Camera Obscura, Pia Arke (1990) (EMPIRE LINES x John Hansard Gallery, KW Institute for Contemporary Art)

Curators Ros Carter and Sofie Krogh Christensen chart Pia Arke’s photo-activism across the Arctic region, from a pinhole view to wider perspectives on Indigenous and Inuit experiences in the 20th century.

Though scarcely exhibited outside Scandinavia, Pia Arke (1958–2007) is widely acknowledged as one of the region’s most important artistic researchers, ‘photo-activists’, and postcolonial critics. Born in Scoresbysund, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) to a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, Arke asserted an identity that was defined as neither exclusively Danish or Greenlandic; a ‘third place’ that allowed for hybridity and resisted binary categories or polarisation. Through performance art, writing and photography, she examines the complex ethnic and cultural relationships between Denmark and Greenland, using long exposure to highlight continuities over time. Modern Danish colonial rule started in the 18th century, and Greenland wouldn’t became a fully autonomous state until the 1970s. Still dependent on grants, much of Greenland’s economic and foreign policy remains under Danish control.

In 1990, the artist developed her own hand-built, life-size camera obscura to photograph the landscapes of Greenland that she had known as a child. Reconstructed today at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, and KW Institute in Berlin, the curators share how Arke was drawn to the ‘in-between’ media of photography, like herself, a ‘mongrel’ which challenged artistic conventions. Arke’s self and group portraits, reappropriated photographs, and archive collages also mark stark interventions, reinserting Indigenous and Inuit people and women into Nordic narratives, challenging the artist’s exclusion from conceptual art circles, and stereotypes of ‘naive’ and folk painting.

Arke died before she could experience the growing interest in her work; its continued relevance to questions of representation, climate crises, and the impact of global economics on Indigenous communities throughout the arctic regions, is evident in the work of other artists on display, and contemporaries like Jessie Kleemann, Anna Birthe-Hove, and Julie Edel Hardenberg. We discuss Arke’s experience of art education in Copenhagen, and the ongoing efforts by the likes of the Nuuk Art Museum to find a language for Inuit art histories. Plus, we consider shared histories between Greenland, Denmark, and the UK - including the British explorer who gave his name to Scoresbysund.

Pia Arke: Silences and Stories runs at the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton until 11 May 2024. The partner exhibition, Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria, runs at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin from 6 July 2024.

A new publication on Pia Arke’s work, co-published by John Hansard Gallery and KW Institute, will be available in late April 2024. Symposiums will take place in both Southampton and Berlin too.

Recommended Exhibitions:

- Outi Pieski runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 6 May 2024. Read more in my article for Tate Research: tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/hyundai-tate-research-centre-transnational/we-are-eagles-outi-pieski-and-maree-clarke

- Michelle Williams Gamaker: The Silver Wave runs at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter until 27 October 2024.

- Shuvinai Ashoona: When I Draw runs at The Perimeter in London until 26 April 2024.

For more about Godland, Hlynur Pálmason (2023), read my article from the BFI London Film Festival (LFF) 2022.

On Sonia Ferlov Mancoba, hear Cobra Museum curators Winnie Sze and Pim Arts on We Kiss the Earth: Danish Modern Art, 1934-1948.

On long exposures, hear photographer Hélène Amouzou and curator Bindi Vora on Voyages (2023).

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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