By DCist contributor Willona Sloan
In the video installation Arctic Hysteria, now on view at the Phillips Collection, Pia Arke, a Danish artist from Greenland, crawls naked across the floor, sniffing and pawing at the black-and-white photograph underneath her. She slithers across mountains and icebergs, the landscape of her Greenlandic hometown, Nuugaarsuk, with her arms outstretched.
She begins to tear the photograph beneath her; first with curiosity, then with fervent excitement. The strips curl onto themselves until they resemble long blocks of ice piled up around her.
“The title of the work refers to Greenland’s colonialist past and the phenomenon of pibloktoq, later known as ‘arctic hysteria,’ the supposedly irrational behavior by Inhuit (Greenlandic Inuit) women first reported by the American explorer Robert E. Peary in 1892,” exhibition wall text for Arctic Hysteria states. “It was compared to Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s diagnosis of female hysteria and most commonly ascribed to the lack of sun and long arctic nights but may also have been confused with shamanistic rituals of the Inhuit people.”
Arke’s video is one of the works challenging perceptions of Nordic culture in the new Phillips Collection exhibition Nordic Impressions: Art from Åland, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Featuring video, photography, painting, print, and mixed-media sculpture from 53 artists, the survey exhibition covers 200 years of Nordic art.
Nordic Impressions features 19th- and 20th-century work by Edvard Munch, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Anders Zorn and Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval, as well as contemporary artists Katrín Sigurðardóttir, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ólafur Elíasson, and Outi Pieski, and represents the common threads that exist between the Nordic countries, while also dispelling misconceptions of homogeneity.
Klaus Ottmann, chief curator and deputy director for academic affairs at the Phillips, went to the source for curatorial research, and visited major museums, alternative art spaces, and artist studios in the Nordic region, asking who were the most important artists working today, and which historical works should be included.
“I got a clear idea that I wanted to create an exhibition that, on the one hand does include some of the things that people think about when they hear ‘Nordic,’ or ‘Scandinavian,’ [such as] the fabulous, magical landscapes and all of that, but also I wanted to show the diversity within these countries,” says Ottmann.
There are, the exhibition posits, distinctly Nordic artistic themes: “light and darkness, inner life and exterior space, the coalescence of nature and folklore, women’s rights and social liberalism,” Ottmann explains in the Nordic Impressions essay, “Ageless Northern Spirit.” “But these are now paired with more current subjects such as climate change, sustainability and immigration.”
Landscapes, both external and internal, comprise the core of the exhibition: the spectacular Scandinavian landscapes of snow-covered mountains and craggy cliffs, and the internal emotional and mental landscapes we carry within us.
Þórarinn B. Þorláksson’s tranquil Repose depicts a splendid symmetry of land, sea and sky, while the mountainous landscape in Helmer Osslund’s A Summer Evening at Lake Kallsjön shimmers so beautifully it looks like a fresh snow has fallen. Conversely, Edvard Munch’s black-and-white prints explore loneliness and alienation, while Helene Schjerfbeck’s The Seamstress shows a working woman at momentary rest, looking sullen, lost in her own thoughts.
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, aka Shoplifter, created a site-specific work at the Phillips. Nervelings I-V is part of her larger Nervescape series. The artist, who moved to New York in the 1990s, adopted her moniker after an acquaintance misheard the pronunciation of her name, Hrafnhildur, as Shoplifter. She has worked under the title ever since.
The brightly-colored, textured Nervelings I-V hang from the ceiling in thick, colorful poufs. “It’s like painting or drawing mid-air,” Shoplifter says of her creations.
She explains that the works in Nervescape follow her practice of painting large-scale abstract landscape paintings, only these are made with fiber.
“It’s synthetic nature—artificial nature—synthetic hair extensions made into nature,” says Shoplifter. She uses hair extensions and clown-like hair pieces, drawing inspiration from Dr. Seuss and the Muppets. “It’s playful and youthful,” she says.
While playful, the work is also quite heady. Through Nervelings she explores her interest in neuroscience. “I’m really interested in the brain, and the interior landscape that we never think about,” says Shoplifter. “It started out with me imagining that the neurological pathways and neurons were these colorful, weaving fibers.”
Rather than showing pieces in chronological order, abstract and conceptual art and video installations is featured side-by-side with historical paintings, creating a conversation back-and-forth across time and borders.
An exciting aspect of the show is that about 50 percent of the artists are women. “You see so many more women artists from the 19th century on the walls of the museums [in Nordic countries] than you would see in this country, or even in other places in Europe,” says Ottmann, who wanted to represent that equity in the exhibition.
Norwegian performance and video artist Tori Wrånes breaks boundaries with her odd and strangely soothing work, Ancient Baby. Wrånes’ character, reminiscent of Sloth from The Goonies, floats gently, as if she were a giant balloon, wearing a puffy coat and high-tops. She grunts, sings, and reaches out, making a connection.
Nordic Impressions mixes the conventional and the unexpected. Like Ancient Baby, several of the works are darkly humorous and unsettling, while others bring a sense of spiritual peace, bathed in glowing light. From classical representations of the Swedish countryside to conceptual art by artists working on remote Atlantic islands; from tears of honey to a fighting witch, the eclectic exhibition offers intriguing opportunities for discovery.
Nordic Impressions: Art from Åland, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, 1821-2018 is on view at The Phillips Collection, October 13, 2018-January 13, 2019.
