Torn between Greenland and Denmark regarding heritage, identity, and politics, Pia Arke developed a practice that anticipated the decolonial turn we witness today. She explored the layered tension between the personal and the political, unearthing and re-positioning archival material, photography, and stereotypes to address the imbalances within a colonial structure. Pia Arke's untimely death in 2007 at the age of 48 robbed us of an entirely unique artistic voice well ahead of her time.
For quite a long time, that voice remained limited to local histories and discourse, but fortunately, efforts have been made to make Arke's work more visible and accessible. In collaboration with the Pia Arke Estate, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art staged an extensive show devoted to Pia Arke as one of the first outside Nordic territory. Titled Pia Arke – Arctic Hysteria, the exhibition aims to review, analyze, and situate her work within an international discourse in light of the ongoing decolonial shifts.
Curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen, Pia Arke – Arctic Hysteria draws its title from the revolutionary artist’s eponymous work, which functions as her paradigmatic manifesto. Arctic Hysteria (1996), a video work in which Arke crawled naked across a Nuugaarsuuk landscape print, encapsulates the artist's self-described societal position as a "Danish-Greenlandic mongrel," insinuating a personal state of in-betweenness that determined Arke's entire practice.
In Arctic Hysteria IV, Arke juxtaposed seven archival photographs drawn from American explorer Robert E. Peary's 1898 book Northward Over the Great Ice. Taken by Peary and his expedition members, these images embody the Artic craze, the male gaze, and the Western perspective that objectified, fetishized, and romanticized the people depicted. Instead of portraying their story, these images perpetuated the narratives of distant people and culture "untouched by civilization"–narratives Arke sought to deconstruct and remodel.
However, Pia Arke not only assumed the role of the artist-ethnographer, but she seamlessly swirled between subject, object, and artist. In doing that, Arke targeted the instruments of the colonizing ethnographers, particularly photography, as a medium she sought to retake through her portraits, self-portraits, and iconic landscapes of the Arctic. On the other hand, Arke's practice centers around the body as a potent signifier for a nuanced structural feminist critique. The blurring of the lines is particularly evident in Three Graces (1993), echoing the famous Western art-historical motif and the stoic poses of polar explorers.
My images are about the silence that envelopes the ties between Greenland and Denmark. I was born into that silence myself.
Stemming from a need to discover and explain her own identity, Pia Arke's practice spanned photography, performance, text, collage, sculpture, and video to explore the possibility of a "third gaze." Born on September 1st, 1958, in Uunarteq, Cape Tobin, near modern-day Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, to an Inuk mother and a Danish father, Pia Arke was brought up in both worlds. Though introduced only to Danish education, she spent her childhood meandering between Greenland and Denmark. She studied painting and photography at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There, she earned an MFA degree in 1995 with her now seminal thesis Etnoæstetik (Ethno-Aesthetics / Etnoæstetik). The same year, Arke traveled to New York, where she had a defining experience for her practice. While looking into The Explorers Club's archive, Arke discovered a file titled Pibloctoq – Arctic Hysteria with an image of an Inuit woman captured by white male explorers. Upon her request to reproduce the photograph, the club denied it, reinforcing the narratives Arke discovered she needed to delve deeper into.
A split identity deeply embedded in her heritage not only prompted Arke to reexamine the personal but also to tackle a perspective of polarities. Instead of adopting an Indigenous perspective or a colonial gaze, she analyzed the two from a third position–a fusion of lived experiences, deconstructed stereotypes, and reappropriated identities. Elaborated in Arke's critical manifesto Etnoæstetik, such a postcolonial mindset of reverting the gaze and overtaking the narrative outlines the core of Arke's practice, which, regardless of media, aimed at exploring the tension between the two opposite perspectives.
Featuring over 100 of Pia Arke's works, the show Pia Arke – Arctic Hysteria is staged within a deconstructed architecture, emulating the principles of stripping the layers of coloniality inherent in her practice. The show primarily focuses on how Arke pivots around the (female) Inuit body as a performative instrument across various media, including montage, staging, and reenactment. The presence of the body also takes center stage in Arke's famous hand-built camera obscura fitted to her dimensions.
Physically entering the camera became a performative act–a process of entering the artwork in a sense and being part of it. For Arke, looking from within was intrinsic, both physically and symbolically. It equally, although differently, manifests when she assumes the role of an unruly colonial subject with a traditional Inuit boot on her head in Untitled (Put your kamik on your head so everyone can see where you come from) (1993) and in her iconic nude Self-portrait (1992) shot in the sublime backdrop of the Nuugaarsuuk Point outside Narsaq. This is one of the places that would emerge as an iconic backdrop for her numerous performances and montages, where she shipped her gigantic camera obscura. Arke intended to transport it to all her childhood homes in Greenland and Denmark, which reveals an entirely personal journey of exploration that resulted in wholly collective reexaminations.
The exhibition Pia Arke – Arctic Hysteria will be on view at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin until October 20th, 2024. The accompanying publication results from a joint effort by KW, the Pia Arke Estate, and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, which staged a show dedicated to Pia Arke earlier this year. Although the shows are separate, together, they represent the first solo surveys of Arke’s work beyond Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and the Nordic region. In tune with the discourse that has just caught up with Pia Arke's thoughts and practice, the publication features newly produced essays that situate her practice within an international framework.