Pia Arke
Pia Arke (b. 1958, Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland, d. 2007, Copenhagen, Denmark) was a Danish Greenlandic visual and performance artist, writer and photographer.
She is remembered for her self-portraits, landscape photographs of Greenland and for her paintings and writings which strive to present the complex ethnic and cultural relationships between Denmark and Greenland. In the late 1980’s Arke began to exhibit her paintings.
In 1988, the artist developed her own life-size pin-hole camera (camera obscura) which she hand-built, to photograph the landscapes of Greenland that she had known as a child. Her exhibitions and accompanying explanations encouraged Denmark to reexamine the colonial history of Greenland. Arke is now recognized as one of the Nordic region’s most important postcolonial critics and players as a result of the artistic research which she practiced for two decades.
