Still from the video installation Christmas Report and Other Fragments (Dirckinck-Holmfeld, 2017). Textile samples ordered by the Danish-Guinean Company on the Gold Coast in Ghana. The order was sent to Copenhagen and then sent to the Danish colony in Tranquebar, today Tharangambadi, India, where the textiles were produced. The textiles were sent to Ghana where they were traded for enslaved Africans, minerals and other goods. Source: The Danish National Archives, Dansk-Guinesisk Kompagni, extile samples ordered Breve fra Direktionen 1705-1722, 390. “Vestindisk-Guineisik Kompagni, Direktionen Breve og Dokumenter fra Guinea: 390/589”
Every six-month Art Hub invites a group of newly graduated artists to organize a series of public events to challenge taught theories and to develop new languages and new perceptions. The program is called Agenda After the Academy.
This autumn, the Copenhagen-based artist collective Subterranean Video Art Club (S.V.A.C.) is selected to arrange a series of lectures and workshops for fellow artists.
On Thursday, December 17, the sixth and last event is being held: An online lecture with artist and Postdoc Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld.
Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld's artistic practice and research centers around developing a framework around the notion of the “reparative critical practice”.
In this presentation, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld will outline her ongoing research into the colonial archives, which Denmark removed from the Virgin Islands in 1919 (two years after Denmark sold the Danish West Indies – today the Virgin Islands – to the United States), and the role of art and cultural institutions in the colonial project.
The colonial archive has been an agent of entanglement between histories (connecting the colonial experience across USVI, Ghana, Greenland, India, and Denmark), while at the same time it also disconnected the communities affected by colonialism and produced a radical cut between these communities and their creative expression.
This presentation will explore how we as artists and cultural workers can create reparative practices in relation to these cuts by building collective infrastructures that can comprise different voices, relations, experiences and artistic practices.
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The event is in English.
This lecture is organized and hosted by artist Lou Mouw, in association with Subterranean Video Art Club.
IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM S.V.A.C.
We value freedom of speech in our digital spaces very highly. However, we don’t want our digital space to become a place for trolls, spammers or bullies. We want to ensure we foster a safe, open, friendly space where everyone feels free to express their opinions on the issues that matter to them but always respecting other people in or around those conversations.
Trigger warning: The presentation may include images of historical paintings portraying racial violence.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Drawing on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld understands the reparative critical practice as a communal, dense exploration of fragments; from (broken) histories into new assemblages, through the artistic and communal engagement with materiality, affect and time. The cornerstone for this work was developed during Disckinck-Holmfeld's PhD “Time in the Making: Rehearsing Reparative Critical Practices” (University of Copenhagen, 2015).
Since, Dirckinck-Holmfeld has continued to develop the reparative practice through the communal engagement with the bar and cultural venue Sorte Firkant, which she co-founded in Copenhagen in 2016, and the video installation: “Zamakan (TimeSpace)” with Amr Hatem.
Alongside, she has been developing the project “Archives that Matter”, with Uncertain Archives Research Collective on the digitization of Danish colonial archives from Danish West Indies (today US Virgin Islands) and Ghana. Her current and ongoing artistic research project “Entangled Archives” continue to explore the reparative critical practice in relation to the colonial archives.
ABOUT AGENDA AFTER THE ACADEMY
Agenda After the Academy is a platform for newly educated artists who wish to set their own agenda post-graduation. By open calls, Art Hub invites a group of young artists every six months to organize a series of public events that unfolds the ideas of their artistic work. With Agenda After the Academy, Art Hub strives to offer a forum for artistic development for younger artists, who find themselves between institutions. A forum where taught thoughts and theories can be challenged and where a new language and new perceptions can be developed.
ABOUT UNITED IN UNITY
This autumn, the Copenhagen-based artist collective Subterranean Video Art Club (S.V.A.C.) arranges “United in Unity”, a series of lectures and workshops, continuing their ongoing collective process and critic sessions hosted by Art Hub in the spring of 2020. The series circulates around the topics of independent community building, connectivity and kinship in the digital age. Hereby a range of artists, researchers and technicians are invited to give a variety of answers on strategies to establish, continue, and reproduce collective process-based learning and interconnectivity in the realm of the arts.
