History will be made in several ways when Inuuteq Storch’s exhibition in the Danish Pavilion opens at the Venice Biennale in just over a month. Firstly, this is the first time that a Greenlandic artist represents the Danish Commonwealth in Venice. Secondly, the pavilion has never before hosted a purely photographic project. And thirdly, Inuuteq Storch is the youngest artist ever to represent Denmark in Venice.
Other stories are also being written in Storch’s project, which combines his own photographs of Greenlandic everyday life with family photos and archival material. Under the title The Rise of the Sunken Sun, Storch will tell the visual history of the Greenlandic people not through an outside lens, but through their own.
Curated by Louise Wolthers (research manager and curator at the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg), the exhibition will comprise several hundred photographic works from Storch’s entire back catalogue, a sound composition, and a sculptural element in the form of a red, glowing semicircle pointing to the setting and rising sun referenced in the exhibition title.
Storch (b. 1989) graduated from the photo school Fatamorgana in Copenhagen in 2011 and from the International Center of Photography in New York in 2016. His preferred medium is photo books. He has published five so far, and they establish an important framework around his projects.
In the artist’s breakthrough project Keepers of the Ocean, published by Disko Bay in 2022, we meet Storch’s friends and acquaintances in a series of intimate everyday scenes from his hometown Sisimiut. We hang out with them, follow their daily lives in warm living rooms and crisp frosty weather, and join them at gatherings and after-parties. It’s a snapshot-like look into contemporary Greenland that feels almost unmediated, as if the camera were not present.
In several previous exhibitions, including at Nordatlantens Brygge (The North Atlantic House) in Copenhagen in 2023 and at Galleri Image in Aarhus in 2021, Storch has juxtaposed pictures from Keepers of the Ocean with projects that delve into historical photographic archives.
For the project Porcelain Souls (published as a photo book by Konnotation Press in 2018), Storch collected a series of photographs that his parents sent to each other by post when they were very young and living apart (one lived in Aarhus and the other in Sisimiut). These emotionally poignant and intimate photographs dating from the late 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s tell a story about how treasures of Greenlandic photography can often be found hidden in private photo albums.
Another project, Mirrored – Portraits of Good Hope, which was published as a photo book by Roulette Russe in 2021, sees Storch delve into the archive of John Møller, the first professional Greenlandic photographer. Møller lived from 1867 to 1935 and was particularly active as a photographer from the late 1880s to the early 1930s, depicting life in the Danish colony that Greenland was until 1953, when it became a Danish county. For the biennale exhibition, Storch has selected a series of Møller’s photographs that particularly focus on the Danish administration, expeditions, clergymen, and miners in Greenland at the time.
A very recent release is the photo book Necromancer published by Marrow Press. It consists of a series of photos taken during the Covid pandemic: dark, grainy, and rich in contrast, these pictures have dark undertones and reference the shamanism that was part of Greenlandic culture before the arrival of the Danish church. The images are rough, raw, and even violent in feel, representing another aspect of Storch’s practice that also found expression in the project Flesh (Disko Bay, 2019), a series of unpolished snapshots from the artist’s time in New York.
When I met Inuuteq Storch at The Black Diamond in Copenhagen, home to the Royal Danish Library, he was careful not to reveal too much about the actual exhibition in the Danish Pavilion. Seated in the café in the building that houses the National Photo Museum, he spoke instead about photography as a tool for decolonialisation and about his dream of creating a museum for Greenlandic photography.
I would very much like to ask about your exhibition in the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, but I know you cannot say much about it yet. Perhaps you can talk a little about the title, Rise of the Sunken Sun?
The title is a reference to the Greenlandic flag, which represents a red sun rising above the white ice. It points to the return of spring after winter, which is a great deal darker in Greenland than in Denmark. When the sun returns, so does hope, partly because the wildlife returns and hunting and fishing can resume.
The exhibition at the biennale will
be a mixture of several different projects that I have worked on over several
years. The most recent one was made especially for the Danish Pavilion and is
called Soon summer will be over. It’s a project I worked on last summer
in Qaanaaq, which is Greenland’s northernmost town; there summer is over almost
before it begins.
What was it like, working in Qaanaaq as a photographer? Given its location, the light must be pretty special?
It was difficult because it has bright daylight twenty-four hours a day in the summer. I prefer not having too much light when I photograph, so it was quite difficult, both in terms of taking decent pictures and in terms of editing them afterwards.
I chose to go there in summer because I wanted to include the project in the biennale. Usually, it takes me about a year and a half to complete a project, from the time I take the photos until the book is ready. If I hadn’t had this deadline I would probably have chosen a different season. In winter, the light is somewhat more subdued, but it does not just become completely black, as many Danes think. There are long sunrises and sunsets, and between them there is moonlight that lights up the ice and snow.
How do you prepare when carrying out projects like the one in Qaanaaq? Do you know ahead of time what subjects you want to depict and which working method you will use?
I work in a very instinctive way. To me, photography is a language that I only understand when I see the finished image. My projects all take their starting point in a specific, concrete place, and my approach is shaped by that particular place. When I lived in New York, for example, I felt quite rootless, and the photographs I took became part of a conversation I had with myself. A dialogue about direction, about homelessness, and about how I saw and understood the city I had arrived in.
It was then that I knew I had found my working method. I travel to a specific place and try to understand it through my photographs. When I arrive, I have a research phase where I try to figure out what kinds of pictures I can take in that place. After that stage I follow my intuition, and the actual working method depends on what the people are like in that place and who I become myself.
Who you become? Could you explain that?
Well, have you noticed that we have different personalities depending on where we are? I take on different roles in different villages and settlements, depending on the landscape and the mentality of the place and my relationship with it.
My projects are basically about identity. My own identity and out national identity as Greenlandic people. I learn a lot about myself in encounters with others, in my relationships with those who are very close to me but also in meetings with what is strange and alien to me. I find that my own identity is tied up with the broader national conversation about who we are as people.
We both know how complex the Danish-Greenlandic history is, but I don’t think it has the same impact on us on a daily basis. In Greenland, we feel that we live closely entwined with Denmark, but we do not feel that Denmark lives closely entwined with us. We read news from Denmark every day, we speak the language, and in schools we learn about the Danish religion but not about our own.
I assume this is because the school system in Greenland is still influenced by the colonial era?
Yes, almost the entire Greenlandic infrastructure is a carbon copy of the corresponding systems in Denmark. But Danes and Greenlanders think very differently, so obviously not all Danish systems fit the Greenlandic culture. One example concerns the way we socialise and spend time together. The first time I came to Denmark, I didn’t know how to be around Danes because the Danes talk all the time. In Denmark, you jump in to speak and fight to take the floor, while in Greenland you wait for others to finish speaking before you say something yourself, so as a Greenlander you can hardly get a word in edgeways. When I’m with my friends, we can easily hang out together without talking. We have times when we talk about everything, but also times when we are quiet together.
Many of your projects are rooted in the intimate personal sphere, in friendships and close relationships. As observers, we get the impression that you take pictures of things that would happen anyway even if you didn’t have your camera with you. Is that actually the case, or do you make it look as if it were?
That’s often how it is. Overall, there is a lot of everyday life in my pictures, many pictures of friends and family. When I first picked up photography, I always had my camera on me and took pictures all the time. Over time I have found that I cannot be a photographer twenty-four hours a day, so these days I often leave my camera at home. But every time I regret the pictures I didn’t get to take because I didn’t have my camera with me.
How many pictures do you usually have to take before you end up with one that works?
I mostly work with analogue photography. Which means that I have taught myself to be quite efficient. I can usually use a little more than half of the photos I take.
That sounds like quite a cumbersome process?
It depends on which camera I use. All my cameras are ones I got from friends and family. Currently I use a really good Leica camera that used to belong to my late uncle. I don’t actually know if it has any bearing on my projects, but I like the sentimental value of using cameras from friends and family.
This also means that I have quite a lot of different cameras which require many different techniques. Some of the ones I’ve received as gifts are small, compact point-and-shoot cameras that have quite a few technical limitations. Others come from second-hand shops, and some of them require me to measure the distance, set the light, and focus myself. All this means that I have many different working methods, production methods, and exhibition methods.
You work a lot with the book format. What is that format able to do that, for example, a traditional exhibition cannot?
I like photo books because when you hold a physical book, you really feel that you have completely finished a project. What is more, books are easier to store, and they reach far more people – especially in Greenland – than an exhibition would. Also, they make a nice calling card that can help you get exhibitions.
Another reason why I like the book format is that it is easier to show how you envision and think about your project in a book. You can work with different rhythms in the layout and vary the design, format and paper to a much greater extent. Making books involves many factors that you don’t usually think about, and I am fortunate enough to have an excellent collaboration with the graphic agency Spine Studio and the publisher Disko Bay in Copenhagen. They understand what I do, but then they are also friends of mine.
Working with friends is important to me. My father has a patisserie in Sisimiut, and he is friends with all the people he works with. Through him, I have learned that friendships are far more important than working relationships. So when I visit Spine Studio, for example, there is also time to have fun, eat dinner, and talk about all sorts of things that are not directly related to work. I appreciate the honesty and trust embedded in those friendships.
I publish quite a lot of photo books – one a year on average – but I still have a lot of material in my archive that hasn’t been published yet. I’d say I have about fifteen projects lying around. So even if I stopped taking photographs tomorrow, I could go on making photo books for the next fifteen years.
Do you think you will still want to make photo books by that time?
I hope so! When I was little I wanted to be either an engineer or a pilot, but somehow I ended up spending my sabbatical at the Fatamorgana school of photography. During that year I realised how important photography is. I realised that in Greenland we have no cultural set-up around photography, and I decided to change that. For me, the photo books are a way of creating a foundation for a Greenlandic photo culture.
I dream of creating a museum for photography in Greenland, because when I say that we don’t have a photo culture, I really mean that we don’t have any public structures that support Greenlandic photography. There is an enormous amount of good photographic work to be found in Greenland, but they are private photos hidden away in boxes in basements. If I had a museum, I would invite people to bring in their private photo archives, and from them I would create a national archive of Greenlandic photography. Here we could exhibit Greenlandic photos from the 1930s to the present day, and that might offer history writing from our own perspective.
Why do you think there is such a lot of good photographic work to be found specifically in Greenland?
I think it is because photography is very closely linked to the Greenlandic language. The Greenlandic language is both very concrete and very good at conjuring up images. In Greenlandic, the word “eye” would translate as “what I see with.”
I would argue that art is deeply embedded in the Greenlandic DNA. In the old days, harpoons were adorned with pictures of the animals you wanted to attract. This was not about the decorative aspect but about hope, because in Greenland you needed hope to survive. There was no term for art in Greenlandic, and the word we use today comes from a foreigner who wanted to write a book about Greenlandic decorations. If you were to translate it directly, it means “to do strange things,” but the decorations were neither strange nor actual decorations, because they served a specific purpose. You depicted a seal on your harpoon because you hoped it would attract the animal and that the animal would let itself be harpooned because of the power of the image.
At Nordatlantens Brygge (The North Atlantic House) in Copenhagen, you recently created an exhibition where you juxtaposed your own photographs with images by the first Greenlandic photographer, John Møller. What is your outlook on that interaction between new and older photography?
Greenlandic history can be difficult to understand because so many changes and developments have happened extremely fast for us. It’s hard for me to relate to how my parents lived when they were children, and even harder to understand the world my grandparents lived in. The contrast between the way I live and the lives led just a few generations ago is huge. That is what I wanted to illustrate by showing the two series together.
Do you see your own work as building on that of photographers like John Møller, or do you see yourself to be breaking away from that tradition?
When I began working with photography, I had no direct role models. Back then, my images were quite messy and snapshot-like, often drawing inspiration from something psychedelic. But I have noticed that my own pictures have changed in step with me working with photographic archives. I can sense how my pictures are tinted and shaped by the material I am interested in at any given time, so without thinking about it I have come to stand on the shoulders of those who came before me. For example, the Keepers of the Ocean project is very much inspired by how my parents took pictures when I was little.
What attracts you to certain photographic archives? Is it the inherent qualities of the photographs, or is it the stories they tell?
Both, I think. Greenlandic history has not yet been written by us. It has been written by people who have observed the Greenlandic people, so when we read about our history, we are actually reading other people’s interpretation of us. There are some good observations in there. You can sense that they have made an effort and that it was written with the best of intentions. But of course they have not understood everything they have seen.
I am very interested in physics, and when you work within that field you know very well that theory and practice are two different things. When you carry out a theoretical experiment in practice, you will always find that a certain percentage of them fails. I would think that something similar applies to the recorded history of Greenland and to some of the photographs taken by those who came here.
Could you tell the difference between a photograph taken on one of the Danish expeditions and a photograph taken by a Greenlandic photographer around the same time? Or are things more complicated than that?
I’m not sure I would be able to tell the difference. Back in the old days, due to the lack of a Greenlandic culture and tradition of photography, the Greenlandic photographers were inspired by the way the foreigners took pictures. So early Greenlandic photography is very similar to European photography from the same period.
But I’m not really that interested in speaking about photography that way. To me, photography is so personal that it doesn’t make sense to generalise. Photography is the most personal art form I can think of.
Why do you think it is so personal? After all, photography involves a certain amount of mechanics?
Photography is a curious thing, entirely mechanical and utterly personal. I think it is because the photograph is a direct extension of the eye. It is about how we see the world, without being filtered through some artistic style the way a painting, for example, always is. A very great part of our personality depends on how we experience and interact with the world around us, and the most direct communication between the brain and the outside world is through the eye. The eye – and thus the photograph – is the point of connection between our consciousness and reality.
