The research network The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories brings together researchers working with art archives and materials primarily related to Danish-Norwegian colonial projects in the Caribbean, India, West Africa, Greenland, Iceland and Sápmi, and Swedish colonial projects in the Caribbean, West Africa and Sápmi from the 17th century and onwards. In dialogue with theoretical discussions in fields such as global art history, decolonial studies, postcolonial studies, and indigenous studies, the project seeks to develop new conceptual and methodological approaches to the writing of transcultural art histories, attentive to processes of cultural syncretism, aesthetic exchange and cultural amalgamation. The research project not only seeks to foster new research, it also seeks to act as an agent of capacity building in the museum sector by stimulating the development of new curatorial and communicative strategies for working with transcultural perspectives and colonial histories.
The project’s contention is that the political investment in narratives of national and cultural homogeneity in the Nordic region have overshadowed the traditions of transcultural exchange, influence, and conflict engrained in histories of colonial encounters. The colonial inflection of the definition of art has also framed aesthetic practices by the colonized as ‘ethnographica’ to be studied by anthropologist not art historians.
The affiliated scholars are:
- Anna Vestergaard Jørgensen, PhD Fellow, UniCPH
- David Winfield Norman, PhD Fellow, UniCPH
- Mathias Danbolt (PI), Associate Professor
- Nivi Katrine Christensen, Director, Nuuk Art Museum
- Gunvor Guttorm, Professor, Sámi University of Applied Science
- Monica Grini, Assistant Professor, University of Tromsø – Arctic University
- Ann-Sofie Nielsen Gremaud, Assistant Professor, University of Iceland, Reykjavik
- Temi Odumosu, Senior Lecturer, Malmö University, Sweden
- Åsa Bharathi Larsson, Assistant Professor, University of Uppsala
- Dorthe Aagesen, Senior Curator, SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Randi Godø, Curator, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway
- Lill-Ann Körber, Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark
- Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer, Senior Research Fellow, Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen
The project is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation
Ann-Sofie Gremaud 