On Thursday, five young art researchers were presented with scholarships within art research. The event took place at the yearly art fellowship award celebration at the Novo Nordisk Foundation where the awardees, their family, friends and collaborators were invited to participate.
In March, The Novo Nordisk Foundation awarded a total of two Mads Øvlisen PhD-scholarships each of DKK 1.6 million over 3 years and three Mads Øvlisen postdoctoral fellowships each of DKK 1.2 million over 2 years. The scholarships were awarded by the Board of the Foundation based on applications received in open competition and evaluated by the Selection Committee on Art History Research – Mads Øvlisen Scholarships. The scholarships are awarded to support research in art history, practice-based art and art & biosciences.
Former CEO of Novo Nordisk A/S and member of the selection committee, Mads Øvlisen, after whom the scholarships are named, participated in the celebration together with the other members of the selection committee, including Chairman Jacob Wamberg.
The five awardees gave a short presentation about their research projects before being presented with a diploma and flowers. Approximately 50 guests participated in the celebration.
Below you can read more about the researchers and their research projects.
THE FIVE RECIPIENTS AND THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS
MADS ØVLISEN PHD-SCHOLARSHIPS (2):
Name: Rosanna Maj Kloster Tindbæk, MA in Art History
Age: 32
Grant: Mads Øvlisen PhD-scholarship in art history, DKK 1.6 million over 3 years
Project title: Imaging Inwardness – the intimate aesthetic of the renaissance
Abstract: The dissertation ’Imaging Inwardness’ investigates the appearance of what we in a modern tongue would call intimate communication in images from the early modern era in Northern Europe (1400-1600). Private devotional images, prayer nuts, book illuminations and miniature portraits will make the empirical foundation for an aesthetic and cultural analysis of the connection between these intimate expressions and the development of a modern humanism. The project furthermore seeks to elucidate previously uncovered correlations between the intimate renaissance image and the more recognizably intimate paintings from the 1700s and 1800s, as well as form a theory about the visual intimacy of early modern times and its influence on our relation to intimate visuality today.
Institution: National Gallery of Denmark and University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Name: Rikke Luther, Artist, Master of Fine Arts
Age: 45
Grant: Mads Øvlisen practice-based PhD-scholarship, DKK 1.6 million over 3 years
Project title: Concrete Aesthetics: From the Era of Universal Political Rights to Financial Post-Democracy
Abstract: Concrete is the most widely used building material in the world, but its production is negatively linked to climate change, and its cultural aesthetic to the financial speculation and inequality of the ‘post-democratic’ era. But, in post-WWII Europe, the aesthetic of concrete was strongly associated with human progress, universal rights and spreading democracy. Today, that aesthetic presents itself as a fossil of political economy just as much as the material of concrete presents itself as a ‘techno-fossil’ to environmental scientists. This research-orientated artistic practice project will contrast the social idealism that situated the political meaning of concrete in post-war Scandinavia with the meanings in today’s Special Economic Zones to build a picture of the meaning of concrete in the developing, post-democratic, globalised economy. Practical outputs of this research will use artistic and architectural projects to generate new, materially embodied, understandings of these developments.
Institution: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
MADS ØVLISEN POSTDOCSTIPENDIER (3):
Name: Kasper Opstrup Frederiksen, PhD, curator, writer
Age: 40
Grant: Mads Øvlisen postdoctoral fellowship in art history, DKK 1.2 million over 2 years
Project title: An Imaginal Kingdom in the Wastelands of the Real – on Art, Esotericism and the Politics of Hope
Abstract: By engaging with art history, radical politics, anthropology, psychoanalysis and the occult, this postdoc will trace a reflexive history going from the early 20th century to the contemporary that desires to break away from History and create a new age where we all might be sorcerers. The overall thesis is whether the way in might be a way out from a present without a future? The works examined are all part of the same lineage, one that pulls on threads from the esoteric web of alchemy, shamanism, magic, and witchcraft, while imagining another way of being in the world.
Institution: University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Name: Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, PhD, MFA in Visual Arts
Age: 35
Grant: Mads Øvlisen practice-based postdoctoral fellowship, DKK 1.2 million over 2 years
Project title: Affect’s Time: Affect and Experiences of Time of the Asylum
Abstract: The post-doctoral artistic research project Affect’s Time researches into experiences of affect that enable different space-times to exist in the same moment. In collaboration with filmmakers and cultural producers from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq living in Denmark, the project analyses and develops the concepts of affect and time, through the production of multichannel video installations to explore: How to understand Affect’s Time as an experience of time, in which multiple different temporalities can exist at the same time? How to create a digital platform that enables a multiplicity of temporalities to exist within the same frame?
Institution: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Name: Jens Hauser, PhD, Postdoc
Age: 46
Grant: Mads Øvlisen postdoctoral fellowship in art & bio- and natural sciences/technology, DKK 1.2 million over 2 years
Project title: (OU)VERT – An Interdisciplinary Investigation into GREEN as Medium
Abstract: OU)VERT – ‘open green’ – undertakes an art, cultural and media studies based approach to investigate ‘green’ as colour, perceptible physical phenomenon, material medium, semantic construct and ideology. The project departs from the epistemological hypothesis that green is the most anthropocentric of all colours, indeed perceived as ‘natural’ and employed to evoke homo faber’s antithesis, thus creating a permanent oscillation between the technicality of its artistic staging, its cultural connotations, and its biological and physiological materiality. (OU)VERT aims at opening up and systematizing relevant aspects and scientific disciplines related to ‘green as medium’, in order to strengthen the Humanities in the light of rapid (bio)technological advances and related worldviews. It will network Danish and international researchers to prepare a further application to the ERC Starting Grants by the European Research Council to create an interdisciplinary research cluster or centre.
Institution: University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
