Artists’ Talk: Voices in the Shadows of Monuments

Please note: The talk will be in English and will be online. 

Zoom link for the talk: https://kunstakademiet.zoom.us/j/68509296167

As part of Voices in the Shadows of Monuments, we are honoured to be hosting an artists’ conversation with the artists Bernard Akoi-Jackson, La Vaughn Belle, Jupiter J. Child, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Oceana James, Sabitha Söderholm, who have all contributed with sound and voice pieces to the audio-visual guide. Departing from the artists sharing their individual practices, the talk will evolve around developing artistic methods for intervening in memorialization and historical legacies of colonialism today. Aiming at fostering collaboration and conversations between different geographies and experiences, the talk will address some of the questions that arose during the creative process.

The talk is arranged in connection with the audio-visual walk Voices in the Shadows of the Monuments, which will take place on 10, 17 and 24 Feb (registration is required via Billetto) and the art film program, Whose Gold is This?, which can be seen in Charlottenborg Art Cinema until 13 March (during opening hours).

Participating artists:

Bernard Akoi-Jackson, La Vaughn Belle, Jupiter J. Child, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Oceana James, Sabitha Sofia Söderholm.

Co-facilitated by Barly Tshibanda, Nanna Hansen & Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld.

Bios of the artists

Bernard Akoi-Jackson (PhD), is a contemporary Ghanaian artist who works from Kumasi. His multi-disciplinary, audience-implicating installations and performative “pseudo-rituals”, have featured in exhibitions across the world. He has curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana and co-curated the Stellenbosch Triennale in South Africa. He is a member of the Exit Frame Collective and holds a PhD in Painting and Sculpture from KNUST, Kumasi where he lectures with particular interest in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art.

La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation and public art. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. She is the co-creator together with Jeannette Ehlers of the large scale public monument I AM QUEEN MARY. Her work has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

Jupiter Child is a Mozambican-born queer artist residing in Copenhagen, Denmark. They are a multifaceted performer and a visual artist, drawing inspiration from Black history, their Makonde ancestry and the Black arts movement. By combining theatre, dance, song, spoken word, creative writing and storytelling, Jupiter describes their art as an anti-colonial intervention, resistance, Black feminism, migration, queerness and empowerment

Julie Edel Hardenberg (Paneeraq) was born and raised in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland. She is educated through the art academies in Finland, Norway, England and gained her MA degree in Art-Theory and Communication at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark. Her works problematize the unequal power structures that exist between Greenland and Denmark. With roots in both cultures, she has an insight into the identity and self-understanding of different Greenlandic people – nonetheless the economic and social dependency that exists between the two countries and its impact on the Greenlandic people; entangled or trapped in a shared or divided identity, between power and powerlessness.

Oceana James is a St. Croix-born interdisciplinary artist.  Her work is an examination/a re-telling/ a re-imagining of her Caribbean indigeneity. It is a commentary on the socio-political, cultural, and economic realities of peoples of African descent.  In her work James deconstructs the idea of language as one’s sole means of communication and experiments with the use of time, space, non-linear form and movement to do this.  Additionally, she uses her Caribbean “Nation Language” to further explore the mythologies and stories that she grew up hearing.  Right now, her research is centered on epigenetics, trees, (the biology and mythology), the intersection of science, spirituality, agriculture; and the use of the body to embody and then exorcise the traumas of colonialism.

Sabitha Sofia Söderholm is a Danish/Indian author and artist, currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and with a practice that revolves around rituals, ceremonies, inquiries and letters. Always with the writing as a starting point or bearing element.