Release of the book TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research
A comprehensive monograph on the seminal work of Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958–2007)
Edited and published by Kuratorisk Aktion (Frederikke Hansen & Tone Olaf Nielsen),
Copenhagen 2012
With contributions by Pia Arke, Lars Kiel Bertelsen, Tine Bryld, Erik Gant, Søren Jønsson Granat, Mirjam Joensen, Stefan Jonsson, Carsten Juhl, Anders Jørgensen, Mette Jørgensen, Inge Kleivan, Kuratorisk Aktion, Jan-Erik Lundström, Iben Mondrup, Sara Olsvig, Søren Bro Pold, Irit Rogoff, Mette Sandbye, Kirsten Thisted, and Finn Thrane
For press inquiries or orders, please contact: info [at] kuratorisk-aktion.org
Following their critically acclaimed and award-winning 2010 retrospective TUPILAKOSAURUS: Pia Arke’s Issue with Art, Ethnicity, and Colonialism, 1981-2006, the Danish curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion is pleased to announce the release of their latest publication TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research – a comprehensive monograph on the seminal work of Greenlandic-Danish visual artist and thinker Pia Arke (1958–2007).
The richly illustrated 400-page book constitutes the first survey in print of Pia Arke’s collected works, practice, and methodology. In essays and images, the book documents Arke’s lifelong artistic engagement with the silence that surrounds Denmark’s colonial presence in Greenland since 1721 and examines how she by unearthing the ‘little’ history of Greenland’s colonization managed to say something decisive about the much ‘bigger’ history of Western imperialism and the dynamics of today’s world order.
Arke would devote her professional life to breaking this silence and to giving voices and visuals to the causes and effects of the Greenland-Denmark relation – and in a larger sense to the relation between the ‘West and the rest.’ Mimicking the movements of the explorer, the colonizer, the cartographer, and the ethnographer, she followed unacknowledged traces and forgotten poles of belonging between Denmark and Greenland. Investigating her field as an aesthetic material, she did this primarily with photography and text due to the central role played by both in colonial processes and by developing a unique form of practice-based research, with which she brought scientific material from public archives in direct contact with the personal keepsakes and memories of ordinary people.
In retrospect, Arke’s practice unfolds as an artistic journey into “the colonial-historical, […] mapmaking, time, memory, space, silence, identity and myth in pictures of and from Greenland,” as she herself summarized her practice. Yet, neither the art community nor academic circles, let alone the public at large, seemed ready to fully embrace Arke’s topic and methodology during her lifetime, for which reason her work did not receive the broad recognition and dissemination it truly calls for. It is the purpose of this publication to remedy this by providing a comprehensive document from which the scopes and implications of her oeuvre and practice can be assessed.
The book is divided into five parts. Part 1 documents the 2010 TUPILAKOSAURUS exhibition and the more than 100 works it displayed in art spaces and cultural history museums during its touring in Denmark, Greenland, and Sweden. Part 2 presents a vast selection of Arke’s notes, sketches, and correspondence from her own and various other archives. In Part 3, 19 different people from Arke’s professional and social networks contribute with texts on individual works and with essays offering different perspectives on her practice. Part 4 contextualizes the Greenland-Denmark relation and postcolonial practice in the Nordic region with essays by Arke and cultural critic Erik Gant. Finally, Part 5 contains a first attempt at a comprehensive Biography & Selected Exhibition History, Bibliography, and illustrated Catalogue Raisonné. In addition, the book contains a DVD presenting a selection of Arke’s individual and collaborative video works.
TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research has been published with financial support from The Augustinus Foundation, The Danish Arts Council Committee for Visual Arts, Det Kongelige Grønlandsfond, Knud Højgaards Fond, Kulturfonden Danmark-Grønland, Government of Greenland’s Cultural Grant, The New Carlsberg Foundation, The Novo Nordisk Foundation, Nordens Institut i Grønland (NAPA), and OAK Foundation Denmark.
For further information or to order the book, please contact Kuratorisk Aktion at info@kuratorisk-aktion.org or (+45) 20 93 50 86.
TUPILAKOSAURUS: An Incomplete(able) Survey of Pia Arke’s Artistic Work and Research
Edited & Published by Kuratorisk Aktion
March 2012, English
Hardcover, 19 x 23 x 3.2 cm, 400 pages, 270 color illustrations + DVD insert
ISBN: 978-87-993523-2-6
