Jukke Rosing & Marte Lill Somby

28.10. – 28.11.2021

On the gables of Bloks 2-9 you can see 38 photographic works by Jukke Rosing and Marte Lill Somby. The works show impressions from the Greenlandic and Sami landscapes and cultures.

Rosing and Somby are both what is called voiceless. Rosing is Greenlandic, but does not speak Greenlandic. Somby is Sami, but does not speak Sami. With the exhibition, they question their voicelessness, or languagelessness. Who decides who you are and where you belong? When are you proper and when are you wrong? Who sets the criteria for identity and who approves?

Throughout their upbringing, both Rosing and Somby have experienced a lack of tolerance and accept, and experienced identity crisis due to their voicelessness. They have experienced being part of a culture, and at the same time placed outside of it. To feel less worthy, less Sami, less Greenlandic. They experience a vulnerability as voiceless, that affects their fundamental sense of belonging.

In their photographic works, they document the Sami and Greenlandic costumes, nature and the landscape as well-known markers for the two cultures. The works depict both the differences between them, and at the same time manage to describe the many similarities, for example in the work “In This Together” where the Sami boots skaller and the Greenlandic kamiit together with a decomposed animal skull form the motif.

Voicelessness and vulnerability are themes in Rosing and Somby’s works. The vulnerability in people, nature and history are shown through the landscape of Norway and Greenland, the reindeers, and through national costumes from their cultures.

Jukke Rosing and Marte Lill Somby met each other for the first time during Nuuk Nordic Culture Festival in 2017, where they exhibited together with six other artists at Nuuk Art Museum in the exhibition “Assinga 4×4”. Only there did they find out that their family’s history had been intertwined through the reindeer station in Itivnera in Nuuk Fjord.

Somby’s great-grandfather crossed the ice sheet in 1888, and returned to Greenland in 1905 to investigate the possibilities for reindeer herding in Nuuk Fjord. In 1952, Rosing’s grandfather established a reindeer station in Itivnera. When he moved to Denmark in 1959-60, Somby’s uncle took over the operation of the reindeer herding station.

The exhibition is presented as part of the Nuuk Nordic Culture Festival.