Over 400 people visited the exhibition the first weekend!

On Saturday, October 4, Perspektivet Museum opened the exhibition “At Home We Belong” by one of the most exciting photographers in the circumpolar region, Inuuteq Storch.

The exhibition is a collaboration between Perspektivet Museum and the research project Urban Transformation in a Warming Artic (UrbTrans) at UiT, and before the opening, an open closing seminar for the project was arranged. A large audience also stopped by for a sneak peek of the exhibition during Kulturnatta on Friday evening.

For five years, researchers, traditionalists and artists have been working on research that explores the relationship between urbanism and Nordic colonialism. On Friday, they presented some of the results at an open seminar in the exhibition “At Home We Belong“, which is part of the project.

The researchers have been affiliated with institutions in Nuuk, Tromsø and Oslo, and have been concerned with how colonial practices and narratives have shaped urban development. The focus has been particularly on Nuuk, but also elsewhere in the Arctic. Through lectures and discussions, the audience gained insight into a project in which those involved have moved between theory, art, archival material and traditional knowledge, and where interdisciplinarity and respect for different knowledge have been central. The seminar was led by Tone Huse at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. She has also been project manager for UrbTrans.

Friday evening was Culture Night in Tromsø, and the public was invited to a sneak peek at the new exhibition. Here they met the three curators, Hanne Hammer Stien (UiT), Marthe T. Fjellestad (Perspektivet Museum) and Mari Hildung (Perspektivet Museum).

They told, among other things, about a photographer who is interested in showing his homeland with an insider’s perspective, as a reaction to the fact that Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland has long been defined by researchers, artists and photographers from the outside. They also told us that he uses various cameras that he has been given as gifts and that he includes photographic material taken by others in his projects.

The opening on Saturday was preceded by a performance by artist Louise Fontain. Fontain lives in Hattfjelldal, but was born in the same town as Inuuteq Storch, Sisimiut in Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland. She was taken to Denmark at the age of 9 as part of a controversial Danish educational experiment, and like Storch, she constantly moves home through the art she creates. Her performance was specially created for the exhibition, and was entitled “Towards Home”.

Director of Perspektivet Museum, Marianne A. Olsen, said in her speech that the museum has long wanted to show an exhibition of Storch’s photos, but that in recent years he has become more and more recognized, and that they were therefore unsure whether they would be able to make it happen.

Among other things, he was the first artist from Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland to exhibit in the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2023. The collaboration with the research project UrbTrans made the exhibition possible, and opened up the possibility of curating photographs from Storch’s entire career.

The photographer was unable to attend the opening. He opened a parallel exhibition at PS1 MoMa in New York, but will visit Perspektivet later in the viewing period. “At Home We Belong” was formally opened by Pro-Rector at UiT The Arctic University of Norway Jørgen Berge.