Bodies of Work: Black Artistic Practices in Denmark and the Politics of Embodiment, 1980s-2020s

Rumor has it that Michelle Eistrup in 1994 became the first black artist to be accepted as a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Art. Her application – a performance titled Eget Værelse (A Room of One’s Own) – involved staying in a crate at the Academy for four days engaging in black study before revealing her presence. Despite the boldness of Eistrup’s performance, this work has not entered sanctioned art history but has instead circulated as a story.

Over the past five decades, black artists in Denmark have created a range of performative, embodied works, much like Eistrup’s. However, these works are minoritized in white-dominated Danish art history and marginalized in larger narratives of black diaspora art history. As the first in-depth study of the history of contemporary black artists working in Denmark, this dissertation creates a dedicated space for these works – a room of our own. 

This dissertation focuses on five artists, linking their lived experiences to their representations of the bodily. The dissertation highlights Maria Thastum’s color-evasive digital prints in the 1980s, Eistrup’s endurance-based performances in the 1990s, Ellen Nyman’s anti-stereotype campaign in the 2000s, Jeannette Ehlers’ collective antiportraiture in the 2010s, and Jupiter Child’s audience-engaging work in the 2020s. 

The dissertation explores the challenges and possibilities of considering black artists in Denmark as a collective group facing color-evasive racism and cultural isolation. Using case studies, mappings of the local art historiography, and artist interviews, the dissertation argues for the importance of in-depth, practice-sensitive analyses of black cultural production in Denmark.