| art.description.project | The exhibition is rooted in a journey to the island of Qeqertarsuaq in western Greenland, which until 1953 was Denmark’s administrative headquarters for North Greenland. Today, the former administration building houses a cultural history museum, while the University of Copenhagen has taken over a research station named Arktisk Station and the Technical University of Denmark runs the magnetic observatory of the island.
Arctic Stations is thus a title referring to the site-specific starting point of the exhibition, but also to its spatial organisation: Three independent film installations serve as artistic articulations of the long stand-ing and multifaceted research work that informs Zenner and la Cour’s collaboration. Regarded not only as the spatial architecture of the exhibition, but also as a kind of historical space, the three installations us-ing 16mm film, reflects upon visual registration practices in botany, geophysics and anthropology. Here, visual registration is not understood as objective or authentic representation, but precisely as a historical effect; mediation of scientific data not understood as neutral dissemination, but as imaging practice.
This approach allows professional vision, gendered positions, personal anecdotes, environment and infra-structure to come to the fore: In other words, Tinne Zenner and Eva la Cour approach scientific practices in Qeqertarsuaq as a continued image of the presence of Denmark in Greenland.
Arctic Stations is a speculation on how complex scientific, institutional, industrial and commercial prac-tices are interconnected and entangled - although science often is regarded as something that can be separated from politics. | sv |
