TUPILAKOSAURUS – An incomplete(able) survey of Pia Arke’s artistic work and research

Annotation

The inclusion of this book in the bibliography is my loving tribute to two amazing women and curators: Frederikke Hansen and Tone Olaf Nielsen, long-time collaborators in the collective Kuratorisk Aktion. Among many other things, Nielsen is the founder and co-director of Trampoline House (the refugee community centre hosting CAMP), and Hansen is co-founder, co-director and curator of CAMP. The massive book TUPILAKOSAURUS is the result of a decade-long research project carried out by both of them, and it constitutes the first survey in print of the seminal work of the Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958–2007), who is also among the artists presented in Threshold(s). Arke’s work is a precious witness to Danish colonialism in Greenland and what that meant for Greenlanders. Her starting point was the silence surrounding Denmark’s colonial presence in her native land: at a young age, she decided to devote her professional life to breaking that silence. The reading of this massive survey takes time and commitment, but it gives back so much.

Beatrice Galluzzo

In my delayed and unfinished settlement of accounts with colonial history I include a lot of stories that family and friends opened up for me, a confused cluster of memories attached to and released by these photographs taken in Scoresbysund (her hometown) and spread for the north wind. I make the history of colonialism part of my history in the only way I know, namely by taking it personally.