NORTH OF NORMAL

Poetics of everyday life interacting with a landscape in flux.

Spectacular normality in photographing Greenland.

 The exhibition is conceived around a photograph from the Nordic House art collection by legendary photographer Ivars Silis  (b.1940). The colour photograph depicts an everyday situation, where a group of people have camped and gathered for bathing. Despite the normality of the situation, the striking natural surroundings render the image almost fantastical.

It is this interplay of the normal and natural world as a tangible presence that lies at the heart of the images on display. The pictures reject photographic exoticism to instead concentrate on the mundane and intimate. The photographers focus on the interaction between human society and the spectacular landscape.

The exhibition features work by photographers who live, have lived for extended periods, or have visited Greenland for longer or briefer visits. Many of the photographs are taken in the settlement of Oqaatsut in the Disko Bay. The renowned Finnish photographer Jukka Male spent an extended period there in 1995. The same area appears in the works of Saga Sig, Jonas Ersland and Anders Berthelsen from 2017 and 2018.

 The exhibition is presented in The Nordic House foyer. Free entrance. 

Photographs by:

Anders Berthelsen (GL)

Jonas Ersland (NO)

Ivars Silis (DK/LT/GL)

Jukka Male (FI)

Saga Sig (IS)