A see-through plaque reading Kalaallit Nunaat (‘Greenland’ in the local language) welcomes visitors and announces a Greenlander’s first participation in the Venice Art Biennale.
Inuuteq Storch’s visual explorations challenge the stereotypical perception of his homeland – a Danish colony for over two centuries and now an autonomous territory, but not yet independent – placing Greenlandic indigenous identity at the center of the international stage. The exhibition Rise of the Sunken Sun highlights the potential of photography as a cultural, social, and historical document, featuring a selection of digitized images from the decades around 1900 taken by Greenland’s first professional photographer, John Møller, alongside amateur photographs from Storch’s family archive and new series like Soon Will Summer Be Over, which documents traces of colonialism in Qaanaaq, northern Greenland, and the impact of the climate crisis on daily life.
The colonial history of the country decisively emerges between historical and contemporary images, making decolonization the central theme of the exhibition. Storch’s various photographic approaches converge under the complex theme of Greenlandic life through concepts of mirroring, doubling, and references to light, including the sun, symbolized by the red semicircle that appears on the flag of Kalaallit Nunaat.
