Fire & Ice On Belonging and Becoming in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

Everyone talks about Greenland. Few let Greenland speak.

What does it mean to belong? To a country, a lineage, a language. To carry where you come from with you and become who you are within it. There is no single Kalaallit Nunaat. No single Greenland. It is tupilaks and Faxe Kondi bottles, plutonium and hope, Kalaallisut at home and Danish at school, sealskin and streaming. There is a colonial history still awaiting its reckoning, and a future everyone wants to own. It is fire and ice, and the people who carry it all inside them – everything no headline can capture.

Fire & Ice brings together eight contemporary artists connected to Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland. The exhibition presents both established artists and emerging talents, many of whom are creating new, ambitious works specifically for the exhibition. Each of them speaks from their own place – of identity and heritage, of grief and resilience, of a landscape that is at once home and something that can be lost. The works don’t hand you the answers in advance. They open a space and let you step into it yourself.

Emilia Sølvsten moves in an in-between position between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), exploring her own origins through a dreamlike, topographic landscape of the West Greenlandic town of Maniitsoq, built from several thousand sugar peaks. A landscape that is at once concrete, remembered and imagined.

In Lisbeth Karline Poulsen’s work, 43,000 red beads are displayed in a small box, one for every person who was never born. A tangible image of a loss that lies beneath the IUD scandal and of what could have been.

As part of CC’s Horizon programme, Martin Brandt Hansen creates new installation works that examine a modern Kalaallit Nunaat and challenge the idea of Greenland as a place associated first and foremost with tradition and the past. Drawing on hunting culture and the tradition of Mitaarneq, he works with cultural signs that point both backward and forward. In another work, he lifts the Faxe Kondi – an everyday object with a special place in Greenlandic culture – into art, turning it into an image of a Kalaallit Nunaat in motion, between heritage, the present and the desire to define its own future.

Fire and Ice

Two temperatures run through the entire exhibition. Fire is the voice that insists on being heard: the grief, the anger, the will to act. Ice is what freezes over: silence, systems, loss – all that was never said aloud. The exhibition exists in a space between the cold and the warmth. Between what is inherited and what may still emerge. The title is inspired by Jessie Kleemann’s poetry from Arkhticós Dolorôs (2021).

Why now?

Never have others spoken so much about Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), while the country itself has rarely been given the word. Fire & Ice offers not the answer, but the word returned, circling something we all know: finding a place to belong. Come and see the world from a new place – the artists’.

A catalogue with critical texts and interviews with the participating artists is produced to accompany the exhibition.