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/ January 8th – February 14th, 2010
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With the premature death of Greenlandic‐Danish artist Pia Arke (1958‐2007), the Nordic region lost one of its few, perhaps primary, postcolonial practitioners. For more than two decades, Arke developed an innovative form of artistic research, with which she examined the Danish‐Greenlandic colonial history that she as the daughter of a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father herself was a product of. The Nordic region did not seem ready to confront this history in Arke’s lifetime, for which reason her work did not receive the broad recognition and dissemination it deserves. With the exhibition TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981‐2006, the Danish curators’ collective Kuratorisk Aktion seeks to remedy this.
SCRUTINIZING THOSE WHO SCRUTINIZE GREENLAND
Arke engaged the Danish‐Greenlandic colonial history in a number of ways. In some works she examined Western conceptions of Greenland, thereby scrutinizing those who scrutinize Greenland. In other works she returned to the places in Greenland, where she as a child had lived, and recovered some of the many stories and destinies that have been left out of official history books. And in others still she settled accounts with European preconceptions of so‐called primitive art and Eskimoic originality. While public archives and private keepsakes formed the primary sources of Arke’s research, photography and text made up her main media due to the central role played by both in colonial processes. Mocking the movements of the explorer, the anthropologist, and the cartographer she followed unacknowledged traces and forgotten poles of belonging. In retrospect, Arke’s artistic production unfolds as a persistent examination of the driving forces behind Denmark’s colonization of Greenland and its contemporary repression and repercussions in both countries.
AN ALTERNATIVE RETROSPECTIVE IN TWO VENUES
The first comprehensive survey of Arke’s work, TUPILAKOSAURUS features more than 70 photographs,
paintings, videos, installations, and social projects alongside material from Arke’s extensive archive. In line with her showdowns with art, ethnicity, and colonialism, the works are presented in the institutions of the two disciplines she examined: hence, the greater part of her works are displayed in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, while a smaller selection of works are curated into the permanent collections of Inuit and Greenlandic cultural artifacts in the National Museum of Denmark. Following its debut in Copenhagen, the exhibition will travel to Katuaq and Greenland’s National Museum & Archives in Nuuk (March 5 – April 4, 2010) and to BildMuseet in Umeå, Sweden (June 6 – September 26, 2010).
NINE THEME SECTIONS
Arke’s works are curated into nine theme sections with headings derived from her own production, such as Arctic Hysteria, Ethno‐Aesthetics, and Fishing out skulls and bones. With the sections, Kuratorisk Aktion hopes to disseminate Arke’s work in a manner that simultaneously circumscribes her artistic project and keeps her methodology and field of investigation open for others to pick up the threads. One of the theme sections consists of the film program The Eccentric Eskimo curated by the Society for Ethnographic Film Blunders, a society Arke co‐founded in 2000 with Erik Gant and Anders Jørgensen.
PIA ARKE'S BOOKS REPUBLISHED IN TRILINGUAL EDITIONS
As an essential part of the exhibition, both Arke’s Danish‐language books, Ethno‐Aesthetics (1995) and Stories from Scoresbysund (2003), are being republished in new trilingual editions (English, Greenlandic and Danish), whereby they have become accessible once more for a Danish readership and for the first time for a
Greenlandic and international public.
DOWNLOAD THE CATALOGUE |
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