Visual notes

“During her residency in Qaanaaq, the northernmost town in Greenland, Anastasia Mityukova measured the distance separating the imaginaries of the Arctic Circle from its reality. For several years, she has been studying, deconstructing and confronting the Western visual culture of the North Pole with reality. Shaped by countless documentary films, illustrated books or photojournalistic reportages, it populated by explorers acclaimed as heroes, a fauna that has become a generic symbol of global warming, and immaculate landscapes. It promotes fantasies of purity, adventure, exoticism and authenticity, obscuring more complicated realities: multifaceted geopolitical interests, a colonial history that is not always discussed as such, or a certain ambivalence about climate change. The artist seizes on these contradictions to bring nuance and complexity to these representations, and to underline the extent to which our gaze is constructed and conditioned.”

“The exhibition presents part of the photographic corpus produced by the artist in Greenland. She considers them more as an accumulation of visual notes that can be mobilised for her projects, or as an index confronting the reality of the field with media stereotypes, than as an independent work.”