Exhibition showcases rarely seen areas of rarely visited Greenland

Feb. 9—Inuk Silis Høegh grew up in Qaqortoq, a town of 3,000 hardy residents in southern Greenland that is only reachable from elsewhere in summer, via helicopter or boat. The rugged surroundings make walks outside the town impractical.

Even now that he lives in Nuuk, the capital, Høegh (Danish-Kalaallit) can't drive for more than about 10 minutes without reaching the end of a road. Such is life on the world's largest noncontinental island, where inhabitants live close to one another and far from other towns, with no roads connecting them.

As a result, even Greenlanders aren't accustomed to the striking nature featured in Høegh's film installation The Green Land, which premiered in 2022. It's one of several elements of Inuk Silis Høegh: Arctic Vertigo, running through July 14 at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. The film highlights Greenland's nature at a time when the icy island is undergoing drastic changes, focusing more on existing splendor than what has been lost. The slow pacing and ancient stone at the beginning might remind some viewers of Koyaanisqatsi, the groundbreaking 1982 wordless film created by Santa Fe experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio.

Arctic Vertigo also includes Høegh's 2014 documentary about a progressive Inuit rock band, Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution; Audio Abstractions, which features spectrogram readings of Arctic sounds; and a new edition of his 2013 installation Taanna. The original version involved putting poems and prayers in bottles through a "melting machine" made from objects found on a Greenland beach.

Inuk Silis Høegh: Arctic Vertigo

* 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays through Saturdays, through July 14

* IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place

* $5-$10

* 505-428-5912; iaia.edu/mocna

"I think a lot of people get surprised by the lack of infrastructure and how few people we are," Høegh says of Greenland, which is more than three times the size of Texas but, with 56,000 residents, has less than one-quarter the population of the Amarillo, Texas, metro area. "And there's just one big chunk of ice in the middle. Eighty-five percent of our country is just ice all year round."

Twelve minutes into The Green Land, the viewer sees what appears to be a green puddle. As the camera pans over the land beneath it, one realizes the water is actually the ocean, viewed from a plane far above. Seen on an IMAX screen, the effect might be vertigo-inducing. About 19 minutes in, the aurora borealis appears to dance in the distance behind Arctic shrubs. The source of light eventually is revealed as a terrestrial fire, a powerful introduction of the last of the four elements featured in abundance in the film. No humans appear in The Green Land, and green smoke is the only human-created effect.

"People will be surprised seeing a film that celebrates nature and doesn't really show obvious pictures like the fast melting of an ice sheet," says Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator at MoCNA. "Hopefully they'll be enveloped in these majestic, ancient rock formations and also allow themselves to enjoy the special effects. Inuk created this without any post-production techniques — without any manipulation of images. He worked with pyrotechnics to create this interesting green smoke that accompanies the storyline."

That green smoke symbolizes nature, as well as something more sinister.

"It's the same color as Homer Simpson's piece of plutonium at his power plant; it's also something really toxic," Høegh says, referring to a scene in the opening credits in The Simpsons in which that character nonchalantly realizes an apparently radioactive piece of metal is stuck to his clothing. "I like this duality, that you're not sure if you want this green color to invade the landscape — if it's salvation or has a doomsday kind of feeling."

Høegh attended the show's February 2 opening in Santa Fe. His work has been featured in several European countries, but Arctic Vertigo is his first exhibition in the U.S. That said, he's familiar with New Mexico, having spent the 1989-90 school year in the Farmington area as an exchange student.

"There are a lot of Indigenous people there, and I see a lot of the same kinds of challenges and troubles," Høegh says. "I feel a kinship, even though we're so far from each other. It was liberating as a young person; everything was so different. There's different groups of people in the States, living side by side and not mingling as much as you would think. There's a division between people, but it was sort of beautiful at the same time that people were living in this together. It was a culture shock, of course."

While The Green Land showcases vast expanses of nature, Høegh cautions that the land isn't as untouched as it looks. He mentions the barely detectable presence of microplastics in fish caught off the island's coast as an example.

'Arctic Highways'

The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts will continue to focus on northern Indigenous art and culture this summer, says chief curator Manuela Well-Off-Man. Arctic Highways, which isn't yet featured on MoCNA's website, explores the exploitation of Indigenous land and how national borders disrupted the natural land borders used by Indigenous people.

"We're one of the last frontiers of nature; this is some of the northernmost part of where humans can survive," he says. "We've got this vast wilderness here that I'm really kind of romantic about. But everything is connected."

Høegh is realistic about his own contribution to the planet's environmental changes.

"I create a film on a computer that's made with rare metals that are being mined somewhere else, making pollution somewhere else," he says. "I think it concerns all of us, questioning our relation to nature and what's left of it."

Well-Off-Man says the museum became interested in Greenland for a range of reasons; a 2021 legislative election there amounted to a referendum on whether to allow a uranium-mining project. The Inuit Ataqatigiit party, which opposed the project, performed well enough in the election to halt it.

Well-Off-Man, MoCNA director Patsy Phillips (Cherokee), and two board members headed to Greenland to hear artists' opinions on the proposed mine. Høegh was working on The Green Land when they met him, and Sumé: The Sound of a Revolution happened to be featured on their plane trip from Greenland to Iceland, where they had a connecting flight.

"It's a fascinating documentary that accompanies this Greenlandic rock band, the first band to ever sing in the Inuit language," she says. "It was kind of a cultural awakening: listening to somebody singing, addressing important issues in your language. I think that made people think about the culture and how to express themselves in different media."

The Green Land is shown in the main gallery at MoCNA. Well-Off-Man is interested to see how long people spend watching the 34-minute film, given many visitors are tourists who spend maybe 20 minutes at the museum, she says.

"It will be an experiment to see how the public reacts to the film, and also the idea of sitting down and allowing oneself to look at the madness of this wonderful nature in Greenland," she says. "It's a test; many people are not used to a slower pace."