Det tredje sted: Language cafe with Lisbeth Karline

This question, and others, will be raised in a performative language café curated by The Third Space in the Alvar Aalto library at Kunsten. The host is the Danish and Greenlandic artist Lisbeth Karline (f. 1981). Karline, who holds a degree from Aarhus Art Academy and lives in Ilulissat, is concerned with questions about Greenlandic culture and identity. She explores cultural codes as something that is fundamentally dynamic and in a state of transformation. In Karline’s work cultural meanings are not fixed, on the contrary they they can be hacked, challenged, and exposed to reappropriations. In her project White Out, which has been exhibited in Katuaq Cultural Center and The Greenlandic House in Copenhagen, she reinterpreted the Greelandic national costume by replacing the colourful pearl-studded dress with a white version. By removing the colours, she turned the costume into a blank canvas, thus posing the question: how are we as Greenlanders going to paint this surface? What does it mean to be Greenlandic today? By participating in the language café, you will be invited into a word workshop, where words become reinterpreted and explored using artistic techniques. The language café is for everyone regardless of age and background.

Photo: Mobile by Lisbeth Karline from the exhibition The White Out, 2015 © Lisbeth Karline

Language and identity are two things that are closely related, and a crucial strategy in the Danish colonization of Greenland was to spread Danish in the Greenlandic society. Today, language has once again become a key issue in the struggle for selfdetermination by a young generation of Greenlanders as well as artists and authors with a Greenlandic background. By employing language as a material through which to engage in questions of identity, The Third Space will organize two language cafées, one at Kunsten and one in the Greenlandic House. Thereby, we wish to highlight the potential of language to approach issues of identity, hybridity and the experience of being multicultural. In her essay, ”Ethnoaesthetics”, Pia Arke speaks about the need for a third space, where one can feel at home as a ’bastard’ – as multicultural. This space, however, is not neccessarily a physical space. More adequately speaking, the third space has to be imagined as a place that emerges when rigid cultural meanings and categories become rejected and reappropriated. In the language cafees, we want to turn attention to words and sentences as a creative material which are open to new meanings and narratives.  

Read more about Lisbeth Karline at sumut.dk/da/udstillinger/2015/whiteout/