Soon Will Summer Be Over (Venice Edition), 2023

Inuuteq storch

Curator Lena Essling on a photographic series capturing everyday life in Sisimiut, Greenland — a place shaped by both colonialism and climate change, and a territory still contested by world powers.

Lena Essling: My name is Lena Essling, and I work as a curator with responsibility for the museum’s moving image and performance collections. This is a relatively small part of the overall holdings, but probably the fastest-growing relative to its size. 

Soon Will Summer Be Over is a work that falls somewhat outside of my remit, though I’d argue that it can be described as cinematic. It’s a project by photographer Inuuteq Storch. I had been following his practice for some time when he was invited to exhibit in the Danish pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. For the first time, Denmark was represented in this prestigious context by an artist from the autonomous Danish territory Kalaallit Nunaat, or Greenland.

In Venice, I was immediately struck by the work, and particularly this series, with its somewhat off-kilter title. Storch portrays people and spaces in his immediate surroundings, capturing everyday life in a place shaped by both colonialism and climate change, a territory still feuded over by world powers. His photographs have the rawness of street photography, yet they also resonate with images in the museum’s collection—from Wolfgang Tillman’s nightlife scenes to Nils Strindberg’s documentation of the 1897 Andrée polar expedition. Storch is deeply interested in the process of collecting, and in photographic and film archives, whether privately held or historically assembled by colonial powers.

We later meet over Zoom, with Inuuteq Storch joining from his home in Sisimiut. I ask how he would feel about an acquisition and what works might be available. He turns out to be a very friendly man, and very concise—an artist in the process of recentring himself after a dizzying period of international attention. He’s happy about my inquiry, but leaves the selection entirely up to me and the museum. All he wants is peace and quiet to focus on his work. “Though I’d be happy to come talk about the pictures once you’ve got them installed!” he says.

In order to complete an acquisition, the museum often needs to seek external funding. I submit a grant application to the New Carlsberg Foundation, which supports Danish, but also Greenlandic, art. The application is successful, and we are lucky enough to acquire the full work as it was shown in Venice—a photographic installation comprising a total of 56 pictures in five different formats, a selection of which is shown here.