Part two of Mathias Danbolts and Jane Rowleys lecture Archive Trouble: Queer Art and Theory at Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall december 8. 2009.
What is lost in traditional history writing, archive compilation and canon creation? What is included, and what is excluded? How is history written? And whose history is told? These are central questions in the exhibition Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive, curated by Jane Rowley & Louise Wolthers at Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center in 2009 and Bildmuseet Umeå in spring 2010. Lost and Found presents a series of contemporary art works that question normative history writing and generate new narratives based on private memories and experiences beyond gender and sexuality norms.
The Lost and Found exhibition and accompanying publication demonstrate how recent queer art and theory challenge traditional understandings of the archive, evidence, visibility, and truth. Under the headline “Archive Trouble” co-curator of Lost and Found Jane Rowley and co-editor of the Lost and Found publication Mathias Danbolt will talk about how artists and theorists query and queer the way we do and understand history, focusing on how a queer perspective challenges our curatorial, artistic, and archival practices.
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Jane Rowley has an MA in Women’s Studies from York University and a Master of Research from The London Consortium, where she specialised in found footage film and the family archive. She has directed short and documentary film, and curated the centenary of European film exhibition The Female Gaze at The Women’s Museum of Denmark. She was co-curator of the Hollywood Archetypes found footage programme at Odense Film Festival in 2007, and co-author of Gender and Work in the Danish Film and TV Industry in 2004. Her writing and translations have been published in a wide range of art catalogues and publications, including Feminist Review, Women Photographers: European Experience (2004), Gender Furore (2007) and Law and Disorder (2008).
Mathias Danbolt is a PhD student in Art History at The University of Bergen, Norway, and founding editor of Trikster – Nordic Queer Journal (trikster.net). His research focuses on queer activism, activist aesthetics, and alternative archives. He has published articles on contemporary art and literature, gender and sexuality, queer theory and social activism in journals including Kvinder, Køn og Forskning, Kritiker, Øjeblikket, Replikk, Trikster, and FILTER – for fotografi. Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark.