Peripheral Insider launch party

Tonight was the book party for one of the more original volumes published by Museum Tusculanum Press: Peripheral Insider: Perspectives on Contemporary Internationalism in Visual Culture. Edited by Khaled Ramadan, a KU art historian, the book analyzes the condition of exiled and refugee artists in Scandinavia, especially those from non-Western cultures.

"In Denmark there has been a tendency to view expatriate art not as part of current global developments, but as expressions of ethnic cultures of little importance to contemporary art practice. In contrast Peripheral Insider argues that expatriate art or internationalism in visual art is not only part of the global art discourse. It is a phenomenon with a specific history, closely related to colonial and post-colonial experiences."

The book wins points for the dramatic cover as well -- designed by Pernille, one of my co-workers -- that features the hilarious guerrilla art campaign "FOREIGNERS, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE US ALONE WITH THE DANES!"

(A note on those posters, designed by the Superflex collective in 2003 -- one of the questions they provoke is who, exactly, the 'us' is. From the admonition we can gather that the subject is neither fully Danish, nor a foreigner -- thus my interpretation that the 'us' doing the speaking is a kind of not-wholly-integrated outsider, an ethnic subject with permanent residence in Denmark but a problematic relationship to national belonging.)

Joining Ramadan on the panel discussion tonight was an Englishman, Trevor Davies, who has worked in artistic and cultural circles in Copenhagen since the 1980s, including stints as the director of the Copenhagen International Theatre and leading the Copenhagen European Cultural Capital project in 1996. He's most recently the author of a report on "Cultural Diversity Seen in Connection to Danish Arts Council" [pdf, huge]. Niels, the director of marketing at the press, bravely holds it aloft here:

As an American I can say that it's very interesting to hear Europeans frame debates over cultural relevance and social integration in terms of government funding. It seems that subsidy and support is the (literal) coin of the realm, and that enormous support from central bureaucracies is the starting point of the conversation, rather than a dangerous dead-end, as it often is in the States. However I will grant that Davies gave a spirited and effective defense of Danish cultural subsidies in his talk, which drew upon a discussion of the differences between his native Great Britain, where the millions of Southeast Asians form a critical cultural mass capable of producing and consuming culture in sizable numbers, and Denmark, where the 450,000 'foreigners' do not exist in significant enough clusters to perform the same cultural role. As Davies said, he wrote his new report "primarily for the ten people" who serve on the Kulturråd, so it will be interesting to see if his -- and Ramadan's -- work, in the academic and the political spheres, respectively, bears fruit.