On Pia Arke

Abstract

Pia Arke's work reminds Danes and Europeans of a history they never got to know, or were taught not to know, because it happened overseas.It began to be shown and discussed at the beginning of the 1990s, a period when notions of globalisation offered new models for understanding the dynamics of the world and exposed neglected historical and aesthetic issues.Among the most important of these issues were the colonial legacies of Western European states.In this context, Pia Arke's interrogations of the suppressed past of Denmark's relationship with Greenland began to resonate.The daughter of an Inuit seamstress and a Danish telegraphist, she was born in 1958 in Scoresbysund, or Ittoqqortoormiit, Denmark's outermost colonial settlement in northeast Greenland.She was from birth entangled in imperial processes that endowed her with split vision and multiple identities.These qualities animated her art already in the 1980s, when she studied atCopenhagen's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and until her untimely death at the age of 48, when she stood on the threshold of international recognition.Pia Arke's work displayed a mesmerising blend of approaches: painting, photography, montage, video, performance and installation art.Her violation of artistic genres was carefully premeditated.A taste for the absurdity of scientific collecting brought her to examine underground vaults -paleontological and ethnographic archives -stuffed with dusty specimens.She made a mockery of all attempts to represent and classify the natives and nature of the Arctic.Solidarity with the silenced victims of history prompted her to reinvent the art of photography, and to strenuously engage with oral history.She deconstructed ethnography, photography, travel writing, history, landscape painting and much more, and

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