Documentation DVD & WEBSITE Launch

Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark
NIFCA, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland
Torpedo Kunstbokhandelen, Oslo, Norway
Konsthall C, Stockholm, Sweden
November 25, 2006

Act 5 consisted of the production and launch of this documentation website, which has also been published on DVD. Both collect and document the rich body of aesthetic and theoretical reflections generated during the first four acts. In addition, they contain a series of essays and interviews produced specifically for Act 5. Four artists and theorists were invited to submit papers on the politics of representation, while four anti-racist magazines and organizations from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden were invited to conduct interviews with citizens old and new to Scandinavia on the topic of Nordic colonialism.

The launch of the website and DVD during a series of simultaneous closing events in the Scandinavian capitals marked a crucial moment in Rethinking Nordic Colonialism. With these publications, the project’s many postcolonial voices from within and without the Nordic region reached the once-colonizing countries of Scandinavia and became audible to their present populations – and to the world at large. Act 5 thus allowed the project to shift focus from the colonialism in the (former) colonies to the colonialism at “home.”

Essay Contributors

Pia Arke (Greenland/Denmark)
Bolette Benedictsen Blaagaard (Denmark/The Netherlands)
Reina Lewis (United Kingdom)
Kobena Mercer (Ghana/United Kingdom)

Interview Contributors

New Meaning (Norway)
Slut (Sweden)
VISION – den om lighed (Denmark)
Voima (Finland)

Pia Arke was a visual artist, who worked with photography and text primarily. She graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1993 and held two additional degrees from that institution: a Cand.Phil. in Art Theory from the Department of Art Theory and a Multimedia Design degree from the School of Media Arts. Born in Greenland by a Greenlandic mother and a Danish father, most of her work deals with her Greenlandic background and the history of Greenland. Arke exhibited in a large number of contexts and completed several public art commissions for the Danish Polar Center, the Ministry of Defense, and the Environmental Investigations of Denmark, among others. Arke was the recipient of the 1999 award from the Danish Arts Foundation and in 2000, she received a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation. [Tone Olaf Nielsen]

To Act 5, Pia Arke contributed with an English translation of her essay “Etnoæstetik” (Ethno-Aesthetics),” originally published in Danish by the Danish art magazine ARK in 1995. In the foreword to the publication, Arke’s brother Erik Gant wrote: “Ethno-aesthetics is something unclean, a subdivision of the ethnic, which connotes the cross breed, the domesticated wild. Ethno aesthetics is concerned with the art of placing oneself between two chairs; an art or a series of feats that we cross breeds must perform at all times. If we are something, we are both something else and the same. If not, we are neither one nor the other. In a way, we are talking about something political and something very aesthetic at the same time because the ethnic, the cross breed, indicate that which is nothing in itself, that which is something only by virtue of something else, which is not the case itself, but an image or a rewriting. And we – who perform our cross breeding all the time – have the possibility of becoming good examples, examples to be followed by others who fumble in search of their identity. In some way, we have a better, clearer, less private case. And Pia Arke’s essay exemplifies how this at the same time clear and indeterminable case can be developed.” [Erik Gant, 1995] To download the essay, click here.

Bolette Benedictsen Blaagaard is a Doctoral Candidate and a Marie Curie Fellow at the Gender Studies Program at Utrecht University. She holds a MA in Journalism and Cultural Studies from the University of Southern Denmark. Blaagaard is an active member of the EU supported European network of Women’s Studies, ATHENA, where she contributes to developing a curriculum in European postcolonial studies. Furthermore, she is organizing a sub-group working with critical whiteness studies in a European context. Blaagaard’s work is centered on the journalistic and public representation of Nordic whiteness, and how this representation works within and alongside a Nordic imaginary and self-identification. Within this imaginary lies understandings of the past as both being used actively in constructing a sense of self (as in the case of the Icelandic sagas and the Viking myths), and being suppressed in order to sustain this sense of self (as in the case of the Southern colonies and the slave trade). Blaagaard has been published in Nordicom Information (2005) and in European Journal of Communication (forthcoming). [Bolette Benedictsen Blaagaard]

For Act 5, Bolette Benedictsen Blaagaard contributed with the paper “Relocating Whiteness in Nordic Media Discourse.” She summarizes the paper in the following words: “Critical whiteness studies are rooted in critical race theory and in African American studies. In my paper, I attempt to move the scholarship from the all American context to a particular Nordic relation to the concept of whiteness. This move results in whiteness no longer being solely a part of a binary power structure, but also functioning as self-identification in a construction of a national identity. I ground the Nordic representation of whiteness in the journalistic and public representation of whiteness in the Nordic – and in particularly Danish – media discourse. I argue that the Nordic region in several ways is the epitome of whiteness in the Western and Nordic European imaginary, and as such whiteness easily becomes at the same time the norm and invisible – everything and nothing – which is reflected in the journalistic representations. Moreover, the paper aims not only at looking at whiteness merely as another ethnic or racial group or as a symbolic way of thinking, but at emphasizing the power structures, which makes this color what it is (hooks, 1990), so that critical whiteness studies in a Nordic and a broader European context become, what Toni Morrison has called, ‘the impact of racism on those who perpetuated it.’ (1992) Using the journalistic representation and discourse as object of analysis, the paper unravels the underlying assumptions of the Nordic imaginary as it is constructed in the dynamics of media production.” [Bolette Benedictsen Blaagaard] To download the paper, click here.

Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor in Fashion Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. She is author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (2004), Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (1996), and co-editor of Feminist Postcolonialism: A Reader (with Sara Mills, 2003). Reina Lewis is series co-editor, with Teresa Heffernan, of Cultures in Dialogue, a book series that reprints with critical introductions selected travel writings by western and middle eastern women. She is also co-editor, with Peter Horne, of Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (1996), and has other articles published on lesbian and gay literary culture, fashion, photography, and queer theory. Her current research is on the contemporary commodification of Muslim femininities in fashion retail and in popular culture, and on the neo-Orientalisms evident in responses to Turkey’s bid for EU accession. [Reina Lewis]

Reina Lewis contributed to Act 5 with the paper “Gender, Orientalism, and Postcolonialism.” She summarizes the paper in the following words: “This paper explores the ways in which colonial and postcolonial cultural and social relations are gendered, looking historically at the development of western Orientalism and contemporary neo-Orientalisms. Arguing that the image of the veiled and sequestered woman of the Muslim harem has been a focal point in the construction of Europe’s imagined differences between the ‘east’ and the ‘west,’ the paper discusses examples of Orientalism in selected visual and literary cultural forms from the past two centuries. These images of the harem – often depicted as a sexualized realm animated by cruelty and excess – bore little relationship to the lives of the women and families who actually inhabited the segregated domains of Islamic society. But they were powerfully influential on western popular consciousness about the east and contributed to the formation of western foreign and imperial policies. However, dominant stereotypes about harem life did not go uncontested, and the paper examines the alternative strands of western women’s visual Orientalism and the interventions made by women who were themselves living in Islamic societies. This focus on western and middle eastern women artists and writers reveals ‘dominant’ Orientalism to be variable and contradictory, suggesting that imperial and colonial power operated in uneasy relationship to contestatory strands from within and without. Continuing this focus on the gendered agency of resistant subjects, the paper concludes by asking what is at stake in the continued hyper-visibility of the veiled woman circulating in contemporary media, culture and politics?” [Reina Lewis] To download the paper, click here.

Kobena Mercer is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Culture and Media, Middlesex University, London. He has taught at New York University and University of California, Santa Cruz, and in addition to his numerous publications on the visual arts of the black diaspora, he is editor of “Cosmopolitan Modernisms” (2005) and “Discrepant Abstraction” (2006) in the Annotating Art’s Histories series published by inIVA and MIT. [Kobena Mercer]

Kobena Mercer contributed to Act 5 with the paper “Art as a Dialogue in Social Space.” At the end of the paper, he writes: “I conclude on this note because although I was initially struck by the apparent belatedness of the initiative to rethink Nordic colonialism, I have come to realise that the tortured chronology of delayed recognition now being brought to bear on the ‘internal colonialism’ of the Scandinavian region is simply par for the course as far as postcolonial consciousness is concerned. The fact that it is only at the beginning of the 21st century that we are now ready to take a fresh look at what is ‘not-yet-conscious’ about ‘what has been,’ to return to Benjamin’s words, suggests that the political predicament of the Sámi is cut from the same cloth as the stories that Akomfrah, Forna and Piper have produced from the black British locations in which they work as contemporary artists.” [Kobena Mercer] To download the paper, click here.

New Meaning is a forum that aims to give young people with intercultural backgrounds the possibility to voice their opinions to the public. New Meaning wants to offer young people a chance to use their resources and become active contributors and creators within the society they live in. New Meaning has initiated and produced magazines, web-casts, board games, live entertainment events, and workshops. New Meaning wishes to expand its communication to help broaden the understanding and knowledge between different cultures. Our participants are varied from many communities worldwide, including: Afghanistan, Colombia, France, Iran, Iraq, Italy, Norway, Somalia, Sweden, India, Scotland, and former Yugoslavia. The coordinators of the project are Gry O Ulrichsen and Ebba Moi. More info at www.newmeaning.no. [New Meaning]

New Meaning contributed to Act 5 with two essays and three interviews of different residents in Oslo on the topic of Nordic (post)colonialism. The contributors are: Hanin Nidhal Al-Khamisi, Raïs Neza Boneza, Ian George Burden, Ebba Moi, and Daisy Nunes. Translation and editing were kindly done by Ian George Burden and Ellen Marie Winther. New Meaning also co-hosted the DVD & WEBSITE launch at Torpedo Kunstbokhandelen in Oslo, November 25, 2006. [Tone Olaf Nielsen]

To download Hanin Nidhal Al-Khamisi, “Chained Screams,” click here.

To download Raïs Neza Boneza, “Nordic Countries and the Congo Colonization,” click here.

To download Ian George Burden, “Norway’s Dark Past: Interview with Ian George Burden,” click here.

To download Ebba Moi, “Interview with Ronald Sagatun,” click here.

To download Daisy Nunes, “Interview with Fusser Martinez,” click here.

Slut is a feminist and anti-racist magazine produced in Sweden. One of our ambitions is to raise the level of the Swedish debate on racism, a debate where many participants until recently equated racism with right-wing extremism and took no interest in discrimination in the job market, in the housing market, in political life, or in the media. Since the end of the 1900s, the Swedish debate has turned. The interest in the extreme right has faded, and at the same time the existence of ethnic discrimination is now widely acknowledged. But the resistance of the 1900s to acknowledge the presence of racism at the core of our society has now been replaced by a sense of fatalism. Mainstream society now tends to describe racism as something natural and unavoidable. Another of Sluts’ tasks is therefore to raise the temperature in the debate on racism.

When looking for a name, the name Rosa surfaced. There seemed to be many role models carrying that name: Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Taikon, and maybe foremost, Rosa Parks. The thought of Rosa Parks gave rise to the idea to name the magazine after one of the young women who preceded her. Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith were both women who had refused to give up their seats to white passengers and they both did it before Parks. For different reasons, the civil rights movement chose not to use any one of them as a poster girl. They were both still in their teens. One of the women was pregnant with a man married to someone else. The choice to give exposure to the impeccable Rosa Parks was probably strategically correct, but at the same time deeply problematic.

Fifty years later, the Swedish debate on racism shares some of the same problems. Like the choice of Parks over Colvin or Smith presupposes that only someone, whose personality is in conformity with white norms, can be a victim of racism. When Swedish media write about racism, they pick stories that are just as clear-cut as the case of Rosa Parks. We want to write stories that are more complicated. Claudette, Colvin, or Mary Louise seemed to be good names for our magazine. But in the end, we choose a name with a more open character: Slut. We’re not quite sure what it means yet, but we like it. [Slut]

Slut contributed to Act 5 with three articles on minority issues in present-day Sweden. The contributors are: Viktorija Kalonaityte, Victoria Kawesa, and Lena Sawyer. Slut also co-hosted the DVD & WEBSITE launch at Konsthall C in Stockholm, November 25, 2006. [Tone Olaf Nielsen]

To download Viktorija Kalonaityte, “We Want to Claim the Public Realm,” click here.

To download Victoria Kawesa, “The Maasai at Kolmården is a Project that Exoticizes the Blacks,” click here.

To download Lena Sawyer, “White Laughter and White Academic Space,” click here.

VISION – den om lighed was initiated by a dozen young people with different cultural backgrounds in the year 2000. The main idea and goal behind the association was to create a platform for youth, who wanted to make a difference in their own society by working towards equality and dignity between all citizens and people without citizenship. The association is working towards its goal by creating forums for dialogue on different levels. Our focus is primarily on dialogue between minority youth and their parents, and on the community level between the minority and majority cultures. SPACE – få rum til dine tanker is a youth counseling project initiated by VISION that advice youth through chat, telephone, and a correspondence column on www.ungdomsliv.dk. VISION has also been cooperating with a great deal of different partners and various networks and has participated in several Nordic and Danish conferences concerning gender, ethnic integration, youth, cultural diversity, etc. The “Visionaries” are between 18-40 years old, with roots in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, Eastern and Western Europe, all residing in Copenhagen. For further information, please visit www.vision-lighed.dk. [VISION – den om lighed]

VISION contributed to Act 5 with three interviews of individuals residing in Denmark. They also co-hosted the DVD & WEBSITE launch at Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, November 25, 2006. VISION summarize the interviews in the following words: “The interviews revolve around current issues of problematic encounters with the ‘Other,’ and how the history of Nordic colonialism might affect the way in which we address these issues. Our motivation for contributing to the project was that we have been dealing with the debate on ethnic minorities for quite some years. In our view, the focus on the repressed history of Danish colonialism in this project was a relevant perspective. By knowing and to some extent understanding our history, we believe that previously unchallenged, suppressed motifs and ways of regarding ourselves will be let out to public contemplation and debate, thus strengthening our self-awareness and giving us new knowledge to proactively act on the challenges of contemporary society.” [VISION – den om lighed]

To download “Interview with Jørgen Callesen,” click here.

To download “Interview with Prem Poddar,” click here.

To download “Interview with Sadia Syed,” click here.

Voima is is an alternative paper on culture and politics. It is available free of charge (living on ads, but politically correct ads!) and it can be subscribed as well. Its circulation is now after four years 50,000 copies, ten times a year. Behind Voima is the independent publishing house Rosebud Books, Friends of the Earth Finland, Finnish Nature League, and a number of individuals. Voima is journalistically completely independent. [Voima]

Voima contributed to Act 5 with an interview series of individuals with diverse backgrounds residing in Finland on the theme of Nordic (post)colonialism. All the interview were conducted by Sabina Mäki. Voima also co-hosted the DVD & WEBSITE launch at NIFCA, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki, November 25, 2006. [Tone Olaf Nielsen]

To download Sabina Mäki’s interview series, click here.