Jørgen Meldgaard’s film works and books on art from the Arctic (original) (raw)

Atanarjuat (2001) and Eskimo (1933) Cinematic representations of Inuit culture and orality

In an intense postcolonial context such as that of the Canadian Arctic, cultural and social tensions are such that they are bound to permeate many works of art, whether because they indirectly reveal those tensions, or because they are used as a direct means of expressing them from one viewpoint or another. The films studied in this work are two masterpieces, each in its own way, and both connect particular aesthetics with particular politics of Inuit/White relations. The emphasis is put on the relevance of audiovisual media to reinvent a modern Inuit orality.

Representations of Inuit Culture in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Material Culture Review Revue De La Culture Materielle, 2007

This paper examines issues of representation and interpretation of Inuit art at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The author uses a semiotic and post-colonial approach to analyze the objects and informational text used in the museum's exhibit of Inuit art. Questions are raised about the aim of the exhibition, its intended audience, the messages communicated and exactly whose history is presented. Problems associated with the signifying elements are discussed in light of the ability for deeply held attitudes to be revealed through the choices made by the writers and designers of the exhibit.

Exchanging stories. Art and identity of an Arctic people

Nordisk Museologi

Sámi Stories. Art and Identity of an Arctic People is an exhibition created and curated by the Northern Norway Art Museum and Tromsø University Museum to commemorate the bicentennial celebrations of the Norwegian Constitution. The exhibition debuted at the Northern Norway Art Museum in Tromsø, Norway, before traveling to New York City and Anchorage, Alaska. This paper shares stories to demonstrate the roles that museums can play in the interpretation and representation of Sámi cultures. Additionally, the shared discussion will advance educational outreach in Alaska and elsewhere concerning similarities and di erences surrounding the adoption of indigenous concepts, practices, values and worldviews.

An Alternative History of the Arctic The Origins of Ethnographic Filmmaking, the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Indigenous Cinema

Visual Anthropology Review, 2020

The Fifth Thule Expedition (1921-24) generated extensive international attention through publications such as Knud Rasmussen's best seller, Across Arctic America (1927). It also appropriated thousands of Indigenous artifacts, shipped mostly to the National Museum of Denmark. The collection includes a little-known film, Med Hundeslaede gennem Alaska (With Dog Sled Through Alaska, 1927) shot in 1923-24 by Danish filmmaker and photographer Leo Hansen, in close collaboration with Rasmussen. The extant film materials reflect Rasmussen's status as an embedded ethnographic explorer because of his Greenlandic heritage and Indigenous language capacity. Through archival research, this article examines early Arctic cinema and early twentieth-century representation of Inuit cultures.

Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq

2021

The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, rather than its central axis. We argue that, in consequence, the Oqaluttuaq narratives not only “provincialize” the tradition of hyperborean colonial memories, but also provide a postcolonial mnemonic construction of Greenland as a place of multiple histories, plural peoples, and heterogenous tempor...