"The thirty-six-year-old Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch didn't know much about Inuit culture growing up. In school, for instance, he was taught about ancient Greek deities, but there was no talk of a native pantheon of gods. About ninety per cent of the Greenlandic population are Lutherans, a legacy of Danish colonial rule. So thoroughly did European missionaries stigmatize Inuit beliefs that, even now, the more pious members of an older generation consider an appreciation of Indigenous spirits to be a sign of something demonic afoot."
"The word "Torngarsuk"-a shape-shifting Inuit spirit believed to assist shamans-is today used as a swear word. Storch, though, saw in the deity an opportunity to rediscover the culture of his ancestors. Four years ago, he got a tattoo of Torngarsuk along the span of his left forearm, in the form of a bearlike creature with beady eyes. In a recent conversation, he described himself as part of a generation of younger Greenlanders trying to rediscover Inuit traditions."
Inuuteq Storch is a thirty-six-year-old Greenlandic photographer who explores erased Inuit traditions by seeking traces in everyday life. He confronts the legacy of Danish colonialism and Lutheran stigmatization of Indigenous beliefs, exemplified by the use of 'Torngarsuk' as a swear word. Storch adopted a Torngarsuk tattoo and documents tattoos—once suppressed—across Greenland. Between 2015 and 2025 he photographed candid portraits and mundane tableaux: people eating, taking out the trash, catnapping in sleeping bags, and revealing traditional markings. Fifty-four photographs appear in a solo exhibition, Soon Will Summer Be Over, at MoMA P.S.1, where the stark Greenlandic landscape remains a persistent presence.
Read at The New Yorker
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