SEA ICE 

Isle Hessner reflects on different weapon cultures in sculptural works

September 6, 2025—January 25, 2026

The exhibition SEA ICE is a further reflection of Isle Hessner’s exhibition Aallaaseqarneq (“carrying firearms”), which was shown at Nuuk Art Museum in 2023-24. The exhibition focused on the use of firearms for war and hunting, respectively, and thus thematized the use of weapons in a Western context, as a tool to take human life, versus the use of weapons in a Greenlandic context, as a work tool to keep people alive.

SEA ICE presents the ten works that Hessner created for Allaaseqarneq, together with a site-specific installation created for this exhibition. With the new installation, Hessner shifts the emphasis from an implicit discussion of war and its devastating consequences to a narrative about the conditions of survival.

- I invite audiences to share a personal experience of weapon culture as materialised via “storis” — the sea ice or pack ice which, in my childhood, prevented open-water hunting, but at the same time invited hunters to bring down game directly on the ice floes. While the hunters crept up on the animals further out on the ice, we (children) played and leapt on the floes among the firearms. In the process, we acquired a relaxed and realistic view of the use of weapons; we were, quite literally, served the results directly at our feet out on the ice.

The exhibition is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation, the Augustinus Foundation and the Beckett Foundation.