Pia Arke: Arctic Hysteria

From the late 1980s until the beginning of the 2000s, Pia Arke mapped the intricate relations between time, memory, space, identity, and myth in pictures of and from Greenland.

– Pia Arke, Selvportræt (Selbstportrait), Fotografie, 1992; Courtesy Pia Arke Estate. Privatsammlung, Langzeitleihgabe im Lousiana Museum of Modern Art

KW, in collaboration with John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (UK), presents the first solo exhibition of works by artist Pia Arke (b. 1958, GL – d. 2007, DK) to be shown outside of Kalaallit Nunaat, also known as Greenland, and the Nordic countries.

Pia Arke at KW Institute for Contemporary Art

From the late 1980s until the beginning of the 2000s, Pia Arke mapped the intricate relations between time, memory, space, identity, and myth in pictures of and from Greenland. Born to a Greenlandic Inuk mother and a Danish father, she wove biographical components of her own complex history into her work. Rendered in Arke’s own words, her images are about the silence that envelopes the ties between Greenland and Denmark, and how she herself was born into that silence. Arke consciously slips between the roles of artist, ethnographer, and explorer, while drawing on different historical, vernacular and archival sources. She is considered a pioneering voice in the decolonial discourses in the Nordic and Arctic regions and continues to influence them today.

Arctic Hysteria takes its title from an influential work series by Pia Arke and brings together her photographic, sculptural, performative and written work, as well as her work on paper. It aims to shed light on the narratives enclosing the colonial relations between Greenland and Denmark, as seen through Arke’s works, and to open it up to a discussion of continuing colonial structures at large. While Arke’s practice is born from the bind between the two countries, it unfolds as a struc-tural feminist critique. Arctic Hysteria revolves around her methods as projected through the body, in particular Arke’s use of performative strategies—montage, staging, re-enactment—with which she attempted to create a sense of belonging and critical self-reflection.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive publication with newly commissioned texts by contemporary feminist scholars, to discuss different aspects of Arke’s practice within an international discourse, with an emphasis on voices of contemporary feminist researchers.

Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

Academic Trainee and Curatorial Assistant: Aykon Süslü

The exhibition at KW is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation.

Runtime: Sat, 06/07/2024 to Sun, 20/10/2024

Takes place here:

• KW - Institute for Contemporary Art