How does one distinguish the good from the bad, the right from the wrong, when parsing through artists and literature of a world created and inhabited by indigenous society? If ever the thought to google Sisimiut, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) strikes, images of northern lights over colorful houses with high pitched roofs dotting the landscape, snow-capped mountains, and glaciers interlacing ice-shelf estuaries populate. The Arctic countryside if you will. Whalebone, and stacks of chopped wood. This is threadbare, but not in a way that is palpable – cliché in its banality, because the Western imaginary has framed it within a narrow lens, because it’s expected. In contrast, Inuuteq Storch’s essayistic work, grain riddled images of everyday life, in Soon Will Summer Be Over at MoMA PS1 brim with an intimacy undeniably meaningful. The Greenlandic photographer brings his world into a space of clarity, a personal purview encased in a shiny clear box that cannot be broken into and remade into something it is not.
The series titled Keepers of the Ocean (2019) presents the viewer with effigies of kinship and closeness, social scenes with hints of youth culture that perhaps developed from Storch’s beginnings photographing friends. A neon yellow truck full of twenty somethings smoking cigarettes meets the audience. Following is a succession of work from this highly acclaimed series, seemingly point and shoot snapshots depicting life in the artist’s hometown of Sisimiut. All images prove existence as a state of passing time. They also begin the conversation around thinking, and seeing, beyond legacies of inherited structures.
Melodic and playful, the collection acts as a definition to his aesthetic incline. A visual phraseology, an outward expression of an entire world, a dreamy declaration of presence – the contradiction to a polis colonized. An embrace, a symbolic wall rack full of keys, a tabletop with bottles and playing cards and a projector from the night before. Things worth holding onto are made visible here. These photographs, and his oeuvre, are sagaciously invested in the artist’s experiences living amongst Kalaallit Nunaat, Denmark, and New York, as well as enlisting a host of archival photo and video, and his family’s cameras and ephemera, to take part in his practice.
The intentional informal language in the above, heeding attention to an interest in local Greenlandic photography, sits alongside Porcelain Souls (2018). The projector remits selected 35 mm slides in a series Storch authored by acquiring photographs and letters sent between his parents, which unfold an aesthetic subtly in their vernacular of personal memories.
Complexities interlace between Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark as depictions of daily lives of the couple and their friends in disparate places from the 1960s to 1980s were chosen material as they conflict the portraits taken and proffered by outsiders and often held in institutions. Domestic photos of friends sitting on couches, on counters; family portraits against the backdrop of a melted glacial lake – these make up an archive of private moments embedding another degree of authenticity into Storch’s own image-making process where he seeks to rediscover the lost cultural overtones of his community’s past.
What’s at stake for the viewer is redaction of the learned perception of culture viewed through a colonial lens. Something original shows itself in the common and becomes a foundational layer to the artist’s work of creating receptivity. The ordinary is a gesture of the universal. The polluted image of bourgeois grandiosity becomes the contradiction to beauty.
Soon Will Summer Be Over (2023), the series that the exhibition is also named after, expands on some of the more alienating conditions that Qaanaaq, Kalaallit Nunaat’s inhabitants experience, who were forced to relocate because of the expansion of the U.S. Thule Air Base in 1953. It also apprehends the significance of time within the photographer’s overall practice, of bringing the past into the present.
Confuting the reverie of closeness and community, the title refers to the short arctic summer, which only occurs above the Arctic Circle where the sun continuously shines throughout the night. While daily life are the centerpieces of Storch’s scenes, nature is a precious novelty, and the contextual backdrop for every scape of storytelling.
The compositions in this series appear fragmented, whether highlighting the interior of a home decorated with ‘live, laugh, love’ obviously influenced by the nearby base infiltrating the cultural imaginary, or thick layers of cracked ice breaking open over a lake, or someone’s yard covered with wooden pallets and random indiscernible items in perpendicular arrangements. In all of his work, Storch purposely leaves each image untitled to break from ethnographic practices of categorization. This series also depicts many fissures, perhaps a reflection on fractured temporalities.
In the screening room a two-channel video plays 11 minutes and 26 seconds of film, again and similar to Porcelain Souls, pointedly colliding past and present realities. In this video titled Anachronism (2016-2022), durations of super-8 film shot by Greenlanders was overlayed with video and sound that Storch forged. The work is a culmination of his investigation of the interrelation between photography of Greenlanders and their representation. Fittingly as the title suggests something belonging to another time, or out of place, the artist silences the notion of misplacement altogether while emphasizing a past that has never been seen. With the rare archival footage reinvigorated through the photographer’s assemblage, his intervention intermixes the image of Greenlandic life into material currency.
Sourced from Greenland’s Public Archive, the found video rests under the title INUIAAT ISAAT, or eyes of the people and its use in this video turns the gaze from falsehood to diligence. Pictures of social and public life in the crisp frozen natural terrain, holding up a fallen polar bear, ice skating, funeral processions, as well as spectacles of Danish bureaucracy visiting the world’s largest island are all sequenced with Greenlandic song. The violin heard most prominently is both shrill at times and unfathomably sunken. Somehow the work also feels like an ending.
Finally, What if You Were My Sabine? (2025) bids to reclaim the land that is too often observed as remote, infinite, and deserted. A vacuous landscape that could be mined for resources without anyone noticing. However, in this series, photographs of the exteriors of buildings set alongside more personal intimations and interior impressions representing a relationship between two dearest loves recondition the perspective of this most treasured place.
A dream is a beautiful aspiration. However, it can also be a delusion, and from the Greenlandic view this Danish delusion has led to the displacement of indigenous people and ruination of the tangible and more elusive cultural fabrics. This series shows the land and its fragility in the hands and minds of the Western cultural project with photographs that expose high rises and other infrastructure that took over the land. What if implies the future and a possibility, maybe a promise to something new.
Although Denmark’s colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat is not as publicized or visually present as some other imperialist projects have been, Greenlandic cultural eradication through systemic measures is just as horrific with accounts of sterilization and forced assimilation. Although Danish colonization of Kalaallit Nunaat technically ceased in 1953, Greenlanders were recognized as a distinct people only in 2009 and still receive financial allowances from Denmark.
Inuuteq Storch’s original and found photographs and carefully composed video distribute a softer gaze towards an indigenous global modernity, directed by his own autobiography. The mundane, deeply rooted in lived reality, offers the material desire to expose an image and purview from innermost experiences. In turn, whether the mix of soft vignettes, clipped compositions, an avowal of love offered as a limitless possibility, and closeness to his subject, he yields a body of work that is at its most contemporary.