A different Greenland – told through trees

Greenland is not just ice and mountains – but also trees. Author, photographer and long-time Greenland traveler Finn Larsen documents this with his pictures.

For the winter holidays, The Green Museum will open the special exhibition ORPIK – Trees in Greenland, which, with many pictures and individual objects, provides a different perspective on Greenland and the man-made landscapes that rarely feature in the story of the country.

“With ORPIK we want to show a Greenland that many people don’t know. The trees tell a story about climate, people and landscapes that goes back millions of years – and is still changing today,” says the museum's director Anne Bjerrekær.

Trees in the everyday landscape
The exhibition's focal point lies in Finn Larsen's photographs. Since the early 1990s, he has documented everyday landscapes in towns and villages in South and West Greenland. Here, he has followed how more and more trees have grown up near houses, in gardens and in urban spaces – some planted with great care, others more randomly. Along the coasts and fjords there are huge areas of low scrub forest, in some places up to 4-5 meters high, and taller forests have now also been erected. The photographs show a changing landscape and challenge the notion of Greenland as an almost treeless country.

Finn Larsen is uncompromising in his documentation, and as a comment on the current international situation, he writes in the introduction to the exhibition: ”"Personally, I don't want to own anything or anyone, not even the Greenland image, but I want to expand it.".

Finn Larsen's work is accompanied by texts written by agronomist and Arctic ambassador for the Kingdom of Denmark Kenneth Høegh, museum director at Narsarsuaq Museum in Greenland Ole Guldager and exhibition and collection manager at M/S Museet for Søfart Sarah Giersing. The texts are from the book ORPIK, published 2023 by Arkitekturforlaget B.

Greenland's trees through millions of years

At the Green Museum, Finn Larsen's contemporary photographs are put into dialogue with the museum's own objects, including the museum's oldest object: a 2.3 million-year-old larch trunk found in northeastern Greenland.

Together with driftwood, birch trunks and herbarium sheets, the objects tell the story of Greenland's tree growth: from lush forests before the ice ages, through periods when wood became a scarce resource due to overexploitation, to today's afforestation in a changing climate.

The exhibition ORPIK – Trees in Greenland can be experienced from Sunday, February 8th and for three months at the Green Museum at Auning.