Visual artist, writer, performer, photographer, born in Scoresbysund (now Ittoqqortoormiit; Greenland) in 1958 – died in 2007 in Copenhagen (Denmark).
Pia Arke was born on September 1st, 1958, in Scoresbysund (now Ittoqqortoormiit) in Greenland, to a Greenlandic seamstress mother and a Danish telegraphist father. Her family moved from Ittoqqortoormiit to Thule (now Qaanaaq) in the early 1960s. Due to her father’s professional duties, they relocated frequently during her childhood. Pia Arke was a young adult at the time of the Greenlandic home rule referendum in 1979, and, through her rhetoric and her work, she joined a generation of emerging artists who actively engaged with this period of political and cultural upheaval and challenged stereotypes about Inuit people and their artistic expression.
Pia Arke studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her master’s thesis, entitled “Etnoæstetik” (literally: “Ethno-aesthetics”), marked a significant turning point in her career. She coined the term “ethno-aesthetics” to denounce the ethnic stereotypes constraining Greenlandic visual arts, as well as their marginalization—or even erasure—from the canon and narratives of art history. This term thus constitutes the starting point for an aesthetic critique of prevailing norms that would compel Pia Arke, as an artist, to produce art perceived as authentically Inuit. This thesis, reprinted several times, remains a reference for the interpretation of Greenlandic visual art.
Early in her career, Pia Arke focused mainly on painting, before turning to photography in the late 1980s. She also redirected her attention toward Greenland, using methods akin to action research. In 1988, she created a pinhole camera large enough that she could fit inside. Since fixing an image using this process takes approximately 15 minutes, this camera allowed her to explore the effects of movement in her photographs. Pia Arke thus produced several series of Greenlandic landscapes, portraits, and self-portraits, playing with the layering of bodies and landscapes to create a visual body of work that critiques Greenland’s colonial history.
In 1995, while conducting research in the archives of the Explorers Club in New York, she consulted a collection of photographs having belonged to Robert E. Peary, the American explorer often regarded as the first person to reach the North Pole in 1909. She found in this archival fund a photograph depicting an Inuit woman, naked and screaming, held back by two white men. The woman was supposedly suffering from arctic hysteria, also known as pibloktoq. This presumed mental illness was conceptualized in the 1910s based on Robert E. Peary’s testimonies, and was then used to justify a range of acts of psychological and physical abuse committed against Inuit women. Pia Arke created several works based on this photograph, including Arctic Hysteria, a six-minute video performance shot in a single scene, which reappropriates and critiques Western depictions of Arctic hysteria. In this performance, Pia Arke crawls over a large photograph of the Greenlandic coast. She then begins tearing the photograph into pieces before leaving the camera’s frame. With this work, Pia Arke also contributed to the introduction of video performance into Greenlandic art, alongside internationally renowned artists such as Jessie Kleemann.
In 1997, Pia Arke returned for the first time to Ittoqqortoormiit, her birthplace; this visit inspired her project Scorebysundhistorier (literally: “Stories of Scoresbysund”), published in collaboration with Swedish writer and cultural studies theorist Stefan Jonsson. This project combines oral history and research on colonial history by contrasting western map-making of Greenland with the ways in which the Greenlanders inhabited and transformed their territory. The resulting publication alternates between critical analyses of Greenland’s cartography by Stefan Jonsson, Pia Arke’s personal stories about her family, and photographs and archival documents. The project and its publication allowed Pia Arke to reflect on the origins of Ittoqqortoormiit, a village created in 1924 by the Danish state to assert its sovereignty over the Arctic. Several Inuit families, including Pia Arke’s maternal grandparents, were relocated there from Ammassalik.
Pia Arke died prematurely from cancer in Copenhagen in May 2007, at the age of 48, just as her work was starting to gain international recognition. Two major posthumous exhibitions consecrated her legacy. In 2010, the exhibition TUPILAKOSAURUS / Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006, curated by the Kuratorisk Aktion collective, showcased over 70 of her works, including photographs, paintings, and videos. The exhibition was presented at the Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, at the Greenland National Museum & Archives (Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu) in Nuuk (Greenland), and at the Museum of the Image at Umeå University in Sweden. It was accompanied by a multilingual republication of her thesis and of the book Scorebysundhistorier. In 2021-2022, a retrospective of her work was held at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk (Denmark). Several of her works are now part of this museum’s permanent collection.
Through her work, Pia Arke profoundly influenced Greenlandic art by exploring the dynamics of colonization and intercultural relations. Jessie Kleemann attributes to her the creation of language to describe colonialism that influenced her own practice. As such, Pia Arke’s work remains an essential contribution to an aesthetic critique of the colonial history of Greenland and Denmark.