Unfinished Histories

Unfinished Histories: Art, Memory, and the Visual Politics of Coloniality brings together essays, conversations, and artistic contributions that respond to the enduring presence of colonialism across transoceanic networks connecting Denmark, the US Virgin Islands, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), and Sápmi. The contributors approach coloniality not as a closed historical chapter but as an ongoing condition that continues to shape social relations, cultural memory, and lived experience.
The volume explores images, objects, archives, and monuments and their role in shaping colonial ways of seeing. At the same time, it presents scholarly, curatorial, and artistic interventions that challenge these histories and imagine new perspectives. Engaging questions of representation, repair, and resistance, the contributions highlight the crucial role of art in confronting colonial legacies in the present.

Attentive to histories and relations long marginalized within colonial historiography and art history, Unfinished Histories offers a rare transoceanic perspective on the artistic legacies of Nordic colonialism and the creative practices of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous communities. By foregrounding the movement of people, images, ideas, and materials across oceans and empires, the anthology advances new perspectives on art, memory, and decolonial futures.