Spinning a Yarn - A Tapestry of Danish Colonial Narratives?

Guest lecture by Josefine Baark, Department of History and Art, University of Cambridge

Time: 20 November 2013, 16:15-17:00
Place: KUA1, building 24, room 05.07, for changes, please check https://tors.ku.dk/
Organizer: ToRS and the Tranquebar Initiative of the National Museum

Abstract

The lecture examines an early modern palampore or Indian wall-hanging, now in the collection of the Danish Design Museum. Through an in-depth analysis of the ways in which it has been used throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to illustrate historical narratives of Danish presence in Asia, I shall broaden both its historical and iconographic significance. The ways artistic practices were shaped and re-shaped by coming into contact with each other will be critically examined and basic assumptions will be investigated in order to challenge a pacifying, hegemonic and legitimizing historical narrative.

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Josefine Baark is currently a final-year PhD Student in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Jean Michel Massing. Her thesis is titled ‘Exchange between Denmark and Asia 1600-1800: A Cultural History’ and it explores the conceptual parameters of cultural curiosity through the trajectories of export art in different aristocratic contexts. Since 2012, she has been affiliated with the Tranquebar Initiative of the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Comparative Cultural Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, working closely with Prof. Esther Fihl on her research into Indian artefacts in Danish collections.