Mathias Danbolt | University of Copenhagen (original) (raw)
Papers by Mathias Danbolt
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
This article takes the Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth’s controversial art project Hornsleth... more 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.
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
I sommeren 2013 mødtes Christina Hee Pedersen med Mathias Danbolt og Dorthe Staunæs til en samtal... more I sommeren 2013 mødtes Christina Hee Pedersen med Mathias Danbolt og Dorthe Staunæs til en samtale om den affektive vending. Det blev en samtale, der vedrører affektive drejninger og dissonanser på mange planer
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2019
How to imagine alternative forms of attachments and intimacies beside the centrifugal force of co... more 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.
NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2014
Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2017
Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated publ... more 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.
Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2017
Published in Nordic Journal of Migration Research Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017: DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-001... more 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/
Article on the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK's artist book 'Voluspå' and exhibition 'Ma... more Article on the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK's artist book 'Voluspå' and exhibition 'Marie Høeg Meets Klara Lidén.'
from "Talende Bilder: Tekster om kunst og visuell kultur" (Bergen Spartacus: 2010)
At the 2009 Nordic Culture Forum summit in Berlin that centered on the profiling and branding of ... more 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.
in "re.act.feminism––a performing archive # 2", eds. Beatrice E. Stammer og Bettina Knaup (Berlin... more in "re.act.feminism––a performing archive # 2", eds. Beatrice E. Stammer og Bettina Knaup (Berlin and London: Verlag fuer Moderne Kunst/Live Art Development Agency, 2013).
![Research paper thumbnail of Den nye kjedsomheten: Om Elmgreen & Dragsets "Biography" [The New Boredom: On Elmgreen & Dragset’s Biography]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/53042600/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](published at Kunstkritikk.no, 10.24.14.
in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research, ed. Renate Lorenz (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014... more in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research, ed. Renate Lorenz (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 136-161.
in "Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories", edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (M... more in "Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories", edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester University Press, 2016).
from FRANK Conversations (May 2015): http://www.f-r-a-n-k.org/conversations/01/01.html
from FRANK Conversation (May 2015): http://www.f-r-a-n-k.org/conversations.html
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
This article takes the Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth’s controversial art project Hornsleth... more 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.
Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
I sommeren 2013 mødtes Christina Hee Pedersen med Mathias Danbolt og Dorthe Staunæs til en samtal... more I sommeren 2013 mødtes Christina Hee Pedersen med Mathias Danbolt og Dorthe Staunæs til en samtale om den affektive vending. Det blev en samtale, der vedrører affektive drejninger og dissonanser på mange planer
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2019
How to imagine alternative forms of attachments and intimacies beside the centrifugal force of co... more 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.
NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2014
Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2017
Racial representations on commodities in Danish supermarkets have been the subject of heated publ... more 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.
Nordic Journal of Migration Research, 2017
Published in Nordic Journal of Migration Research Vol. 7, No. 2, 2017: DOI: 10.1515/njmr-2017-001... more 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/
Article on the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK's artist book 'Voluspå' and exhibition 'Ma... more Article on the Norwegian queer feminist platform FRANK's artist book 'Voluspå' and exhibition 'Marie Høeg Meets Klara Lidén.'
from "Talende Bilder: Tekster om kunst og visuell kultur" (Bergen Spartacus: 2010)
At the 2009 Nordic Culture Forum summit in Berlin that centered on the profiling and branding of ... more 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.
in "re.act.feminism––a performing archive # 2", eds. Beatrice E. Stammer og Bettina Knaup (Berlin... more in "re.act.feminism––a performing archive # 2", eds. Beatrice E. Stammer og Bettina Knaup (Berlin and London: Verlag fuer Moderne Kunst/Live Art Development Agency, 2013).
published at Kunstkritikk.no, 10.24.14.
in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research, ed. Renate Lorenz (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014... more in Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research, ed. Renate Lorenz (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 136-161.
in "Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories", edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (M... more in "Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories", edited by Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (Manchester University Press, 2016).
from FRANK Conversations (May 2015): http://www.f-r-a-n-k.org/conversations/01/01.html
from FRANK Conversation (May 2015): http://www.f-r-a-n-k.org/conversations.html
Part of a praxis session titled We Need To Talk About Semen (with Katie Brewer Ball, Mathias Danb... more Part of a praxis session titled We Need To Talk About Semen (with Katie Brewer Ball, Mathias Danbolt, and Benjamin Haber)
wanna talk
wanna talk about
talk about body
body building
– MEN, "Credit Card Babie$"
Cryobanks, IV4 treatment, barebacking, HIV/AIDS, breeding, gaybies: semen engenders eccentric temporalities and new intimacies. Following Lisa Jean Moore's observation on how "sperm have journeyed from the realm of the secretive to the realm of the communal,” we want to explore sticky connections between body fluids and money, dykes and fags, holes and body parts, mouths and medicine, personal pasts and impersonal futures.
We would like to hold the praxis session in a bathroom at Stanford University, as an intimate space for one-to-one paper presentations on performance, temporality, and queer relationality. Working with José Muñoz’s theorization of the “alternative economy” of homosexual desire and nightlife, this praxis session seeks to remake the space of queer intellectual exchange by situating it in the “public” restroom. We propose to each deliver an academic paper, but in the tradition of queer parties such as Brooklyn’s JUDY, San Francisco’s Hard French, and London’s Wotever Club we wish to create a nightlife space that aesthetically and viscerally responds to the many questions on queer time and space proposed in each paper. Working from the space of the party allows us to elide negotiations of practice and theory or participation and spectatorship with an unstable synthesis forged through an affectively palpable synesthetic field of sound/vibration, light/color, touch/sex. The one-to-one format and the nightlife aesthetic also prompt a different temporal framework for presentation. We propose a durational timeframe, preferably later in the day/evening and for several hours, to draw out and concentrate the temporal intensities of our discothèque de toilette.
Billedkunst, 2018
in Billedkunst #4, 2018
Peripeti, 2018
The article "'Everyone Needs to Experience This': Racial Transformation as Consciousness-raising ... more The article "'Everyone Needs to Experience This': Racial Transformation as Consciousness-raising and Diversity Tool in Danish Anti-Racist Performance'" analyzes the self-declared anti-racist performance project 'Med Andre Øjne' (MAØ) [Through Different Eyes], which since 2011 has served as a sought-after diversity tool in Denmark. The purpose of MAØ is, through the use of racial and gendered transformations, to allow participants to ‘put themselves in the other’s place’ in order to produce empathy and compassion. Through a critical analysis of MAØ’s invitation to embody and appropriate the experience of racialized minorities in order to engage questions of everyday racism, the article highlights the limit of empathy as an anti-racist methodology, while arguing that MAØ reproduces a depoliticized understanding of racism that reduces anti-racism to individualized self-transformation.
https://tidsskrift.dk/peripeti/article/view/109631
Lambda Nordica, 2017
Among the most frequently repeated stories in queer scholarship nowadays are those concerning the... more Among the most frequently repeated stories in queer scholarship nowadays are those concerning the social and spatial localization of queer. Narratives of how queer has occupied and inhabited speci c language and cultural areas, and how it has been “domesticated” in different contexts, involve a plot line told time and again. This focus has also informed attempts at finding a queer “common ground” in the Nordic territory. Challenges related to the localization of queer in a Nordic context are also embedded in the framework of a Nordic-oriented journal, such as lambda nordica. At a meeting with the journal’s editorial committee in Stockholm last year, the “Nordic country representatives” were asked to prepare a response to the question: “What is going on in Denmark, Fin- land, and Norway?” It may be argued, and indeed is the contention of this article’s authors, that Sweden often functions as the default mode of and location for “Nordic queer,” for example in terms of citational practice, in- stitutional visibility, and activist sensibility.
The objective of the seminar was to reflect on colonial memories, neo-colonial and de-colonial us... more The objective of the seminar was to reflect on colonial memories, neo-colonial and de-colonial uses of the past, and their links to how otherness and migration are perceived in Europe today.