Kasper Opstrup er forsker og forfatter med speciale i hybrider af kunst/litteratur, okkultisme og politik som modkultur og undergrundsfænomen. Han har en PhD fra the London Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of London (2013). Seneste udgivelser er monografien ”The Way Out – Invisible Insurrections and Radical Imaginaries in the UK Underground 1961-1991” (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2017), antologien "Unexpected Encounters - Possible Futures" (Antipyrine, 2019). For tiden arbejder han på et 4-årigt Investigator Grant-projekt med titlen "Twisting the Fabric of Space: On the Art and Politics of the Hidden" (2023 - )

My research centres around concatenations of art, politics, and esotericism. These constitute what I call ‘weird entanglements.’ At various times, I have designated my overall research interests as ‘mystical utopianism,’ ‘magical activism,’ ‘critical futurology,’ and, most recently, simply ‘weird studies’ and/or 'occulture.'

My PhD thesis researched the UK counterculture from the 1960s to the 1990s as a continuation of the historical avantgarde. This identified a political position and an occult position which, taken together, expresses the artistic urge to transform society and change the self. Taking this as my starting point, I engage various types of rejected knowledges and speculative fictions in a dialogue with contemporary  art and theory to investigate the symbolic production of other futures and new ways of thinking.

From 2016 to 2018, a first postdoc grant from the Novo Foundation enabled me through a string of publications to explore Symbolism in its relation to utopian socialism and fin-de-siècle occultism, Surrealism in its relations to early psychoanalysis and alchemy, as well as its drift from Marxism towards anarchism, and, finally, the return of magical thinking in an age of algorithms as an expression of a politics of hope.

A second Novo postdoc grant from 2019-2021 gave me the opportunity to analyse the influence of Russian Cosmism on both contemporary art and the space race of the 1960s while developing a theory of myth and exploring ideas from not only science fiction but also post- and transhumanism. This resulted, besides various publications, in an exhibition and an anthology.

My most current research before the Investigator Grant was as part of an international research group at the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid where I developed a notion of 'weird aesthetics' as an umbrella term for my research interests. Most recently, I have published on ‘the political weird,’ post-situationism, and a new barbarianism – following Walter Benjamin – that calls for an ‘outside,’ as well as on the fictional occult in relation to the real.

My Investigator Grant-project, Twisting the Fabric of Space, develops a critique of the current revival of esoteric and surreal themes in contemporary art while, at the same time, comparing it to earlier revivals where the occult revival, the urge to create a new religion, went hand in hand with utopian thinking and the urge to create a new type of society as in the 1960s and 1970s where I am especially interested in notions of folklore, folk horror and landscape within the counter-culture as well as in the 1920s and 1930s where I am interested in the social movements of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift in the UK and Acephale in France. An international conference, A Tide of Ghosts, has been part of this project and an exhibition will follow.

Symbolisme, Surrealisme, Situationisme, Samtidskunst

Spekulativ fiktion, weird, horror, science fiction, fantasy, "spejderlitteratur"

Modkultur, sociale bevægelser, utopisk tænkning og eksperimenter med at leve alternativt og/eller "udenfor", bevidsthedsudvidelse, occulture, magisk tænkning og den vestlige esoteriske tradition, "ungdoms"-bevægelser (beat, hippie, punk, goth, industrial, hip-hop, osv.)

Kritisk teori, poststrukturalisme, dekolonialisme, posthumanisme