Reykjavik Art Museum Holds Weekend Program on Danish Contemporary Art

Reykjavíkurborg, the City of Reykjavik, organized a special event at the Reykjavik Art Museum Hafnarhus on the first weekend of April 2018. The program was linked to the exhibition "Tak i lige måde: Contemporary Art from Denmark."

The event commenced on Saturday, April 7, at 2:00 PM with a discussion featuring artists Jeannette Ehlers and Tinne Zenner, alongside ethnologist Kristinn Schram. The conversation focused on the artists' works and examined Denmark's relationship with Iceland, both during the colonial era and in contemporary times.

Sunday, April 8, featured a series of documentary film screenings. At 1:00 PM, "Concerning Violence," directed by Göran Olsson, was shown. This film explores the African nationalist and independence movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their challenges to colonial rule, based on Frantz Fanon's essay. At 2:30 PM, "Sumé – the Sound of a Revolution" by Inuk Silis Høegh was screened. This Greenlandic film chronicles the band Sumé, whose music was instrumental in the first major confrontation with Danish colonial rule and sparked a revival of Greenlandic culture and identity.

The weekend's film program concluded at 3:45 PM with Helle Stenum's documentary "We Carry It Within Us – fragments of a shared colonial past." Released in 2017, the film interrogates the legacies of Danish colonialism, particularly in the centennial year of Denmark's sale of the Caribbean Virgin Islands to the U.S. The film uses reflections from descendants of former Danish West Indians, artists, and historians to explore the persistent presence of colonial history in contemporary society, art, and memory.