CulturalEncountersAndDifferences.dk

By Josephine Amanda Jørgensen, Nadia Charlotte Dahlgren Petersen and Nicoline Bonø Reindel, Sunday morning in April and the sun is shining. Although it is Sunday, Købmagergade is filled with people enjoying the weather. Copenhageners never waste a chance to get some vitamin D. As we reach Rundetårn the spring has gotten us all frisky and smiling. We are so ready for this exhibition! We enter the great national landmark and make our way up the spiral passage. None of us…

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By Paulina Anna Gretkierewicz The Imam Ali Moske in Copenhagen is the biggest mosque in Denmark. It was inaugurated in October 2015 and is placed in the district of Nørrebro. Two turquoise minarets and a dome decorated in gold look over the square apartment blocks surrounding it on Vibevej. The blue of the facade stands out, in contrast to the red bricks of its surrounding architecture. Somehow, this majestic blue building appears hidden on a side street to Nørrebrogade, and…

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By Ditte Nikolajsen Volfbrandt, Lasse Ringø Hansen and Charlotte Juul Olsson Two enormous minarets rise above the roofs of Nordvest. We were about to attend the Friday prayer at the Imam Ali Mosque. While entering the mosque we were confronted with the gender division, which would split up the group. We realized that the division might foster different experiences of the prayer.     The balcony Entering the balcony, people were already sitting on the floor or on the wooden…

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By Ruben Campos Arjona Born out of a necessity to enter a conversation in which they were only talked about but not talked to, this group of women decided to make their voice heard by joining together to do the one thing no one was willing to do: establish a dialogue. Kvinder I Dialog (Women in Dialogue) has chosen to approach the general public in an attempt to build bridges and burn down stereotypes about and around them. But who are…

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By Ida Cecilie Guttman Gammeltoft, Asmus Sebastian Kobbernagel og Peter Krøgh Lundby Gravesen On a sunny spring morning, we visited The David Collection as part of the Master programme of Cultural Encounters. The subject of the day: the museum’s exhibition of Islamic art. The David Collection holds the eighth largest collection of Islamic art in the Western world, although the museum views itself first and foremost as ‘a collector of beautiful objects’, rather than as a museum of religious art….

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By Ruben Campos Arjona Ten thousand years ago, a wounded prey is running away from its hunters. Three arrows of a material that is not yet flint are stuck on its side. The beast stumbles, gasps for air and closes its eyes one last time as the frigid waters of the lake claim it. The hunters pass it by, the prey forgotten. After a violent pause and millennia of silence, a bunch of bones are unearthed and reassembled on top…

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By Jamie Jackson and Sarah Plauborg As we make our way through town on an overcrowded warm bus, we finally arrive at our destination. The topic that we had begun to discuss on the way there was Nørrebro in the news. Being from two different parts of the world, often gives us an advantage when discussing aspects of Danish society. Sarah being an ethnic Dane, and Jamie a South African. We discussed how the area in question had fallen privy…

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By Riia Marette Mäkilä I certainly didn’t imagine they would have me dancing until my feet were sore! I was spending the weekend at my Palestinian friend’s family house in Nablus when I got invited to his sister’s wedding. I felt very excited as I had heard about Palestinian weddings from friends but had never been to one before. I was imagining gender segregation, dancing and a dinner with Mansaf, which is a traditional Arabic dish with rice, lamb and…

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by Guðrun Henrysdóttir “museums are structurally neo-colonial institutions” (Robin Boast in his article ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museums as Contact Zone Revisited’) Concerned about Robin Boast’s polemic statement I set out to examine this polemic statement myself by going to the National Museum of Denmark in central Copenhagen. My aim was to understand this controversy in regards to the ethnographic collections of the National Museum. Walking through the ethnographic collection of the museum felt tedious. As much as I appreciated the craftsmanship…

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By Jessica Silverio Rasmussen, Lea Vyff Blauenfeldt and Arleen Sharon Pushparajah In a time where there appears to be an on-going focus on the depolarisation between Muslims and non-Muslims in Western society, it was especially interesting and enlightening to visit the Imam Ali mosque in Nørrebro as part of our Cultural Encounter’s course. When arriving to the mosque, the construction appeared massive and almost majestic in its expression with its two, blue, beautifully ornamented minarets and dome, which stood out…

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