Pia Arke was an artist with an unusually profound relationship to her medium. In the current exhibition at KW in Berlin, she emerges, first and foremost, as a photographer who is able to expand the pinhole lens of her device to include poetry, video, performance, and appropriation, all in aid of asking the question: what is a photograph? What does it do – to a landscape, to a subject, and to time?
Arctic Hysteria, as the exhibition curated by Sofie Krogh Christensen is called, is part of the last cycle of shows under the directorship of Krist Gruijthuijsen, who has helmed the Mitte institution since 2017. Spanning the two middle floors, Arke’s exhibition is sandwiched between Luiz Roque in the main space downstairs and a dual presentation of Jimmy DeSana and Paul P. on the floor above. Both present explicitly queer-themed oeuvres from Brazil and New York, respectively, a topic that has been consistently explored during Gruijthuijsen’s tenure, especially when it comes to the AIDS-narratives of gay men, and especially in its latter half, for instance in landmark exhibitions by David Wojnarowicz, Reza Abdoh, Leonilson, and Martin Wong.
His first year at KW was characterised by a rather minimalist and highly conceptual approach, with early solos by Ian Wilson and Willem de Rooij, and the razor-sharp group show Enemy of the Stars that saw Ronald Jones in dialogue with David Hammons, Louise Lawler, Helmar Lerski, and Julia Scher. But as the Kunsthalle has increasingly found itself taking on the burden neglected by what would be Berlin’s institutional heavyweights, such slick opacity has often given way to thematic legibility in the programme and an increasingly museological tendency within the exhibition design.
While the heavy-lifting is largely to Gruijthuijsen’s credit, there’s still something to be said for speaking in a quieter register. And though, surrounded by gay men, Arke – who was born in Greenland in 1958 and died young from breast cancer in Denmark in 2007 – obviously ticks some neat boxes, I’d wager that Arctic Hysteria has more in common with KW’s earlier conceptual chapter than with the other shows in the current cycle. Arke’s work is staunchly formal and at the tail-end of the modernist tradition; in it – as she put it herself in a TV interview from 1996, on view at KW – the camera determines the motif, not the other way around.
The first part of the exhibition focuses on the work she did with the human-sized pinhole camera that she built and transported to various locations in Greenland and Denmark starting in 1990. In a speech for “the inauguration of the camera obscura” – a framed typescript is included as part of a constellation of related materials – Arke writes that she built it with her own hands and according to her own proportions so that in “both body and spirit” she could become one with her tool. Through this oneness, Arke believes she can form an attachment to the places that she photographs “that belongs more to the places” than to her, eclipsing the distance between them. “I’ve sought back towards degree zero”, she explains.
With an exposure time of up to an hour, the pictures have a deeply atmospheric, timeless, and almost uncanny quality. But this is less an aesthetic choice than a condition of the radical proximity Arke demands to her tool. It is paradoxical and, in a beautiful way, metaphorically indicative that the camera she built integrates her own body and yet, due to the long exposure time, cannot capture that of another human. Contrary to much contemporary image production, Arke does not mobilise photography as an instrument of a kind of endless mirror-stage meant to show us ‘who we are’, but rather the opposite: as a mode of defacement that coincides with a more immediate form of embodiment. When living subjects appear in the pinhole camera works, they are blurry and translucent – barely there.
The picture her camera house took of the bay at Nuugaarsuk made for a photographic backdrop to pictures since taken in Arke’s Copenhagen studio, as well as to the video performance Arctic Hysteria (1996), in which the picture is torn to pieces by a naked Arke rolling around on the floor. Across these works we see a fraught relationship not only to the landscape but to its very picturing. To this end, Arke makes use of a range of modernist strategies from montage to appropriation to complicate the notion of subjectivity, especially as it relates to place. In the same TV interview, she explains that what interests her about the locations that she chooses for her camera house is that they are abandoned, that they hover in a kind of limbo where their signification appears suspended.
We could say this is also where she leaves her own work, where tensions between major and minor registers, the personal and the structural, the mundane and the existential, remain strategically unresolved. Nature Morte alias Perlustrations I-X (1995), for example, is a lineup of photographs of archival material and books related to the history and colonisation of Greenland that also includes a series of portraits (as quietly monumental as Gerhardt Richter’s photo of Ulrike Meinhof) of the artist’s friend Susanne Mortensen after her mastectomy. Here, as in her artistic practice at large, Arke seems bent on maintaining two contradictory truths: that individuals are multiple and nebulous and can never be reduced to the circumstances of their identity, and that the sweeping stakes of geography, history, and colonialism do, in fact, come all the way down to Susanne’s mastectomy. It is the formal nature of her work that holds this contradiction, and it is the contradiction that, in its turn, allows Arke the space to fold other positions, objects, and modes into her practice as photography.
When Arke’s exhibition opened in July, there were three flags outside the headquarters of rightwing media mogul Axel Springer in Berlin: Ukraine, Israel, and the latest iteration of the Pride flag. On the opposite end of Leipziger Strasse, at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Andy Warhol exhibition Velvet Rage and Beauty bizarrely cast one of art history’s greatest vanishing acts – famous for dissolving his person into the image stream of his work, and his work into the image stream of capitalism – as a sex-positive gay activist. As part of the public program, Pussy Riot made a visit. When artistic positions are turned into items of content, it becomes possible to make false equations.
It is in this context that Arke’s stubborn, disassembled, and actually quite Warholian mode of photography registers as an especially poignant strategy for art-making. Photography, and perhaps media more broadly, Pia Arke knew, makes people and places disappear. What transports through the pinhole of her camera nonetheless is a tremendous sense of humanity – whatever it is that survives the colonisation, commodification, and political instrumentalisation of our bodies and minds.
