BERLIN — I first encountered Pia Arke’s video “Arctic Hysteria” (1996) in 2021 on the thirty fourth São Paulo Biennial. In it, the Greenlandic-Danish artist crawls bare throughout a big black and white {photograph} of the Arctic panorama earlier than tearing it up. Her hypnotic work invitations comparisons with artists similar to Ana Mendieta; each used their our bodies in performances and movies to mirror on each their nations’ violent colonization and ladies’s our bodies as an oppressed different. Poised on the intersection of feminism, post-colonialist critique, and ecology, Arke’s artwork, spanning the Nineteen Eighties to the early aughts, is lesser recognized internationally, but it surely’s been acknowledged in Nordic artwork establishments since her dying in 2007.
Comprising over 100 works, Arctic Hysteria at KW Institute for Up to date Artwork is her first posthumous retrospective outdoors Denmark, organized by KW with John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, England. Curator Sofie Krogh Christensen frames Arke’s follow as addressing the distinction between Denmark’s colonialist narratives, characterizing the invaders as benign, and the lived expertise of colonization marked by invisibility and ethnic stereotypes. As Ros Carter writes within the catalog, when Arke first started to make artwork, “it’s questionable as as to whether Denmark even regarded itself as having been a coloniser in the identical sense as different nations. As an alternative, it was, and nonetheless is, a standard perception inside Denmark that its relationship with Greenland was primarily based on a softer, extra sympathetic and benevolent type of colonisation.”
Arke’s works pierce this fantasy. For example, her collages of outdated pictures within the collection Arctic Hysteria IV (1997) alternate pictures of unidentified and unclothed Greenlandic girls with these of named and absolutely clothed White explorers. A piece in one other collage collection, Legend I–V (1999), for which Arke layered photographic portraits over Western researchers’ maps of Greenland, incorporates an outdated image of Arke’s Inuit mom (her father was Danish) and one other younger girl smiling alongside a White man. It’s this sort of propaganda that, as artist Tiara Roxanne notes in her catalog essay, the Danish authorities used to justify the compelled urbanization of Inuit folks — in addition to the destruction of their livelihoods and traditions — as modernization.
The advanced function of science in legitimizing imperial conquest, as colonizers manipulated it to rationalize their means and ends, is a recurring motif in Arke’s work. It informs her numerous photographic collection picturing ethnographic books, juxtaposing the books’ musty, luxurious attract — the pictures convey their bodily heft and wonder — with the racist concepts that these usually scientific books include. The ensuing aesthetic and cognitive tensions are however one instance of what Roxanne calls Arke’s many “archival ruptures.” Equally, the whimsically titled “Could Solely Be Touched with Thumb and Little Finger” (1999) depicts a e book as a staggered tower of paper on the ground, rising perilously excessive.
Arke’s haunting collection Nature Morte alias Perlustrations I–X (1994) intercalates black and white photos of scholarly texts by Arctic explorers with portraits depicting topics similar to an prolonged forearm, a childhood toy canine, and a detailed good friend, the good friend additionally proven with Arke and her cousin within the photographic quadriptych “The Three Graces” (1993) and alone in “Perlustrations (Susan Mortensen in Clinic)” (1994). In Nature Morte, a closeup reveals the corrugated scarring from Mortensen’s mastectomy. “Perlustrations,” by which Mortensen poses in movement, with after which with out white gloves — which might allude to her surgical procedure — is especially eloquent. In these deeply private works, Arke stresses the gestural energy and vulnerability of precise girls’s our bodies, contrasting them with the discursive our bodies in her photos of books embodying scientific information.
The exhibition additionally sheds new mild on the video after which it’s titled by together with an archival supply: {a photograph} of a distraught Inuit girl, bare from the waist up, restrained by two White explorers. In 1995, the Explorers Membership in New York denied Arke the correct to breed the picture, citing its “delicate” (of their phrases) nature; a fax from the membership is displayed in a glass vitrine alongside a replica of the {photograph}. Arke’s daring interventions choose up on the early definition of the time period “hysteria” in psychoanalysis, courting again to Freud and Charcot, as a quintessentially feminine situation. The artist exposes it as a chauvinist, colonialist assemble by drawing viewers’ consideration away from medical terminology and again to the historic and geographic context that formed it.
Arke’s undertaking of archiving her Inuk lineage later in her profession was lower brief by her dying from most cancers at age 48. A few of the present’s last galleries are dedicated to quite a few pictures and tales that she collected whereas revisiting the world the place she was born and different Greenlandic Inuit areas. She printed these in her e book Tales from Scoresbysund (2003), a few of whose pages are exhibited as a single sprawl. Her spectacular quest to create an archive harks again to her earliest photographic collection. For Imaginary Homelands alias Ultima Thule alias Dundas ‘The Outdated Thule’ (1992/2003), she captures Greenlandic residence development with a pinhole digicam. She additionally made works with a digicam obscura that she constructed so she might match within it as if inside a home (a duplicate is on view). In “Self-Portrait” (1992), for instance, she poses bare towards Greenlandic landscapes. These late and early works, which collectively compose an archive that’s each intimate and communal, hint Arke’s want not merely to name forth reminiscences however slightly to reinscribe them with the fact of the physique towards its illustration by White colonizers. Whereas questioning the historic instruments of archiving, she additionally re-anchored it in precise bodily our bodies — beginning along with her personal.
Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria continues at KW Institute for Up to date Artwork (Auguststraße 69, Berlin, Germany) by October 20. The exhibition was curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen with curatorial help from Aykon Süslü.