Pia Arke used her dual ethnicity in Greenland and Denmark as a point of departure for powerful and poetic works, that delve into Danish colonial history and her personal journeys and kinships. Arke, who is steadily garnering posthumous, international recognition, is presented in the Louisiana on Paper series.
Pia Arke (1958-2007) died at an early age and did not experience the steadily increasing international interest in her art. Central to her mainly photographic oeuvre stands the artist’s dual ethnicity in Greenland and Denmark, and her work plays consciously and with great relevance on relations within the Danish Commonwealth.
ETHNOAESTETICS
Pia Arke’s art can be regarded as an expedition to the areas which in an extended sense constituted her identity, history and the mechanisms that form a human being’s sense of belonging. With her art and in writing she engaged in what she herself described as ‘ethnoaesthetics’, and in the Danish context her project represents an important and early example of post-colonial thinking.
A WORLD IN MOTION
With stagings, performances, genealogy and work with map material, Pia Arke's art inscribes itself not only in the artist’s own life, but in a whole world in motion.
It was this nomadic motion among places, lived life, dreams and scruples that she made, with an extraordinary sense of the poetic, the central aspect of her art, and which she wanted to hold up to the view.
A considerable number of the works in the exhibition take their point of departure in the Louisiana’s important collection of Arke’s works acquired over the past ten years.
