Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

“Amnesia,” “ignorance,” and “selective remembrance” have been often-used terms when discussing national memory discourses on Denmark’s colonial history in the Global South and involvement in the transatlantic enslavement trade. To investigate this, a large exhibition about the former Danish West Indies, now the US Virgin Islands, was organized in the Royal Danish Library in 2017. This exhibition presented diverse visual artefacts such as maps, paintings, book illustrations, and photographs all found in Danish collections today. The historical power structures endure in the material frameworks of the national collections, and the images of the former Danish colony were all created by Europeans and thus represent the view of the colonizers only. The curators faced the challenge of drawing the visitors’ attention to how the colonial images-on-display work through specific visual tropes and stereotypes, and to what aspects of history they have left out. Three strategies were employed to include contesting perspectives: A collaborative sound intervention designed to bring out emotional responses, a web-based tool to remix historical photographs, and contemporary artworks by Danish and Cruzian artists engaged in critique of colonial representation. This paper explores how these three strategies could recontextualize the colonial images in the exhibition.