
<p><strong>Ann Mirjam Vaikla</strong> is a curator and scenographer based in Tallinn. Since 2023, she has served as the curator of contemporary art at Kumu Art Museum. In her curatorial and artistic practice, she focuses on the intertwinement of climate justice, more-than-human worlds, and processes of decolonisation.</p>


Ann Mirjam Vaikla


<p><strong>Hanna Laura Kaljo</strong> is a curator and writer currently based in the Stockholm archipelago. Her research-led work is concerned with the arts through the notions of embodiment, movement, and belonging, particularly in the context of environmental change.</p>


Hanna Laura Kaljo


<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-233x300.jpg 233w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-796x1024.jpg 796w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-612x788.jpg 612w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-787x1013.jpg 787w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-874x1125.jpg 874w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-1049x1350.jpg 1049w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy-1399x1800.jpg 1399w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2560-copy.jpg 1481w" data-sizes="auto" width="1481" height="1906" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Installation view of Pia Arke&#8217;s <em>The Three Graces</em> (1993) at exhibition <em>Arctic Hysteria</em> at KW Institute of Contemporary Art. Photo: Keiu Krikmann</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>Pia Arke (1958–2007) was a Kalaaleq<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="1" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-1">1</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-1" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="1">Greenland Inuit</span>-Danish visual artist, writer and photographer. She is considered one of the first artists to unveil the long-ignored colonial history of the Nordic region. Her artistic work, from archival ethnographic material to self-portraits, is gaining attention due to its ability to address the enduring effects of colonialism. Curators Hanna Laura Kaljo and Ann Mirjam Vaikla introduce their perspectives on Pia Arke’s artistic practice, in connection with their upcoming co-curated exhibition <em>They Began to Talk</em> at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.</p>



<div class="q-and-a" class="wp-block-www-blocks-q-and-a-block"><div class="question"><p>Hanna Laura Kaljo:</p></div><div class="answer"><p>Born to an Inuit seamstress and a Danish father, Pia Arke emigrated to Denmark at the age of 13 and never learned to speak Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic), her mother’s first language. She returned to Greenland as an adult to photograph her childhood landscapes, which referred to her origin but with which she lacked a living relationship.</p></div></div>



<p>Her work speaks of the condition of displacement, of being torn out of context, and the loss it evokes. At times, this is a loss of a land-based identity, which would hold a sense of continuity between one’s past, present and future. When one moves, or is removed, memory remains the territory of one’s belonging. But how does one remember when what has been passed on is silence?&nbsp;</p>



<p>As a representative of a generation born into the echo of displacement, Arke directed her fractured gaze, often with the help of the camera, towards the repression of her foremothers. She allowed the silence, which lingers over the shared colonial history of Greenland and Denmark,<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="2" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-2">2</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-2" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="2">Denmark began colonising Greenland in 1721 through missionary work – subordinating the latter under the Danish colonial empire for the following two centuries.</span> to speak through her own body.</p>



<div class="q-and-a" class="wp-block-www-blocks-q-and-a-block"><div class="question"><p>Ann Mirjam Vaikla:&nbsp;</p></div><div class="answer"><p>I remember encountering Pia Arke’s work first in 2019 at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (<em>The Seventh Continent</em>, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud). Five large-scale collages <em>Legend I-V </em>(1999), were made of geological maps of Arke’s birthplace Ittoqqortoormiit (Scoresbysund) in Greenland, family photographs including images of Arke’s mother, and traces of colonial goods such as flour, coffee, sugar, oats and rice. Masterly compositions intertwining the scientific and personal narratives underline Arke’s artistic principle: “I make the history of colonialism part of my own history in the only way I know, namely by taking it personally.”</p></div></div>



<p>Soon after, this first encounter with Pia Arke’s oeuvre paved the way to exhibit her work in Estonia. The video <em>Arctic Hysteria</em> (1996), loaned from the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, became part of a group exhibition “Point of No Return. Attunement of Attention” (2021) at NART–Narva Art Residency. In the video, Arke crawls naked over an image depicting her childhood landscape, until finally ripping it apart. This feminist gesture draws the viewer&#8217;s attention to how Western explorers pathologised Inuit women, and ignored their resistance to being photographed and classified by the colonising power.</p>



<p>Part of an exhibition concerned with environmental change, Pia Arke allowed co-curator Saskia Lillepuu and I to address the local context of Ida-Viru County, located in eastern Estonia, through a colonial lens. Ida-Viru County contains large deposits of oil shale, used for the production of shale oil to generate electricity. Industrialisation of the region and mass migration during the Soviet era resulted in Russians largely replacing the indigenous Estonian population. Nowadays, declining industry has caused the highest rate of unemployment in the country. So, Tanel Rander, one of the invited writers for the exhibition catalogue, refers to it as a sacrificial area: “Social welfare states maintain sacrificial areas that are generally far away, in a former colony or in some periphery. A hole has to be created for a castle to rise. Estonia’s main sacrifice area is Ida-Viru County.”<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="3" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-3">3</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-3" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="3">Rander, T. 2021. The Itch. <em>Point of No Return. Attunement of Attention</em>. Exhibition catalogue. Tallinn and Narva: NART–Narva Art Residency, 23.</span></p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3-300x205.jpg 300w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3-1024x699.jpg 1024w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3-1154x788.jpg 1154w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_2563-copy3.jpg 1167w" data-sizes="auto" width="1167" height="797" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Installation view of Pia Arke’s Arctic Hysteria (1996) at exhibition <em>Dream and Repression</em> at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg. Photo: Ann Mirjam Vaikla</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-q-and-a-block q-and-a"><div class="question"><p>HLK:</p></div><div class="answer"><p>In early 2024, our attention was drawn to Arke’s piece <em>Self-Portrait</em> (1992): a black and white photograph depicting the landscape of southern Greenland, near the town of Narsaq, onto which the artist had placed her naked body, her back to the viewer. This image became a guide through the exhibition Ann Mirjam and I wanted to make. I saw in it a body caught between two currents, two worldviews – an Inuk lineage and a Danish lineage – and an artist working to bridge the silence that lingers in the aftermath of displacement.</p></div></div>



<p>Arke shows us that memory does not reside in the mind alone. As the social anthropologist Timothy Ingold writes: “to follow a path is to remember the way.”<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="4" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-4">4</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-4" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="4">Ingold, T. 2000. <em>The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill</em>. London and New York: Routledge, 147.</span> Meaning, memory is an embodied activity that takes place in the world. This is evident in Arke’s return to photograph her childhood landscapes in Greenland: it is through the body that we re-member and create. But the body, as a lived reality, extends beyond the skin, into the environment in which we dwell.</p>



<div class="q-and-a" class="wp-block-www-blocks-q-and-a-block"><div class="question"><p>AMV:</p></div><div class="answer"></div></div>



<p>We ended up choosing Arke’s photographic series <em>Nature Morte alias Perlustrations I–X</em> (1994). Ten silver gelatine photographs depict haunting still lives: the artist’s hand at the beginning and end of the series, a toy dog, leather-bound science books, a portrait with closed eyes – but most strikingly Arke’s friend’s scarred body from a mastectomy. Curator Anders Kold writes: “With cartographic sobriety, Arke records the scar from the removal of her childhood friend Susanne Mortensen’s left breast. The likeness to the modified map, to which sugar adds a relief-like effect, is uncanny”,<sup class="modern-footnotes-footnote " data-mfn="5" data-mfn-post-scope="00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470"><a href="javascript:void(0)"  role="button" aria-pressed="false" aria-describedby="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-5">5</a></sup><span id="mfn-content-00000000000003a20000000000000000_3470-5" role="tooltip" class="modern-footnotes-footnote__note" tabindex="0" data-mfn="5">Kold, A. 2021. A Body and Map: A Leitmotif for Pia Arke. <em>Pia Arke. </em>Exhibition catalogue. Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 84.</span>– referring to a connection with the series <em>Legend I-V </em>described earlier, wherein fragments of the Greenland landscape have also been noted to resemble the bronchial tubes of the lungs.</p>



<div class="wp-block-www-blocks-image-block alignleft"><figure class="is-zoomable"><img data-src="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-scaled.jpg" data-srcset="https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-150x150.jpg 150w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-206x300.jpg 206w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-702x1024.jpg 702w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-540x788.jpg 540w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-694x1013.jpg 694w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-771x1125.jpg 771w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-925x1350.jpg 925w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-1233x1800.jpg 1233w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-1349x1969.jpg 1349w, https://admin.ashadecolder.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/IMG_6702-copy4-scaled.jpg 1754w" data-sizes="auto" width="1754" height="2560" alt="" class="lazyload"/><figcaption>Installation view of Pia Arke’s Arctic Hysteria (1996) at exhibition <em>Point of No Return</em> at Narva Art Residency. Photo: Hedi Jaansoo</figcaption><button class="zoom m-image" aria-label="View fullscreen"></button></figure></div>



<p>In the context of <em>They Began to Talk</em>, this work emphasizes the indigenous knowledge of the inseparability of the body and the land. Violence, committed on land due to colonial and economic gain, also leaves the inhabitants of the place wounded. These invisible wounds are passed down through generations, resulting in a centuries long process of environmental trauma.</p>



<p>In dialogue with artists from Estonia, the Baltics, and indigenous artists from Sápmi, Pia Arke is a guide to a deeper understanding of the condition of displacement. In an era of neocolonialism and rapid environmental change, she helps us to imagine the possibility of recovering a sense of connection where it has been severed. Arke does so by showing the way to a wider understanding of who has the ability and the right to speak, and that art making, as an embodied activity, can be one of re-membering.</p>



<p><em>They Began to Talk</em> is open at Kumu Art Museum from 7 February to 3 August 2025.</p>


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Kalaaleq-Danish artist Pia Arke: the speech of body and land

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