PARIS.- Le Bicolore – La Maison du Danemark in Paris presents, from September 19 to November 23, 2025, the exhibition Gardiens de l’Océan, dedicated to the Inuit artist Inuuteq Storch, who represented Denmark at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Throughout this exhibition, Storch deconstructs the dominant narratives and preconceived ideas about Greenland, his home country, while proposing a personal, intimate, and political understanding of his environment and heritage.
The exhibition articulates four major themes: the sublime, intimacy, intergenerational knowledge, and the colonial past as well as the colonial future. Each theme is explored across a selection of works that are part of the emblematic series Keepers of the Ocean, Soon Will Summer Be Over, and Anachronism.
The first immersive space features three large lightboxes displaying striking images—a devil-horn gesture in front of an iceberg, the embrace of two young Kalaallit, two children lying under the sun’s warmth—while a panoramic wall print (6 × 2 m) presents the view from the artist’s home, a true opening into his world. These works serve as an introduction to the themes developed throughout the exhibition.
The second space, designed as a photographic gallery, takes visitors into the intimacy of everyday Greenlandic life. Danish, colonial, and Kalaallit traditions intersect here, revealing the complex identity of a region long represented through external perspectives.
The third space offers a video immersion with the looped projection, on a large screen, of four of the artist’s major works: The Way You Kill is the Way You Live, Either Way, This is Where We End, and We Grow Up to Forget Who We Were. These films expand his exploration of memory, territory, and belonging.
Soon Summer Will Be Over
Qaanaaq, the northernmost village of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), is also one of the most northerly inhabited places on Earth. Remote and sparsely populated, fewer than 700 inhabitants today, Qaanaaq was among the last Greenlandic territories to be colonized, between 1910 and 1930. This late context drew the attention of Danish expeditions, scientists, and photographers eager to document what they considered an “authentic” Inuit culture.
In the summer of 2023, Inuuteq Storch stayed in Qaanaaq. Immersing himself in the community, he built close ties with contemporaries, families, and hunters. For Storch, photography is never an end in itself: human relationships come first, and only within this trust-based exchange can the image emerge. The series presented here stems from that immersion: portraits, landscapes, and everyday scenes are displayed in a restrained installation of framed, suspended prints, echoing the classic conventions of photography.
Keepers of the Ocean
The works presented are drawn from Keepers of the Ocean (2022), a major photographic series published as a book. As in his earlier project At Home We Belong, Storch returns to Sisimiut, his hometown, reaffirming the strength of local territory and the communal roots of his photographic practice.
These profoundly intimate images explore the materiality of daily life: the tactility of surfaces and textures, clothing, snow, skin, hair, food, metal, and porcelain. Together, they form a fragmented self-portrait of the artist and his community, weaving an organic relationship between bodies, objects, and places. Some close-up shots, intentionally blurred or cropped, create a physical presence for the viewer within the image, almost corporeal.
Inuuteq Storch
Born in 1989, Inuuteq Storch grew up in Sisimiut, the second-largest town in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), located on the west coast and home to about 5,000 inhabitants. He continues to live and work there today. Like many Kalaallit artists of his generation, Storch trained in Denmark and abroad, notably at Fatamorgana, the Danish School of Art Photography in Copenhagen, and at the International Center of Photography in New York.
Through an intuitive, raw, poetic, often playful and humorous style, Storch captures with great freedom the everyday life and contemporary identity of the Kalaallit. Working primarily with analog photography, he embraces the materiality of the image—grain, overexposure, imperfections, visual accidents—that become expressive signatures.
Eschewing technical perfection and sophisticated equipment, Inuuteq Storch favors cameras with personal resonance: often gifts or hand-me-downs from family and friends. This individualized, intuitive approach underscores the profoundly personal bond he maintains with photography.
