Worst-Case Scenario: Four Artists from Greenland
March 6–May 30, 2021
At Lunds konsthall we regularly focus on countries or regions we think deserve the attention of the interested public. This, we have found, also allows us to spark debate among those more specialized than ourselves. Yet it is always legitimate to ask: “Were the exhibiting artists selected because of their origins or because of their artistic relevance?” Our answer tends to be: “For both these reasons, at the very least.”
That, we feel, is certainly true of Worst-Case Scenario: Four Artists from Greenland. Almost 45 years ago, in the autumn of 1974, we hosted Greenlandic Art Today. Back then “glacial” was a synonym for “unchangeable, or changeable only at an extremely slow pace.” Today we have been disabused of this complacency, as we observe how fast the Arctic ice sheet is melting away.
On March 11, 2020, The Guardian carried this headline: “Losses of ice from Greenland and Antarctica are tracking the worst-case climate scenario, scientists warn.” We were already planning this exhibition and promptly appropriated the keyword for our title, to illustrate how topical Greenland has become through no fault of its own.
On July 19, 2019, Jessie Kleemann flew out (by helicopter, a regular mode of transport in Greenland) to the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier near Ilulissat in West Greenland, where meltwater is menacingly collecting, to carry out one of her theatricalized, trance-inducing performances. Barefoot in the snow, she was struggling to manage a large and unwieldy black “veil” or “sail” in the strong wind. The video documentation of Arkhticós Doloros conveys the terrifying sensation of being—and acting—at the ground zero of the climate crisis.
Yet this is not the only lens through which our exhibition title may be read and understood. When Sweden’s leading newspaper Dagens Nyheter introduced its readership to postcolonial theory back in 1995, in a series of nine articles authored and commissioned by critic and writer Stefan Jonsson, photographs by Pia Arke accompanied all the texts, one of which was Jonsson’s interview with her. This series also became an important point of reference for Arke’s own essay Ethno-Aesthetics, first published in 1995, where she states:
“The ethnic condition is in truth ironic: on the one hand, by our own example, we are a necessary, external contribution to the European self-view; on the other hand, owing to this very self-view, we do not quite match European superiority, and must generally remain a sadly outdistanced supplement, an unbearable reminder of the ethnic, the political, the economic—in short, everything ‘un-aesthetic’ about aesthetics.”
The “post” in postcolonial mustn’t be taken literally as temporal information. In most postcolonial societies the colonial condition continues to be a lived reality. The fact that Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate (especially among young indigenous men) cannot be properly analyzed in isolation from the continuing reality of being a Danish colony. This de facto status began with the protestant mission in West Greenland in the 1720s and ended (but only de jure) in 1953, after much of Denmark’s sovereignty over the world’s largest island had already de facto been transferred to the United States during the Second World War. Even after the introduction of home rule in 1979 and the expansion of self-governance 20 years later have, Denmark remains Greenland’s paymaster and international trustee, and the US retains its military base at Thule.
Of the four artists in our exhibition, Julie Edel Hardenberg is the only one permanently residing in Greenland. Her practice centers on the constant, continuous unmasking of its postcolonial realities as simultaneously tangible and intangible (the networks of influence and ownership overlapping with inherited colonial privilege), symbolic and literal (the meaning and use of identity markers such as the Greenlandic and Danish national flags).
The survival and revival of precolonial culture become all but indistinguishable in Elisabeth Heilmann Blind’s reinterpretation of uaajeerneq, the Inuit mask dance tradition. Like so much indigenous knowledge, it is self-evidently ancient without being archaeologically traceable to the period before the early second millennium CE, when the ancestors of today’s Greenlandic Inuits arrived from what is now Canada and Alaska. In Heilmann-Blind’s creative reworkings this immaterial heritage is enriched by influences from traditional and postwar Japanese dance and from contemporary “western” performance art.
This exhibition aims to be as hybrid and fluid as the four practices it tries to contain. The curatorial agenda is pared down to offer just the necessary scaffolding for presenting these four engaging artists to the interested public. The three co-curators—Åsa Nacking and Paula Luduşan Gibe of Lunds konsthall, Anders Kreuger of Kunsthalle Kohta in Helsinki—wish to thank all the participating artists and the estate of Pia Arke, represented by her son Søren Arke Petersen. We thank the institutional lenders of Arke’s work: the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, Brandts Art Museum in Odense, the Malmö Art Museum and the Nuuk Art Museum. We also thank Nordic Culture Point, headquartered in Helsinki, for its generous financial support.
