Profile

I am an intellectual and art historian, theorist and cultural producer. My research focuses on the historical avant-gardes, the neo-avant-gardes, contemporary art, and aesthetic theory from 1800 to the present. I am particularly interested in the "politics of knowlege" in art and theory that can be attributed to the revolutionary and emancipatory tradition, including Soviet and German Constructivism, Marxism, Critical Theory, the Situationist International, anti-colonial art and thought as well as recent socially engaged art and climate activism.

Alongside my employment at the university, I also teach at Det Jyske Kunstakademi and am a member of the extradisciplinary collective Organ for the Autonomous Sciences, whose activities are manifested in texts, performances and exhibitions. We are currently working on an exhibition in 8. Salon in Hamburg.

Current research

I have just completed the research project A Nameless Science: Art, Expertise, and Infrastructure, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. Here I investigated how a number of artists in recent decades have renegotiated their critical competencies and literacy in the encounter with knowledge institutions such as the laboratory, the courtroom, the university and the hospital, and how such renegotiations reflect a more general institutional, social and epistemological crisis in the illiberal society of late capitalism. In addition to a number of articles (already published or forthcoming), I am currently writing a book that summarizes this work. A part of the project also led to the curatorial program series Experts of the Undercommons in Kunsthal Aarhus during 2023.

I am also working on finalizing a book manuscript (based on my PhD thesis) on the historical roots of the contemporary phenomenon of 'artistic research' in the historical avant-garde movements. I hope to finish this by early 2025.

I have also written a longer afterword to the new Danish translation of Theodor W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, published in November 2024.

Together with Maja Bak Herrie, I have edited a questionnaire for the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics entitled “Aesthetics in the Age of Unreason”, published in August 2024. Together with Dominique Routhier and Louis Hartnoll, I am preparing a new special issue of NJA to be published in the fall 2025.

The work on an anti-capitalist handbook I have edited together with Kristoffer Balslev Willert is nearing completion. It will be published by Antipyrine in early 2025.

Last but not least, on November 1, I have started a new research project in collaboration with Museum Jorn supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation. It is titled “Who does art belong to? On the collective, the common and the popular in Jorn and his context”.