Mathias Danbolt

Short presentation

Mathias Danbolt is an art historian and theorist working on politics of history and historiography in contemporary art and performance, with a special focus on queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on art and culture. 

Danbolt holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Bergen with the dissertation Touching History: Art, Performance and Politics in Queer Times (2013). He was the founding editor of Trikster: Nordic Queer Journal and co-editor of the book Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive (2009). His work on contemporary visual art and performance, queer temporalities and the politics of history, LGBT and queer feminist art and theory, decolonial art and antiracist theory have been published in journals such as Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, and Lambda Nordica, and anthologies including Performing Archives/Archives of Performance (2013), Not Now! Now! Chronopolitics, Art & Research (2014), Otherwise: Imaging Queer Feminist Art Histories (2016), Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries (2018), and Curatorial Challenges (2019).

anbolt is currently head of two collective research projects, The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories (2019-2022, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation) and OKTA: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2019-2021, funded by Norwegian Art Council and Danish Art Council). These projects engage in different ways with the effects and affects of Nordic colonialism within the field of art - and relates to Danbolt previous postdoc project Colorblind? Theorizing Race in Danish Contemporary Art and Performance, supported by the Danish Independent Research Council (FKK) and Sapere Aude – The Danish Indepentent Research Council’s Research Career Program. That project resulted among other things in the exhibition Blind Spots. Images of the Danish West Indies Colony (2017-18), co-curated with Mette Kia Krabbe Meyer and Sarah Giersing at the Royal Danish Library, and the international research conference Unfinished Histories: Art, Memory, and the Visual Politics of Coloniality (2017). 

Danbolt is an Associate Professor of Art History at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and member of The Young Academy, under The Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters.