Half Hidden

Anne Haaning

This exposition conveys the final results of Anne Haaning's artistic research project Half Hidden, which she has been conducting as a PhD Candidate with Oslo National Academy of the Arts in collaboration with the Academy of Arts, UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Through the prism of the mineral cryolite, extracted from Greenland by Denmark in the years 1857–1985, the project seeks to uncover hidden structures and histories imbedded in technology. It has done so by exploring analogical correspondences at a specific intersection of technology, myth and colonialism; the method it employs to this end is an investigation of the ontological context of digital image production. Denmark extracted the rare mineral cryolite in Greenland between the mid nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries. Essential to the mass production of aluminium, cryolite proved critical for the shipbuilding and aviation industries during World Wars I and II. The mineral was so important that the cryolite mine was put under US administration during the German occupation of Denmark in World War II. But this history has been virtually erased from the collective memory and consciousness of the Danes. Today, the flooded mine is a scar in the Greenlandic landscape covered by a pervasive mirroring water plane concealing a significant part of the Danish-Greenlandic colonial history.