Primary Colors for the Fourth World: The Nonfigurative Sovereignty of Synnøve Persen and Frederik “Kunngi” Kristensen

Abstract

Summary This essay examines the anti-colonial conditions under which two artists gravitated toward radically reduced form. In 1977, Synnøve Persen (b. 1950) designed a tricolor screen print that inspired an iconic flag. The flag was hoisted at barricades along the Áltá river where water defenders blockaded the site of a planned hydroelectric dam and demanded recognition for the Sámi people’s ancestral rights to their homelands, and in 2017, it reappeared alongside nine monochrome paintings at documenta14. Across the same timeline, Frederik “Kunngi” Kristensen (1952–2021) charted another path for abstract form. While political organizers called for Indigenous self-determination in Kalaallit Nunaat in the mid-1970s, Kunngi began producing geometrically abstract images that had no basis in art historical or culturally specific precedents. For Persen, monochromy reconfigured collective memory, underscoring the Áltá struggle’s continued purchase on contemporaneity, while for Kunngi, who resisted comparison to avant-garde painting traditions, nonfigurative techniques indexed the new possibilities that an independent Greenlandic arts institution promised.