Mathias Danbolt

This article takes the Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth’s controversial art project Hornsleth Village Project Uganda (2006-2007) as a starting point for a discussion of the relation between aesthetics and ethics in contemporary art. Far from advocating that art must be ethically ‘good’ to be of importance, the authors question why transgressive and provocative socially engaged art projects frequently perform, repeat and consolidate patriarchal, racist and colonial structures. The article shows how Hornsleth’s neocolonial ethnographic project enables a reenactment of Western colonial subjectivity, embodied by the artist in the form of a bad ass white avantgarde masculinity, untouchable and above critique.

How to imagine alternative forms of attachments and intimacies beside the centrifugal force of compulsory coupledom? This is one of the central questions in this creative exchange between an artist (Fleckner) and art historian (Danbolt), using wood cuts and words respectively in an examination of imaginaries of relation and belonging. With an interest in the power of esthetic figurations in shaping desire and politics, the article’s cross-medium exchange considers the importance–and difficulty–of reconfiguring established plots and institutions of intimacy. While the prints take their starting point in a critical reconfiguration of the visual tradition of mapping relationality in the form of couple-oriented family trees, the textual responses move between the genres of the essayistic, theoretical, and diaristic in an attempt to consider alternative modes of valuing and acknowledging relations. Refusing to let go of the desire for a revolution in the structures of intimacy in times where alternatives to hetero- and homonormative arrangements of desire seem increasingly sparse, the text flaunts an unabashed belief in the world-making power of the esthetic and its ability to produce utopian performatives that gives sense to ways of feeling and relating differently.

Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called ‘racist liquorice’, the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

Published in Nordic Journal of Migration Research Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017: DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-0013

Abstract: Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated public debates about race and racism in recent years. Through an analysis of a 2014 media debate about the so-called 'racist liquorice', the article suggests that the fight for the right to consume racialized products sheds light on how 'epistemologies of ignorance' of race and colonialism operate in Denmark. Focusing on how questions of history, memory and nationhood feature in the media texts, the article introduces the concepts of retro racism and racialized affective consumption to capture the affective and historical dynamics at play in debates on racism in Denmark. While the former term points to how racism becomes positioned as something always already retrograde in a Danish context, the latter relates to how a rhetoric of pleasure and enjoyment gets mobilized in the sustaining of a whitewashed image of Danish national community.

https://journal-njmr.org/articles/abstract/10.1515/njmr-2017-0013/

At the 2009 Nordic Culture Forum summit in Berlin that centered on the profiling and branding of the Nordic region in a globalized world, one presenter stood out from the crowd. The lobbyist Annika Sigurdardottir delivered a speech that called for the establishment of ‘‘The United Nations of Norden’’: A Nordic union that would gather the nations and restore Norden’s role as the ‘‘moral superpower of the world.’’ Sigurdardottir’s presentation generated such a heated debate that the organizers had to intervene and reveal that the speech was a performance made by the artists Jeuno JE Kim and Ewa Einhorn. This article takes Kim and Einhorn’s intervention as a starting point for a critical discussion of the history and politics of Nordic image-building. The article suggests that the reason Kim and Einhorn’s speech passed as a serious proposal was due to its meticulous mimicking of two discursive formations that have been central to the debates on the branding of Nordicity over the last decades: on the one hand, the discourse of ‘‘Nordic exceptionalism,’’ that since the 1960s has been central to the promotion of a Nordic political, socio- economic, and internationalist ‘‘third way’’ model, and, on the other hand, the discourse on the ‘‘New Nordic,’’ that emerged out of the New Nordic Food-movement in the early 2000s, and which has given art and culture a privileged role in the international re-fashioning of the Nordic brand. Through an analysis of Kim and Einhorn’s United Nations of Norden (UNN)-performance, the article examines the his- torical development and ideological underpinnings of the image of Nordic unity at play in the discourses of Nordic exceptionalism and the New Nordic. By focusing on how the UNN-project puts pressure on the role of utopian imaginaries in the construction of Nordic self-images, the article describes the emergence of a discursive framework of New Nordic Exceptionalism.

The Danish performance and activist collective dunst has over the last decade made their mark on Copenhagen with their outrageous genderfuck performances that trash all forms of respectability and political correctness. This article anal/yses dunst practice of taking the anal stage to the stage, asking whether it is possible to tease out a queer sexual politic in dunst’s incoherent attacks on the “normalcy dictatorship”.

More about the DTJ issue: http://www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk/news.post110.html