Inuuteq Storch: Swing by at 14:14

For his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Inuuteq Storch brings two carefully selected photographic series into dialogue: Flesh (2016-2019) and Swing by at 14:14 (2020–2026), portraying the artist’s journeys to New York City and Tasiilaq in East Greenland, respectively. The series were selected for their geographical and aesthetic contrasts, as well as for their distinct visual languages and individual rhythms. Yet contrast itself is not Storch’s primary concern in the exhibition. Rather, it is the realisation that, within these two extremes and on their different terms, he was able to find himself.

The New York series Flesh is composed in a rapid, almost instinctive visual language, captured on the move rather than carefully considered or staged. Throughout the series, the gaze shifts between looking in and looking out – through panes of glass, glass façades, phone booths and windows. The recurring presence of glass adds another mediating layer to a fundamental condition of photography itself: looking through a lens at the lives of others from the outside. *Flesh* presents us with an observer who is present within the noise of the city, yet never entirely absorbed by it.

In Swing by at 14:14, the tone shifts markedly. Storch does not traditionally work with landscape photography. As he puts it, its beauty is too “easy” to capture. But the landscape of East Greenland could not be dismissed. Here, nature is overwhelming, too close to something fundamental to be overlooked. Following his journey to New York, Storch returned to Tasiilaq several times in search of shamanism, spirituality, nature, and a connection both to himself and to a past on the verge of disappearing. “East is where I found myself,” as he describes it. Here, the two underlying registers of his practice emerge: the quiet, poetic and spiritual set against the noisy, raw snapshots of the metropolis.

The exhibition emphasises this duality precisely: Flesh versus Swing by at 14:14. Framed works project from the wall with an almost sculptural presence, while others draw the viewer into expansive landscapes, fog, and the characteristic grain of analogue photography. This aesthetic pushes the images towards abstraction, opening up associations with a spiritual dimension – a space between the human, the natural and the cultural.

Yet one should be wary of being led by an expected iconography. Visitors may enter the exhibition with the assumption that photographs from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) will necessarily concern the sublimity of nature or a traditional hunting culture. Storch’s images insist on something else: friendship, community and the social life of youth.

A young girl pretends to make a call from a phone booth at Tasiilaq Airport. The phone line, however, has long since been disconnected, superseded by the mobile phone. A childhood friend, who works as a mechanic, accepts a challenge and positions himself at the top of a ladder, creating an almost absurd counter-image to conventional notions of the heroic. Photographs from a seal hunt carry an immediate, almost archetypal iconography: a figure in a snowy landscape, rifle raised, dressed in white camouflage. At first glance, it is an image recognisable from the visual language of traditional hunting culture. Yet the clothing is not traditional hunting attire at all. It is an ordinary painter’s coverall, stained with paint – simply the gear the two friends, both hunters, happened to have at hand. The iconographic promise the photographs appear to fulfil is simultaneously undermined by this very contingency, sharpening the point further: what the viewer expects to see is not necessarily what is actually taking place. Hunting scenes in which blood stains the ice are presented not as exotic spectacle, but as an integrated part of everyday life – alongside picturesque views of the cemetery and the path at Naasuliardarpi, the Valley of Flowers.

It is precisely within this tension that the exhibition’s central concern comes into focus: that human existence, despite the vast cultural and geographical distance between New York’s vertical architecture and the icebergs of East Greenland, is fundamentally much the same. We spend time with our friends and carry the same dreams and difficulties, the same fleeting moments of boredom, joy and lightness. Swing
by at 14:14 and Flesh therefore emerge not as two opposing narratives, but as two movements within the same composition – one directed outward, the other inward – united by a shared search for the self.