ABSTRACT
The late Kallaleq and Danish photographer Pia Arke was a groundbreaking artist who, before her untimely death from breast cancer, assertively cast Kalaallit experience in Greenland onto a global stage, illuminating its entangled histories and dynamic artistic productions. Distinct features of Pia Arke’s practice comprise her key moments of auto-biographical activation: Arke came of age in the years prior to 1979 Home Rule in Greenland and developed her career, like others of her generation, in the explosive years which followed, thus negotiating two different political eras. This chapter examines the impact of local and international modernism on Pia Arke’s works and practice that enabled her more radical directions. It adopts the non-Eurocentric perspective that decolonization broadly refers to a “long aftermath of colonial readjustment,” a perspective that re-affirms Indigenous aesthetic space, time, and narrative under conditions of modernity.
