Marvelous flowers of the arctic: resisting the taxonomic gaze in Hannimari Jokinen’s Mirabilis L.

This article examines Hannimari Jokinen’s installation Mirabilis L. as a critical intervention into the intertwined histories of colonial botany and Nordic racial science. We argue that the work made the mobility and circulation of colonial ideas spatially and affectively tangible by staging classification as a relational field shaped simultaneously by observation, resilience, and vulnerability. Through the reconstruction of a Wardian case—containing living coffee plants—and its juxtaposition with altered archival photographs from the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology, the installation revealed how Enlightenment taxonomies organised both vegetal and human life into extractable, mobile types. Tracing connections between Linnaean nomenclature, botanical gardens, anthropometric photography, and the infrastructures of colonialism in Sápmi and Finland, our analysis situates Mirabilis L. within emerging scholarship on transcultural Nordic Colonialism. The work foregrounded the tensions between the stabilising impulses of taxonomy and the unruly dynamics of living organisms, highlighting how classificatory regimes persist and fracture across time. By activating the viewers’ own positions within a historically-cultivated setting of scientific observation, Mirabilis L. unsettled inherited epistemologies and exposed the affective, ecological, and ethical stakes of classification. We show that Jokinen’s installation not only visualised the entanglements of colonial knowledge production but also opened a space for decolonial reflection, where opacity, fragility, and growth function as modes of resistance against a culturally-enduring taxonomic gaze.