Mathias Danbolt

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Mathias Danbolt is Professor of Art History at University of Copenhagen working on politics of history and historiography in art history and visual culture, with special emphasis on queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on art and culture. Over the last decade his research has centered on the contact zones between art history and colonial history in a Nordic context, with special focus on memory politics, monuments, and art in public space. 

Danbolt is currently Principle Investigator of two collective research projects, The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories (2019-2024, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation) and Moving Monuments: The Afterlife of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (2022-2025, funded by Novo Nordisk Foundation). These projects engage in different ways with the effects and affects of Nordic colonialism within the field of art - and relates to Danbolt previous research projects, such as OKTA: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2019-2022, funded by Norwegian Art Council and Danish Art Council),  and exhibition projects such as 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). Recent publications related to these projects include the anthology Searvedoaibma: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2024), co-edited with Britt Kramvig and Christina Hætta, and the special issue of Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History, "The Art of Nordic Colonialism" (2023). 

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 (2008-2010) and co-editor of the book Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive (2009). His work on historical and 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), Curatorial Challenges (2019), Globale og postkoloniale perspektiver på dansk kolonihistorie (2021), og Infrastructure Aesthetics (2024)

Danbolt has been a member of The Young Academy, under The Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters (2018-2023). He is currently on the jury working on the establishment of a national memorial commemorating the terror attack in Oslo on July 22, 2011.