2021 marks three centuries of colonial history between Denmark and Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). The Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede’s colonial expedition in 1721 was one of several starting points for the establishment of Copenhagen as a center for colonial knowledge production on what was insistently understood as the terra incognita of the Arctic. This centuries-long investment in Polar Studies by missionaries, explorers, and settler researchers have resulted in the presence of large collections of Indigenous material culture in Denmark, not only from Kalaallit Nunaat, but from across all of the Arctic, including Sápmi, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska.

“Art, Race, and Resistance in the Arctic” seeks to examine the active roles that art and visual culture played in the Danish imperialist projects in the Arctic from the 16th century and onwards. Artists and image makers participated in colonial expeditions (as map makers, researchers, documentarists, propagandist), as ‘tourists’ and travelers, or as fascinated or critical onlookers from home. At the same time, colonized subjects used aesthetic practices in their resistance to colonial rule. With a special focus on questions of power, resistance, and agency in the “contact zone” between colonizer and the colonized, we will analyze how Indigenous material culture transformed as foreign empires encroached on Native land, forced new belief systems, and demanded cultural assimilation. We will also discuss Indigenous practices of resilience and survivance in the face of suppression and colonization, practices that remain central to the ongoing fight for Indigenous self-determination and cultural revitalization today.

Drawing on theoretical debates in colonial art history and museology as well as Indigenous studies and Indigenous methodologies, the course will have an empirical focus on the vast Arctic collections at the National Museum in Copenhagen. The weekly thematic lessons will take a starting point in selected objects and images from the collections by Indigenous makers such as Israil Nichodemus Gormansen, Johan Turi, and Jakob Danielsen, as well as settler artists including Mathias Blumenthal, Johannes Rach, Hans Heinrich Eegberg, and Emilie Demant-Hatt. Questions we will discuss include the contested state of repatriating Indigenous objects in European museums; collaboration and exchanges between Native artisans and European explorers; and how visual imagery aided colonial constructions of race, to only mention a few.