The history of Denmark and its former territory, the now self-governing state, Greenland, is not without its controversies and residual bitterness. Denmark’s national broadcaster, dr (Danmarks Radio), however, is addressing a more positive episode from this particular colonial relationship in its latest radio drama, Menneskenes Land (Land of Men): the ultimately ill-fated expedition of the Danish missionary, Hans Egede, to the Arctic island’s east coast in 1721.

“It is an incredibly dramatic story,” says the six-part drama’s English-born writer Christian Gamst Miller-Harris. “Egede comes across as a complete drama queen in his memoir. He is strong willed and overpoweringly devout but also melodramatic, so we had to tone him down to make him believable.”

Norwegian-born Egede – the “Apostle of Greenland” – was sent by the Danish king to colonise Greenland and persuade the indigenous population of the virtues of Christianity. This he did with fire-and-brimstone teaching and a level of compassion that was unusual for missionaries of the time. He also founded Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.

“This is a story of colonisation,” admits Miller-Harris. “That’s never really positive but Egede did it in a Danish way, with no soldiers or massacres. It would have been worse if the Dutch, who were hunting whales up there at the time, had got there first. For me the story of Denmark and Greenland is neither 100 per cent horror, nor 100 per cent glory.”

Miller-Harris and his co-writer, Lasse Lindsteen (whose idea the drama was), chose to avoid overt reflections on the current state of affairs between Denmark and Greenland but they were sensitive to the historical issues. “Though one of the Greenlanders in the cast was concerned we were depicting Egede as too benevolent at the start, they have found it quite balanced,” says Miller-Harris. “It was also a challenge to evoke the landscape of Greenland on radio,” continues Miller-Harris, “but we tell the story from the viewpoint of Egede looking back on that period in his life in retirement in the Danish countryside and he described it vividly.”

For the cast, dr is drawing on its – understandably limited – repertory company, so you’ll hear voices from its global television hit Forbrydelsen (The Killing): Thomas W Gabrielsson, in the title role, and Henrik Birch, as the captain of the ship that bore Egede to Greenland.

Menneskenes Land airs from 23 October on P1 and will be available as a podcast on dr.dk/radiodrama.

Poul Erik Tøjner, director of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, talks us through its new exhibition, arctic, which runs until 2 February 2014.

The Arctic’s not just about endeavour, triumph and failure against the elements. Artists have always been intrigued, too – eager to track and investigate the motives of solo explorers, resource-hungry nations and, sometimes, just to stare into the wilderness.

In contemporary artist John Bock’s video work “Skipholt”, we follow an explorer who struggles across a rugged landscape wearing a monstrous, poorly mounted backpack. The film recalls the finest images of noble, heroic men of great stamina, for it is based on one of our basic stories: “Man Against Nature”. But it delivers these icons up to parody.

We find another wanderer in Darren Almond’s video work “Arctic Pull”, in which parody has now been replaced by a monomaniac struggling through a blizzard in the dark, where everything is an indistinguishable mass around the protagonist who pulls a sledge across what can barely be called a landscape.

Finally we find a third wayfarer in Guido van der Werve’s video “Nummer Acht, Everything is going to be alright” (Number Eight, Everything…). Here we meet a man who is walking across the ice towards us, closely followed by an ultra-modern icebreaker that ploughs up a channel where the man has just passed.

Three men in a landscape, all images of “Man in the Wilderness” – and above all images with antecedents in a history that is itself full of images. Louisiana’s major arctic show presents this historical background as a foundational narrative of our culture and its use of images and ideas, myths and stagings.

For that, more than anything else, is what the story of the conquest of the Arctic and the race to the North Pole was: a major cultural project that called upon the greatest and most reckless heroes, including some who should have been wiser than they were. Heroes who were also nourished and supported by a culture that for 150 years, from the late 1700s on, hungered for a meeting with the unknown, and staged its own desire afterwards in the great images and stories and ideas that came to define the magical North – often before they had even been there.

arctic encompasses a basic narrative of our culture and its use of images and constructs, myths and mise en scènes. Louisiana’s exhibition unfolds the dream of the far North as image, cultural ideal and scientific field. From the Romantic Age to present-day contemporary art, the Arctic plays a role as a place where everything terminates in endless whiteness and something new can begin. An untouched landscape, terrifying and dangerous. Once a territory to be conquered, the Arctic today could well mark the perimeter of human power.