in kalallisut/greenlandic ILULISSANI EQQUMIITSULIANUT KATERSUGAASIVIK is Greenland's most visited art museum and opened in 1995. The collection is based on a former private art collection that was given to the municipality and is expanded annually with new works.
On the 1st floor is a permanent exhibition with some of Greenland`s fines artists, and an exhibition dedicated to the local painter Peter Rosing. The same floor puts colonial-era paintings by Emanuel A. Petersen and Harald Moltke in a critical context.
The ground floor presents annually up to six international exhibitions that build a dialogue with the collection.
The house is located in the former colonial governor's residence, designed by Boysen Møller and built in 1923.
The museum hosts various cultural events and conducts courses and workshops for different age groups.
CURRENT EXHIBITION: Do You Remember the Sea (Ina Rosing)
It can be salty like the oceans or our tears; it can be sweet like the inland lakes or blood.
It manifests itself as firm and liquid, in the form of a tiny stream as well as a giant iceberg.
It falls in heavy drops and light snowflakes.
It gives life and bears death.
Water, the bearing element of this exhibition, has many forms. It always finds its way and proves what is in level.
Without the colorless water, our planet would not be blue.
None of these words bears any new wisdom. We tend to forget how important water is in its omnipresence, always around us, always in us.
To uncover even more important capabilities of water, we need artists who are able to unseal and share the water`s further qualities and attributes.
To Ina Rosing, water is the bearer of remembrance, liquefied memory nourishing her Danish-Greenlandic family tree.
Her father, the artist Jens Rosing, was born in 1925 to the local priest Otto Rosing in Ilulissat and was an important knowledge-bearer of old Inuit traditions. Otto himself was the son of a priest, Christian Rosing, who baptized the first Inuit in Ammassalik, today’s Tasiilaq on Greenland`s east coast. Christian`s mother, Haldora Helene Margrethe Karoline Rosing, born Petrussen, the child of a hunter`s family, with her mother tongue Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) but also fluent in Danish due to her years with a priest`s family in Paamiut, became the first trained Greenlandic midwife, educated in Copenhagen. She translated numerous Danish newspaper articles into Kalaallisut that have been published in the newspaper Atuagagdliutit.
Intertwined in and fully aware of a complex family history of Inuit tradition and missionary work in the name of the Danish kingdom, Ina Rosing wants to raise awareness of the vulnerability of the unique Greenlandic nature that reveals its magic through silence and ceaselessness, guarded by its animals and protected by its spirits. Her paintings bear a poetic, introverted visual language, often underlined by the use of the water-based paint gouache on big sheets of cotton.
Without exaggeration: Water is the amniotic fluid of this exhibition.
Andreas Hoffmann
Copenhagen based Ina Rosing has roots in both Greenland and Denmark. She studied at the School for Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen.
Ina`s work centers around a deep longing for nature, both concrete and as a concept, as a source of wisdom and a force of beauty, different from what is known and constituted within Western society. Her works are an exploration and rediscovery of her Inuit roots – an appreciation of ways of being and relating that has largely been suppressed, forgotten, and neglected.
This exhibition is supported by Nunafonden.
