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Kuratorisk Aktion and the Pia Arke Society in collaboration with The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ Department of Art Theory and Communication & University of Copenhagen’s Department of Arts and Cultural Studies proudly welcome you to:
AN ARCHIVE OF AFFECTED ANTHROPOLOGY: LOCATING THE ARKE-TYPICAL IN THE AESTHETIC RESEARCH OF PIA ARKE, 1981-2006
- A two-day seminar on Pia Arke’s innovative contributions to artistic research, visual thinking, and postcolonial studies
February 6 – 7 2010
Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art
Oslo Plads
DK-2100 Copenhagen Ø
ADMISSION: Adults DKK 45, Students/Pensioners DKK 25
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SYNOPSIS
The seminar An Archive of Affected Anthropology: Locating the Arke-Typical in the Aesthetic Research of Pia Arke, 1981-2006 brings 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 TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006, the first comprehensive survey of Arke’s work curated by the Danish curators’ collective Kuratorisk Aktion (Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen) and currently on view in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art and in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen through February 14, 2010.
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 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 colonial legacy has remained structurally “invisible,” not just to the Nordic populations but to a quarter-century of global postcolonial studies as well. Both seem unable to imagine colonial dynamics crossing the colonial North-South divide and unfolding internally in the presumably wealthy North. In this historical context, Arke was a pioneer both in terms of her aesthetic and ethical-political concerns, which ironically might explain the failing recognition of her practice by her contemporaries.
While the exhibition seeks to remedy Arke’s marginalization by providing a comprehensive platform upon which the far-reaching scope of her artistic practice and methodologies can be assessed, the aim of the seminar is to identify the implications of her work in such areas as artistic research, visual thinking, and postcolonial studies and to further analyze why she remains a marginalized figure in these, both regionally and internationally.
Taking place in Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art amidst Arke’s work as a constant point of reference, the two-day seminar will chiefly address four areas to which Arke made significant contributions. The first area is the ethnographic archive along with its practices of collecting, classification, and photographical documentation, which was at once a source and a target for Arke’s practice. The second area is comprised by the fields of postcolonial art and thinking, to which Arke has contributed seminal accounts of Nordic and Danish colonialism. The third area covers new practices of artistic research, documentarism, and visual thinking to which Arke contributed the amalgamation of questions of anthropological, postcolonial and existential importance with new plastic registers. The last area has to do with marginalization and legacy and seeks to identify the Arke-Typical, i.e. Arke’s deliberately messy, mongrel-like methodology that allowed for different and seemingly incongruous observations to coexist.
Each of the four areas will be introduced by seminar moderators Marianne Ping Huang (Head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen) and Mette Jørgensen (Ph.D. in postcolonial literature, University of Aarhus) and are followed by a series of presentations and keynote lectures by regional and international experts, screenings of a number of Arke’s video works, and four short panel discussions. The seminar participants are: Erik Gant (Ph.D., freelance critic and Acting Executive Secretary for The Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat, Copenhagen), Maryam Jafri (artist based in Copenhagen and New York), Stefan Jonsson (writer and senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm), Carsten Juhl (historian and Head of the Department of Art Theory and Communication, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen), Jeuno JE Kim (artist based in Malmö and Seoul), Kuratorisk Aktion (independent curators’ collective formed in 2005 by Danish independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen, curators of TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006), Iben Mondrup (writer and artist based in Copenhagen and Nuuk), Irit Rogoff (theorist, curator, organizer, and Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College, London), Søren Rud (Ph.D. candidate, University of Copenhagen), and Mette Sandbye (art critic, Lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen).
With the analysis and contextualization of Arke’s practice, the seminar in a double-move hopes to discuss the recent criticism of postcolonial studies for their production of unconditional difference resulting in incommensurate singular subjects and to examine whether practices of artistic research and visual thinking such as Arke’s can point to a way out of the dead end and revitalize the field of postcolonial studies.
THE SEMINAR IS CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH. SEATING IS LIMITED, AND ADVANCE REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED NO LATER THAN FEBRUARY 5. FOR REGRISTRATION, PLEASE CONTACT KIT LEUNBACH AT E-MAIL
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ADMISSION: ADULTS DKK 45, STUDENT / PENSIONERS DKK 25.
The seminar is organized by Kuratorisk Aktion 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. It is realized with financial support from The Danish Council for Independent Research|Humanities.
PROGRAMME
DAY 1: SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2010
12:00 – 12:10 Introduction to the seminar
by moderators Marianne Ping Huang (Head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen) and Mette Jørgensen (Ph.D. in postcolonial literature, University of Aarhus)
12:10 – 12:20 Introduction to the exhibition TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006
by curators of the exhibition Kuratorisk Aktion (an independent curators’ collective formed in 2005 by Danish independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen)
12:20 – 12:30 Introduction to Area 1: Emotional Geographies: Exploding the Ethnographic Archive, Disrupting Ethnographic Representation
by moderators Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
12:30 – 13:00 “Pia Arke Developing the Postcolonial Body”
a presentation by Iben Mondrup (writer and artist based in Copenhagen and Nuuk).
The history of Greenland comprises an archive full of distortions, holes, and blind spots. It is primarily written by recently arrived Europeans – adventurers, traders, and missionaries – whose interest above all consisted in legitimizing the exploitation of new areas of land and who therefore more or less aware fiddled reality in order for it to describe a simple and clear picture. The work of Pia Arke can be seen as a pushing, pressuring and jostling with the archive. In her work, Arke gives history new dimensions and there, among all the intermediate results, she finds a space for herself as well.
13:00 – 13:10 Screening of Pia Arke’s video Tupilakosaurus. An interesting study about the triassic myth of Kap Stosch (1999)
13:10 – 13:40 “Between Script and Document: Excavating the Past to Narrate the Present”
an artist presentation by Maryam Jafri (artist based in Copenhagen and New York)
13:40 – 14:00 Area 1 panel discussion
moderated by Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
14:00 – 14:30 Coffee and snack break
14:30 – 14:40 Introduction to Area 2: Danish Colonialism – Greenlandic Postcolonialism: A History of Dominance and Resistance Explored by Means of Affected Anthropology
by moderators Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
14:40 – 15:10 “The Reintroduction of ‘Tradition’: Ethnology and Administration in Nineteenth Century Greenland”
a presentation by Søren Rud (Ph.D. candidate, University of Copenhagen)
"My presentation seeks to provide an historical frame for the postcolonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland that Pia Arke aimed to unsettle in her work. Specifically I will focus on the second half of the 19th century, where a new role was accorded to Greenlandic “tradition.” Ethnographic knowledge about the Greenlanders became integrated strategically as part of the colonial administrational strategy. I will give different examples of this strategy: the reintroduction of tradition."
15:10 – 15:40 “Arctic Diagnoses”
a paper from 2005 written by Erik Gant (Ph.D., freelance critic and Acting Executive Secretary for The Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat, Copenhagen) read aloud by Kuratorisk Aktion while Pia Arke’s video Arctic Hysteria (1996) is screened.
15:40 – 16:20 “Is The ‘Post-Colonial’ a Relative Concept?”
a keynote lecture by Irit Rogoff (theorist, curator, organizer, and Professor of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College, London)
"Given that I know very little about the northern European model of colonialism and its aftermaths, and equally little about the work of Pia Arke, I thought that the most useful contribution I could make, would be to ask some questions regarding the mobility of the concept itself. The genesis of post-colonial discourse from primarily British and French colonial histories and the articulation of subaltern responses, assumes a certain specificity that then organizes the struggles and discourses that emanate from it. But they are not the only defining models. The Ottoman model for example organizes colonial culture very differently and subsequently opened up other possibilities of inhabiting it. I would like to speculate on what a post-colonial discourse that does not rely on such hegemonic models might look like and to ask whether criticism or invention might be the more appropriate paths for its contemporary unfolding."
16:20 – 16:35 Coffee break
16:35 – 17:00 Area 2 panel discussion & Closing remarks
moderated by Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
DAY 2: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2010
12:00 – 12:10 Introduction to Area 3: Visual Thinking: New Strategies for Documentary Art and Aesthetic Research
by moderators Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
12:10 – 12:40 “Making Pictures Talk: The re-opening of ‘a dead city’ through vernacular photography as a catalyst for the performance of memories”
a presentation by Mette Sandbye (art critic, Lecturer at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen)
“Close the town with no future.” That was the headline of an article in a Greenlandic newspaper that Pia Arke read ten years ago. The town in question is Scoresbysund in Greenland – one of Denmark's most northern posts, populated by 600 people. Few Danes know about this town, and it has hitherto played no important role in the history of neither Denmark nor Greenland. It is a town with no collective memory, an almost invisible town. The paper analyzes how the project that Arke carried out in the following years – resulting in the book Stories from Scoresbysund (2003) – ‘re-opened’ the city as well as its collective memory and turned the town into a locus of active, recognized memory and emotions. The book is used as a case-story to reflect on the use of family and amateur photography in contemporary culture as well as in academia. The thesis will be that these vernacular forms can be used as a personal, creative and performative counterweight to the objectifying and stereotyping of identity that individuals experience in public life, and that the oral aspect of photography is crucial but has been hitherto neglected. Recently, fields of visual studies and visual anthropology have offered new ways to challenge the theory and the historiography of photography. The talk will focus on the use of amateur images as performative, emotional, oral interlocutors between people and between people, place, experience and historical knowledge. Photographs are not only determined by or mirroring social relations, they can themselves create social relations as well as history and ‘a sense of place.’
12:40 – 13:10 Screening of Gallery 11, a 1996 television feature on Pia Arke produced by DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation)
13:10 – 13:40 “A Woman's Place in the World Order: Pia Arke in the Context of Postcoloniality”
a presentation by Stefan Jonsson (writer and senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm)
"It’s more than obvious that Pia Arke’s work deals critically with the colonial ties between Denmark and Greenland. My piece will begin to show how her work also constitutes what I will call a “global narrative.” Looking at Marguerite Duras’s so-called ‘India Cycle’ and then at Pia’s work – Nature Morte, Arctic Hysteria, The Three Graces et al. – I will identify one essential trait in this global narrative (the woman as neither object nor subject, magically wandering or hovering at the edge of natural landscapes). I will then show how this puts Arke’s work in relation with other postcolonial artists and thinkers, while it also provides a new understanding of certain cultural political problems of our own time."
13:40 – 14:00 Area 3 panel discussion
moderated by Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
14:00 – 14:30 Coffee and snack break
14:30 – 14:40 Introduction to Area 4: Locating the Arke-Typical: Pia Arke’s Mongrelization Strategy between Marginalization and Legacy
by moderators Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
14:40 – 15:10 “The Neutrality of Positions and the Open Subjectivity: Pia Arke as a Creator of Conditions”
a presentation by Carsten Juhl (historian and Head of the Department of Art Theory and Communication, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen)
After the Mauerfall 1989 and 14 years after the postmodern turn 1979 it seemed possible to formulate a neutral position, not only between West and East, private and state capitalism, but also between the metropolis and the periphery, and especially between identity and mixtures. – Pia Arke discussing Mario Perniola’s “Art as a neutral mutant” from 1993: Nothing is lost, so there is no reason for melancholy.
15:10 – 15:20 Screening of Pia Arke & Anders Jørgensen’s video Countryside (2005)
15:20 – 16:00 “Nordic Reputation In The World: A Passepartout”
a keynote lecture by Jeuno JE Kim (artist based in Malmö and Seoul)
This lecture introduces the idea of self-branding and self-exotification to debates about identity politics and specifically formation of national identities. It investigates Nordic and Scandinavian representations of itself to the rest of the world, and what are prevailing ideas and discourses produced by others onto this region. Understanding brands to be more strategic and therefore having different currency in political debates to the rhetoric found in identity politics, the lecture examines how Scandinavia has branded itself since the Cold War, and how Scandinavian “specialness” and Nordic “exceptionalism” are challenged and altered since the post-Cold War period until now. A passepartout has two meanings, first as something that passes everywhere and second as a method of framing where a cutout cardboard is placed between the glass and the picture. Having two very different meanings of being a document that provides universal passage, as well as being a framing device, are two useful metaphors to understand current issues of national representation and misplaced cultural exotification. The lecture asks how narrated histories and handling of historical documents determine the nation and its representation, and how points of comical tension and chance are strategies within an artistic research that can address issues of pertinence in our societies.
16:00 – 16:15: Coffee break
16:15 – 16:35 Area 4 panel discussion
moderated by Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
16:35 – 17:00 Seminar conclusion
moderated by Marianne Ping Huang & Mette Jørgensen
BIOGRAPHIES
ERIK GANT was born 1960 in Ittoqqortoormiit (Scoresbysund), Greenland. He holds a Cand.phil in Film Studies from the University of Copenhagen and a Ph.D. from the Department of Aesthetic Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark, with the thesis Eskimotid [Eskimo Time] on representations of Eskimos in film. As a freelance critic, he has taught and written extensively mainly on Greenlandic issues and has on several occasions collaborated with Pia Arke on art projects. Gant is currently Acting Executive Secretary for The Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat in Copenhagen.
MARIANNE PING HUANG is Head of the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Since 2001 her research interests have concentrated on Avant-Garde Studies, specifically on aesthetic crossovers, media art and the reappearance of avant-garde strategies in contemporary art and culture. She is coordinator of the Danish Research Network of Avant-Garde Studies and the Nordic Research Network of Avant-Garde Studies, and she has been involved in establishing the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies.
MARYAM JAFRI (b. Karachi, Pakistan) is an artist working in video, photography and collage. Informed by a research based, interdisciplinary process, her artworks are often marked by a visual language poised between film and theater and a series of narrative experiments oscillating between script and document, fragment and whole. She holds a BA from Brown University, Rhode Island, and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.
STEFAN JONSSON is senior cultural critic at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s major newspaper, and Associate Professor of Aesthetics at Södertörn University in Stockholm. He has been fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (1998-2000). He has in several books introduced postcolonial theory to a Scandinavian readership and has collaborated with Pia Arke on several projects, most notably Stories from Scoresbysund. His most recent books are: A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions, 1789, 1889, 1989 (Columbia University Press, 2008) and Rapport från Sopornas Planet: Kritiska essäer (Norstedts, 2010).
CARSTEN JUHL holds an MA in History and Italian from the University of Copenhagen and has since 1996 been Head of the Department of Art Theory and Communication at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He has published a number of books on Italy, political economy, art theory, and aesthetics and has also translated a number of texts into Danish, by authors such as Agamben, Baudrillard, Kant, Lyotard, Perniola, and Serres. His most recent book is titled Globalæstetik. Verdensfølelsen og det kosmopolitiske perspektiv (Billedkunstskolernes Forlag, 2007).
METTE JØRGENSEN is a teacher and writer, born 1963 in Aarhus, Denmark. She has studied English literature and is a former scholar at the Department of Literature at the University of Aarhus, where she wrote her Ph.D. on postcolonial literature. She lives and works in Copenhagen.
JEUNO JE KIM works with video, performance, sound, and drawings. Born in South Korea, she has studied, taught, and exhibited in the UK, France, and the US. In 2003 she received her MFA from University of Illinois, Chicago, and in 2001, she received a Masters in Theology from Harvard University. Currently, she is based in Malmö – Seoul.
KURATORISK AKTION (KA) is an independent curators’ collective, formed in 2005 by Danish independent curators Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen. Collaborating with artists, theorists, and activists from all over the world, KA produces cross-disciplinary exhibitions, publications, and discussions that investigate the complex relations between historical colonialism, capitalist globalization, and neo-colonial forms of exploitation on the one hand and postcolonial forms of conviviality on the other. KA’s recent projects include: Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts (2006), The Road to Mental Decolonization (2008), and Metropolitan Repressions (2009). www.kuratorisk-aktion.org
IBEN MONDRUP is a writer and artist born 1969 in Copenhagen, but raised in Greenland. She wrote De usynlige grønlændere [The Invisible Greenlanders] (2003), a book about language, culture, and identity among mainly Danish speaking Greenlanders. In 2005, she wrote the introduction to the acclaimed photo art book The Quiet Diversity by the Greenlandic artist Julie Edel Hardenberg. Mondrup is the founder of the online archive www.ibenmondrup.dk featuring articles about postcolonial Greenland.
IRIT ROGOFF is a theorist, curator and organiser who writes at the intersections of the critical, the political and contemporary arts practices. Rogoff is Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College London University, a department she founded in 2002. Her work across a series of new “think tank” Ph.D. programs at Goldsmiths (Research Architecture, Curatorial/Knowledge) is focusing on the possibility of exchanging knowledges across professional practices, self generated forums, academic institutions and individual enthusiasms. Publications include: Museum Culture (1997), Terra Infirma – Geography's Visual Culture (2001), Unbounded – Limits Possibilities (2008) and forthcoming Looking Away – Participating Singularities, Ontological Communities (2010). Curatorial work includes: De-Regulation (2005-8), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y (2006) and Summit – Non Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture (2007).
SØREN RUD, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen, is currently writing a thesis on the development of modern governmental techniques across metropole and colony (Copenhagen and Greenland) in the late 19th century. His research investigates how governmental techniques used to influence the domestic urban poor were related to techniques developed by the colonial administration.
METTE SANDBYE (born 1964) is Associate Professor at The Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, where her main research area is contemporary photographic art, practices and theory. She is the editor of the first Danish history of photography, Dansk Fotografihistorie (2004), author of several books on photography and contemporary art, among others Kedelige Billeder (2007) and Mindesmærker (2001), and since 1995 art critic at Weekendavisen.
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