The Future Contemporary

Inquiries into Visual, Performing, and Media Arts

Creolised Dance, Museumised Space: Jeannette Ehlers and Decolonial Re-Edification

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Abstract

This chapter examines three works by Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers that involve dance as ritual movement in what I call“museumised space”. Examining these dances as creolised products arising from the enslavement of Africans by European nations, I will argue that Ehlers performs through them an Afropean decolonial praxis of ‘re-edification’ around the silences surrounding Denmark’s colonial past, involving in particular a dialectic between spectrality and material sumptuousness that draws purposely on dance in relation to the materiality of sound.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: April 12, 2021 | Published Sept. 16, 2021 | Language: en

Keywords Jeannaette Ehlers • Danish colonialism • African-heritage dance • Museumised space • Decoloniality • Creolisation

Copyright © 2021 Ananya Jahanara Kabir. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-534-6/004


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