With the Home Rule Act of 1979, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) achieved an unprecedented level of political autonomy. Curiously, in the midst of this long-awaited confrontation with Danish colonial rule, the generation of artists whose careers began under expanded sovereignty shied away from political and cultural imagery. But not all was as it appeared. As I will discuss, Kalaallit and Tunumiit artists applied their commitment to self-determination toward redefining the conceptual foundations of media like installation and video, inventing formal and technical language that facilitated the continuity of cultural knowledge, but which also challenged colonial inequalities that persisted during the Home Rule era. Extending questions raised by these projects, in this talk I will ask how art should respond when colonialism adopts more opaque forms of power, masking control over land and resources through the strategic recognition of cultural difference.

David W. Norman is a Forsyth Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Greenland and the circumpolar north. He is particularly interested in the politics of form and media, as well as the broader histories and geographies of Indigenous conceptual art. He earned his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 2021.