(Post) Colonial Relations on Display. Contemporary Trends in Museums and Art Exhibitions depicting Greenland

Abstract

This study describes how Greenlandic culture is represented in the arts sector of Greenland and Denmark, and furthermore analyses the political processes that those representations relate to. Greenland has been talked about a lot recently in the discussions about climate change, and also in the light of a possible independency of the country in the future. I therefore wanted to find out whether those debates are reflected in museums and art exhibitions depicting Greenland and if so, in what way. During the summer of 2015, I visited three museums and four art exhibitions in Nuuk and Copenhagen and analysed how they described Greenlandic culture. I was left with three main discourses: One being the Greenlander as a hunter – historical colonial views as depicted today; another being the threatened Greenlander in times of climate change, and lastly, Greenlanders as modern people in a country on its way to independence. I argue that the three trends I discovered, have their origin in different socioeconomic or political processes and that a majority of them can be described as having their origin in colonialism.