The Art of Guilt-Tripping: A Transregional Genre of Exchange

In the Nordic region, I argue, artistic and cultural works may gain credibility and relevance by drawing on that which may be considered immoral. In particular, the immoral can be a way of injecting relevance into art projects that engage with relations to the global South; a way of signaling distance to an ethically good and perhaps even “humanitarian” art upon which the Scandinavian publics look with distrust. I refer to this distrust as “skeptimentality” in order to distinguish it from sentimentality. In these kinds of artworks, the artist sometimes invokes or reenacts colonial histories or positions, which then form a background against which to reflect on the guilt, the debts, and the accountability of art, and on the ways in which art also capitalizes on inequality.

In this article, we shall take a closer look at (scandalous) guilt-tripping as a key mode of Nordic contemporary works of art for engaging their publics. In particular, I discuss the art projects My African Letters (2011) by the Danish artist Ditte Ejlerskov, Hornsleth Village Project Uganda (2006) by the Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth and European Attraction Limited (2014) by the Swedish artist Lars Cuzner and the Norwegian-Sudanese artist Mohamed Ali Fadlabi. I propose that we recognize these art projects as belonging to the genre of “the artful guilt trip”.