This chapter will consider grey as an aesthetic operation that drives towards a critical positioning of contemporary Inuit art in relation to climate change. I consider how Inuit artists recuperate and deploy an aesthetic of grey with a view to uncovering the traumas of colonial encounter that are readily obscured by the assemblage of climate science. Such obscurity is exacerbated by the ‘post-truth’ context with which climate science contends. Thus, the grey of contemporary Inuit art appears against the grey of a critical exhaustion, as Bruno Latour diagnoses. In this respect, I consider the aesthetics of casting Inuit art against climate science – to cast grey on grey – as a means to challenge the discursive scaffolding that upholds the tradition of Enlightenment thinking. Furthermore, I will argue that by greying the grey of the post-truth moment with the aesthetic operations of Inuit art, one can witness the appearance of the latter's decolonising force as it redistributes itself as a philosophical negative.

I position artworks by Pia Arke, Tim Pitsiulak and Shuvinai Ashoona as a disavowed negative of Western science and philosophy. Yet I argue that precisely from such a positioning, their work returns to adhere to the scientific assemblage, generating a phantasmatic topography charged with vital elements and mythological actants that perturb the study of Arctic environments. I consider these to be decolonising forces that emerge from fundamental splits at the heart of a colonial episteme. Thus, I situate the greying effects of contemporary Inuit art as a means of resuscitating a common root between Inuit culture and climate science in the traumatic primal scenes of colonial encounter in the Arctic. I suggest that the grey operation that animates the work of many contemporary Inuit artists may be read by way of George Bataille's phantasmology, in part because his work was explicitly addressed and critiqued by a generation of Greenlandic artists such as Pia Arke, but also because its decolonial trajectory may be developed further by reading it alongside the work of subsequent generations of Inuit artists in the circumpolar North. Through the anarchical vectors of shattered ice, sticky phantasms of colonial displacement and residual soma, these artists grey the predicament of climate change.