Mathias Danbolt

Short presentation

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

Danbolt has been Principle Investigator of several collective research projects, including The Art of Nordic Colonialism: Writing Transcultural Art Histories (2019-2024, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation) and OKTA: Art and Social Communities in Sápmi (2019-2022, funded by Norwegian Art Council and Danish Art Council). Currently he is leading the project Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (2022-2026, funded by Novo Nordisk Foundation). These projects all engage in different ways with the effects and affects of Nordic colonialism within the field of art - and relates to Danbolt previous 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 monograph Tropaganda: Kunst, kolonialisme og kampe om historie (2025), Nordmandsdalen: Kunst, makt og materialer i 1700-tallets Danmark-Norge (co-edited with Peder Valle, Tonje Haugland Sørensen, Helene Birkeli and Morten Spjøtvold), and 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, historiography and the politics of history, LGBT and queer feminist art and theory, decolonial art and antiracist practice 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), Infrastructure Aesthetics (2024), Landscape and Nature in Scandinavian Art (2025), and Model Collapse: European Contemporary Art in a Time of Democratic Crisis (2025).

Danbolt has been a member of The Young Academy, under The Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters (2018-2023), and was on the jury working on the establishment of a national memorial commemorating the terror attack in Oslo on July 22, 2011. He is also head of The Committee of Research in Art and Art History at the Novo Nordisk Foundaiton.