læs bogen her - Den Frie

February 6 – 7, 2010:
INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR
A two-day seminar on Pia Arke’s innovative contributions to
artistic research, visual thinking, and postcolonial studies,
organized by the Danish curators’ collective Kuratorisk Aktion
(Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen) and the Pia
Arke Society in collaboration with the Royal Danish Academy
of Fine Arts’ Department of Art Theory And Communication
and University of Copenhagen’s Department of Arts And Cultural
Studies.
SYNOPSIS:
The seminar brought together nine leading artists, critics,
writers, and scholars from around the world to analyze and
contextualize the work of visual artist and thinker Pia Arke
(1958-2007). The seminar accompanies the exhibition TUPI-
LAKUSAURUS: PIA ARKE’S ISSUE WITH ART, ETNICITY AND
COLONIAL HISTORY, 1981 – 2006 at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary
Art.
Pia Arke is among the few postcolonial practitioners in the
Nordic region, and possibly the first and primary one. Although
the Scandinavian nations of Denmark, Norway, and
Sweden actively participated in the era of modern European
colonialism and continue to control a number of territories
in the North Atlantic, only a few artists in the region have
made the specificity of Nordic colonial dynamics and the
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AN ARCHIVE OF AFFECTED
ANTHROPOLOGY: LOCATING THE
ARKE-TYPICAL IN THE AESTHETIC
RESEARCH OF PIA ARKE, 1981-2006
postcolonial condition their field of artistic examination.
Certainly, no one has done so with the artistic vision and
intellectual attitude of Arke. From the early 1980s and until
her cancer prevented her from working in 2006, Arke developed
a multilayered and innovative form of artistic research
that would enable her to critically examine Denmark’s colonization
of Greenland that she, who was born to a Greenlandic
mother and a Danish father, was herself a product
of. As she framed it, her oeuvre represents “a delayed and
unfinished settlement of accounts with colonial history”, in
which she persistently intervened into Western constructions
of “Greenland” as Danish colony, as primitive art, and
as ethnic authenticity. Yet up until this point, neither the
art community nor academic circles, let alone the public at
large, have been ready to embrace Arke’s topic and methodology,
for which reason her work has not received the
analysis, recognition, and dissemination it truly calls for.
The explanation for this might be sought for in the belated
arrival of postcolonial studies and practices in the Scandinavian
countries. At a time when postcolonialism has been declared
dead or, at best, at a dead end by a growing number
of international scholars, a postcolonial turn in the arts and
humanities is only now being initiated in Scandinavia. Normally
associated both internally and externally with progressive
values and politics, it may come as a surprise that
Scandinavians have managed to repress or play down their
imperialist history to such a degree that the region’s colo-