Mette Sandbye

2
Today many young artists combine straight photography and conceptual strategies, including
text, in a way that borrows from other disciplines such as anthropology. Social, political and
cultural criticism is again ‘hot’ among young artists as well as identifying with sexual, ethnic
or social minorities, and the critic willingly follows and expounds the ideas behind the work
as they are outlined by the artist. The idea of art as social critique is much too often taken for
granted by artists on the contemporary art scene and this critical self-understanding is not
questioned by the critic. I would say that quite a lot of work following this international
anthropological, sociological ‘art scene hype’ end up as exotic and aesthetic ethno-tourism
instead of a real cultural critique as it so desperately fights to be identified with.
The Arctic culture and experience has not really been a central issue within the contemporary
western art institution which is both sad and odd, since for example – and as I mentioned -
Greenland is a part of Denmark and Canada has a major Inuit population. If it has been dealt
with in art it has traditionally been in the form of an aesthetic worship of the exotic, the idea
of an Ultima Thule, the sublime wilderness on the borders of western civilization, only
sparsely populated with primitive, authentic people. The same image has been transmitted by
the history books, and from my childhood education I remember almost nothing about the
history and culture of Greenland, except from the images of a wasteland of ice and sealers
dressed in polar bear and seal skin. In the city squares of Copenhagen I could meet drunken
Greenlanders, but nothing in my cultural upbringing learned me to connect the two images.
Very few Danes have actually visited Greenland, both before and now. Our knowledge stems
from representation, and here photography has played an important role – but not much has
been written about the photographic representation of Greenland. In the History of Danish
Photography, which –as you all know – was published in 2004, Birna Kleivan wrote a
chapter on the photographic representation of Greenland, especially in the late 19.th and early
20 th Century, and the photographs I’ll show here comes from this chapter.
Photography at that time was understood within a largely unmediated, unquestioned realist
frame – these photographs were in general seen as neutral, unproblematic records of field
data – but it was through this photographic gaze that the Danes learned about Greenland. And
it was of course an instrumental gaze fused with and ideological and political discourse. The
images speak for themselves.