I have been thinking a lot about Inuit photographers and photography lately in connection to my various projects. Thought I would share these two meta-photographic works, examining the methods and motives of one Inuit medium (because as we all know any medium used by an Inuk is an Inuit medium) through the lenses of two more recognizable Inuit media, namely the graphic arts and ivory carving.
Image 1: Kananginak Pootoogook’s famous image The First Tourist, 1992
Image 2: Bob Kussy of Ashoona Studios, Inuit Photographer (Peter Pitseolak)
Emil Ekberg, at Galleri Mors Mössa in Gothenburg this week.
ayiman:
Kwiakiutl Sea Otter with Sea Urchin by John Livingstone
David Shrigley. White whine sphinx/centaur/thing?
Speaking of. By Devendra Banhart.
The Harbour Mother of Nuuk is a goddess-type figure of the past who protects the coast and brings the sea animals to hunters, and she exists in varied forms throughout Greenland. The statue in Nuuk is past the colonial harbour and is a big tourist attraction.
The second image is of my old children’s book “A Journey to the Mother of the Sea”. Aka Høegh, Greenland’s ‘most proclaimed living artist’ (although personally I find her too ethnographic), made the illustrations. It has a lovely message. One winter the sea freezes over so the hunters cannot catch food and the greatest hunter goes to an old, poor shaman couple and asks them for help. The couple are hesitant because they had not done magic for a long time, but they agree, and the old woman goes down to the Mother of the Sea, who demands that the old woman cleans her. She says that when the sea gets too polluted and the animals overhunted she must freeze the sea over to protect them. But the humble woman saves her settlement because her intentions were pure.
Ane Mette Hol, drawings reproducing xeroxed images. Very interesting discussion of the transmittance of information, and loss as part of its process, also the relationship between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media in artistic practice - and all of these issues particularly as they relate to art history.
