2012
Exhibition shown at Kunstverein Jahnstraße, Braunschweig, Germany, upon invitation by Lucie Biloshitskyy and Lena Buhrmann
lightbox, text documents, drawings, photographs, medium format and video projection, wooden structure
'heim' interrogates the narrative positionings between the private and immediate versus the exterior influx of transnational interests on the westcoast of Greenland.
The video shows a short excerpt of the original film, depicting a 37 min survey on the everyday, covering the entire road-net of the town Upernavik between twilight and darkness. Projected onto a small maquet of the standardized Greenlandic/Danish housing type, the landscape appears as a miniature window, framed by a wooden construction blocking the exit ways.
Archival material describes the landscape from the perspective of Danish explorers. Their texts are shown alongside contemporary documents from a multinational engineering and planning consortium that describe the entire west coast of Greenland and assess the extent to which extraction and processing of oil and other raw materials would be possible. The landscape features are described in terms of their 'usability' where Upernavik appears in the category: considered suitable.
'heim' is a work bringing the views from inside and outside into a dialogue, all the while I am an artist visiting the country by flying in for prolonged visits from the outside, too,
This project has been made possible by a generous stay hosted at Museum Upernavik, by conversations with locals, by conversations with town planners in Ilulissat, by funding from The Danish Arts Council, and furthermore by patient assistance at the Arctic Archive in Copenhagen. Thank you.
