio’s art has been exhibited in various countries in Europe, Asia & Latin America. He works with mixed media, photography, sound, installations, video, sculpture and text. His main interest as an artist is to try to offer the spectators a possibility to shift perspective on established dominant narratives and marginalized topics. Lately he’s been focused on topics like the concept, the idea and the image of nature and how the indigenous cultures seem to get suffocated by the schizophrenic nature relationship of the nation states and capitalism. Aikio is one of TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Fellows 2022 and also performs as a DJ.