By Jonas Wissing Larsen

The exhibition Voices from the Colonies is quite new, as it opened for visitors in the October 2017. Before this exhibition the Danish colonial era did not take up much space in Danish museums.

The increased focus on the Danish colonial history is probably due to 2017 having been the centenary of the sale of the former Danish West Indies, to the USA. However, the exhibition is not just about these islands, now known as the U.S. Virgin Islands, but about all the former Danish colonies, and the stories and individual narratives that was a part of the Danish colonial “adventure”. Adventure is probably the wrong word, as most of the narratives in the exhibition are tragic, and in no way matches the exotic and romantic paintings that are exhibited elsewhere at The National Museum.

The first thing you meet inside the exhibition is a screen by the entrance, which explains where all the colonies were, and the routes sailed by the colonizers. It very quickly becomes clear, that the colonization happened because of greed and for profitable reasons by expect to hear about the glory days of Denmark, they are about to be surprised. The screen gives an overview over the colonization, before entering the main part of the exhibition, which consists of different “voices from the colonies”.

Some of the voices come from the young Greenlanders Poq and Qiperoq, who came to Denmark in the 18^th century, and tell us about their experience, and how it was to see this flat land and the large buildings for the first time. A more tragic story is about a young African child, Oly, who was kidnapped from his village, shipped to the West Indies, sold as a slave and died only 10 years old. All these voices are finally being heard in this new exhibition, so many years after they should have been listened to.

The exhibition can be seen, as what Mary Louise Pratt defines as a cultural contact zone, which is a place where different cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other. This becomes especially visible in relation to some of the exhibited objects, where the spectator has the option to take an earpiece and listen to different persons’ perspective on the same historical events. An example is the uprising of the black workers on St. Croix in 1878, known as the “Fireburn”. The events are explained by the voice of Queen Mary, one of the leaders of the rebellion, but the story is also told by a Danish soldier who fought against the unhappy workers. Both stories are told, and I think it is interesting to see how the two different cultures and their viewpoints are clashing, and showing how different history can be, if the perspective is changed. However, though both sides of the many of the stories are told, there is no doubt that the Danish colonial power is the villain all along.

While I was looking at the exhibition I overheard a family behind me discussing the Danish colonial past. They sounded surprised to see how Denmark had acted as slave traders, how they had taken Greenlandic kids away from their parents and so on. The mother and father disagreed upon whether Denmark should apologize for these actions in the past, and I think that it is one of the main purposes of this exhibition. To show the Danish people the darker sides of Denmark’s history so we can finally get a more realistic picture of “our beautiful little kingdom” and its past.

Reference:

Pratt, Mary Louise (1991) Arts of the contact zone. Profession: 33–40.