Julie Edel Hardenberg
Greenland’s complicated history informs the work of Inuk/Kalaaleq artist Julie Edel Hardenberg, who lives and works in Nuuk, the small capital city located on the southwest coast.
She explores identity, culture, and language from a postcolonial perspective to address mental colonization, cultural assimilation, and socialization structures.
The artist says:
Julie Edel Hardenberg (Greenland, born 1971), Oqaluttuarisaaneq / History, 2019, nylon flag, human hair, 57 1/16 x 43 5/16 inches. Private collection. © Julie Edel Hardberg
“As a child of a Danish father and a Greenlandic mother, I am a descendant of both Kalaallit Inuit and Danish missionaries characterized by a life with opposing interests for my identity formation, an ambivalence, and a kind of schizophrenic state, characterized by an environment of gender / cultural struggles and opposing paradigms, where narratives are created and used to affirm rights. Therefore, throughout my upbringing and existence, I have had to find myself in the ambivalent position—between power and powerlessness. Partly to create my own raison d’être [reason for existence], then to articulate what it means to me to live in a (post) colonial society, with its established colonial structures.”
The work Oqaluttuarisaaneq, which translates to “history” in Kalaallisut, consists of a recognizable Danish flag—red with a white Scandinavian cross—stitched together with tufts of black hair. It also resembles broken threads, as if the tattered flag is unraveling or being sewn back together. These visual details grapple with the complex history of Greenland, which was ruled by Denmark from the early 18th century until 1979, when home rule began. Greenland approved the Self-Government Act in a referendum in 2019. Hardenberg’s work is a postcolonial statement that questions what flag bests represents Greenland and its Inuit inhabitants today.
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