COPENHAGEN.- Copenhagen Contemporary opened its doors to Fire & Ice – On Belonging and Becoming in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), a group exhibition bringing together eight contemporary artists who live, work or have roots in Kalaallit Nunaat, Greenland. The exhibition presents both established artists and a new generation of talent. Across visual art, performance, literature and activism, the artists insist on telling their own stories — at a time when Greenland occupies more of the world's attention than ever, yet is rarely given the floor to speak for itself.
The majority of the works are newly commissioned, created specifically for Fire & Ice. This makes the exhibition eight answers to what it means to be connected to Kalaallit Nunaat in 2026 — not as a look back, but as a living interpretation of the present.
What does it mean to belong?
In Fire & Ice, belonging is not something you have, but something you do. It is a place you can point to on the map. It is the people who came before you. It is the history that shapes the present, and what you pass on yourself. It looks different for each artist, and each of them speaks of identity, trauma, resilience and the relationship to a landscape that is at once a home and something that can be lost. There is no single Kalaallit Nunaat. No single Greenland.
"Fire & Ice is about the right to tell your own story. At a moment when everyone is talking about Greenland, the exhibition hands the floor back to the people it is actually about. Eight artists step forward as the authors of their own images — not as symbols in a political debate, but as artists in their own right. In a work of art, we are allowed to experience the world through someone else's eyes, conveyed through the senses, poetry and aesthetics. It is an exhibition about belonging, about anger and grief, resilience and hope — and about everything that no headline can contain," says Marie Laurberg, Director of Copenhagen Contemporary.
Ice and Fire
Two temperatures run through the entire exhibition. Fire is the voice that insists on being heard: the grief, the anger, the will to act. Ice is what freezes over: silence, systems, loss — everything that was never said aloud. The exhibition exists in the space between cold and warmth. Between what is inherited and what may still come into being. The title is inspired by Jessie Kleemann's poetry from Arkhtics Dolors (2021).
Eight voices, one exhibition
In the video work Sangens kraft (The Power of Song, 2026), Jessie Kleemann (b. 1959) retells an Inuit myth about a man whose kayak slowly lifts from the sea as he hears singing. The work was filmed at the Wadden Sea, where Kleemann performs herself, accompanied by a soundtrack — an image of how art, like the song in the Inuit myth, lifts us out of the familiar. Kleemann is a poet and performance artist, and one of the central artistic figures connected to Kalaallit Nunaat; she previously headed the art school in Nuuk and has exhibited at institutions including SMK (the National Gallery of Denmark).
In Lisbeth Karline Poulsen's (b. 1981) Inunngorsimanngitsut (The Unborn), 43,000 red beads spill from a small box. It is among the smaller works in the exhibition, yet carries great artistic and poetic force. Taking the 1960s coil case (spiralsagen) as its point of departure, each bead represents one of the unborn children that were a direct consequence of the systematic IUD contraception the Danish state imposed on Greenlandic women without their consent. Poulsen was born in Nanortalik and lives and works in Nuuk.
Emilia Slvsten (b. 1996) moves in an in-between position between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat, exploring her own origins in the work Sukkertoppen: a dreamlike, topographic landscape of the West Greenlandic town of Maniitsoq, built from several thousand cast sugarloaves. The title of the work — Slvsten's largest presentation to date — is Maniitsoq's old Danish name, and so the work becomes an image of its own point: a seemingly innocent material carries a violent colonial history, and a Danish place name conceals a place where the artist herself has roots. Slvsten works with sculpture, installation, performance and text, and trained at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
Martin Brandt Hansen (b. 1990) places everyday life and culture behind museum glass and turns the ethnographic gaze around: who is really being looked at? A visual artist working with installation and sculpture, for Fire & Ice he creates a large-scale new presentation as part of Copenhagen Contemporary's Horizons Program, with three newly commissioned works: Nuuk Imeq, Mitaartut and Assakaasoq.
In the video work The Green Land, Inuk Silis Hegh (b. 1972) intervenes in the landscape of South Greenland. The pervasive green is at once an image of hope and of the radioactive substances historically explored in the ground below. Created together with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, the work circles the plans to mine rare earth elements — and lets nature itself become a co-creator. Hegh is a visual artist and filmmaker from Qaqortoq.
With Soon Will Summer Be Over, Inuuteq Storch (b. 1989) presents a series of photographs from North Greenland — hunting, catch and change, seen from within. Storch is a photographer, born and based in Sisimiut, and one of the most striking new voices in Greenlandic art: he was the first Greenlandic artist to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale in 2024 with Rise of the Sunken Sun, and in 2026 presented the solo exhibition Soon Will Summer Be Over at MoMA PS1 in New York.
"Eriagisaq" Kim Kleist-Eriksen (b. 1985) contributes, among other things, a carved walrus skull gifted to the Danish royal couple, where traditional craft meets contemporary art. He works precisely at the intersection of traditional Greenlandic craft and contemporary art.
In Meant To Meet – sisamat, Julie Edel Hardenberg (b. 1971) works with a strikingly bodily material: fabric and human hair, joined together into a single work. For Fire & Ice she presents a reinterpretation of the piece, in which the intimate, almost personal material meets the artist's ongoing engagement with language, power and self-determination — threads that run through her entire practice, from early language projects to photography and activism. Hardenberg is a visual artist and activist, and one of the voices in Greenlandic art who has most consistently made language itself a battleground.
Fire & Ice also spans literature and performance, and is accompanied by a publication featuring new texts by, among others, the artists themselves.
