Institut for Kultur og Samfund

Christian Vium is a photographer, filmmaker and Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. Primarily working on long-term projects anchored in participatory observation and in-depth collaboration, his work investigates the intersection between art, documentary, and the social sciences.

In 2016, he was nominated for The Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters silver medal for excellent research, and awarded a 2-year research grant by the Carlsberg Foundation.   

Christian Vium is a FOAM Talent 2015, Lensculture Emerging Talent 2015 Grant Winner and is on the Critical Mass 2015 list. In 2016, he received the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie for his long-term project 'Ville Nomade' (The Nomadic City), which was published as a monograph in July 2016 and exhibited in Bordeaux, Geneva, Metz, Mougins, and Paris. 

He has exhibited his work in more than 20 venues internationally in the period 2015-2018. 

Christian Vium is currently working on the research project ‘Reframing Danish Colonial History: Visual anthropology in the former Danish colonies’: a comparative anthropological critique of historical archives undertaken in close collaboration with people living in the former Danish colonies in Greenland, India, and The Virgin Islands as well as historians, archivists and other experts at universities, museums, research libraries, and archives. 

As a member of the ARTlife research project, Christian is also doing co-creative, workshop-based qualitative research with unaccompanied minors from Afghanistan in Denmark. Working with photography, diaries and exhibition-making through a combination of anthropological and artistic methods of intervention, he explores new forms of articulations of everyday life with his interlocutors. 

His previous Post-Doctoral research project, 'Temporal Dialogues' which combines archival research, experimental ethnographic fieldwork, photography and film-making, has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Aomori, Athens, Aarhus, Brussels, Guatemala, Landskrona, Lodz, London, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney, and Tokyo.

He is the author of a number of articles on visual anthropology, photography, ethnographic methodology, migration and urban anthropology, and is currently working on a new monograph and several film and installation projects. 

 

Anthropology 
Postcolonial theory, discourse and culture analysis, Migration, Refugees, Urban Anthropology, Re-enactment, Collaborative Knowledge Production,Experimental Anthropology, Experimental methods, Aesthetic practice, Art and Science, Nomadism, Afghanistan, Mauritania, Mali, Australia, Brazil, China, Siberia, South Africa, France

 

Ethnographic Film - theory, Ethnographic Film - production, Film theory, Film analysis,     

Participation, Collaboration, Experimentation, Montage, Installation design

 

Photography
Photographic methods, photographic theory, colonial photography, photo-elicitation, visual repatriation, re-enactment, aesthetic theory, exhibition design and co-curation