This knowledge transfer conversation, within the project ”Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation”, features Lisa Rosendahl, Associate Professor of Exhibition Studies at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and curator of Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (2019 and 2021), in dialogue with Oana Nasui, a cultural researcher. Their discussion explores curatorial strategies for addressing contested monuments and colonial heritage, the role of artists as mediators, and the potential of temporary exhibitions versus permanent monuments.
Uncovering Gothenburg’s Colonial History
Lisa’s curatorial work for Gothenburg Biennial began with the city’s 400-year anniversary celebration, which immediately placed history as the central context. The official narrative presented Gothenburg as Sweden’s “window to the Atlantic,” founded in the 1600s as a trade port that later became an industrial powerhouse—a story of prosperity and global connection without acknowledging darker dimensions.
Through Lisa’s previous research on extractivism and Swedish iron mining, she discovered something almost entirely absent from public discourse: Swedish iron was a key product in the transatlantic slave trade from the 1600s onward, used to build warships, weapons, shackles, and chains, and even served as currency in trading enslaved people with Africa. This iron was shipped through Gothenburg’s harbor.
In the historical museum, Lisa found only a small paragraph mentioning “the French plot of land”—a specific harbor location exchanged between the French Empire and the Swedish king, giving Sweden a Caribbean island while France gained a trading spot in Gothenburg’s active international harbor. This brief reference represented an entire colonial history that Lisa had never been taught growing up in Sweden, and which remained absent from the city’s public narrative about itself.
The French Plot of Land: Racist Artworks as Traces
Visiting the actual French plot of land, Lisa found no signage or acknowledgment of its colonial history. The only traces were artworks commissioned in the 1920s-1940s by large shipping companies that had placed their headquarters there—companies unrelated to the original colonial Caribbean history but creating an overlap of narratives in public space.
These artworks, created by famous Gothenburg-based artists like Ivar Arosenius in a naive, fairy-tale aesthetic popular at the time, were quite racist and sexist. They depicted violent confrontations between Swedish tradesmen and sailors with indigenous populations in other parts of the world. Despite being offensive, these artworks were the only visible traces of colonial history in public space.
This led Lisa to a crucial insight: the history isn’t actually hidden—it’s right there in front of us in these images. We’ve simply been trained not to see them. The challenge became: how can contemporary artists make us see these things again, and not only see them as they were then but understand them today?
Sweden’s “Innocent” Image and Its Shadow Side
Lisa addresses the common perception of Sweden as a “very nice place, very innocent”—an image she encounters constantly while traveling. While acknowledging that Sweden is indeed lovely, she points out the shadow side often ignored both inside and outside the country. It’s convenient to have an example of a successful social democracy, but the link between how that prosperous industrial country grew up in modernity and how it directly connects with the colonial economy of the past (and still ongoing) is quite rarely discussed.
Possible Monuments: A Discursive Project
Given the biennial’s temporary nature and limited budget (they had neither the mandate nor the budget for permanent artworks), Lisa and her team launched a parallel discursive project called “Possible Monuments” The question mark was deliberate—this was 2019, as the Black Lives Matter movement was building momentum, with monuments being torn down in classic colonial countries like Britain and Portugal, and big protests in the US.
They engaged seven artists (both Swedish and international) plus two writers to address fundamental questions: Is the monument form at all interesting today, or is it very outmoded? What can permanent forms of public presence bring? What problems are associated with them? The artists were asked specifically to consider the French plot of land and respond to whether there should be a monument commemorating this site—and if so, how it should look; if not, why not.
The artists had complete freedom—no fixed budget, no limitations. Lisa hoped for completely immaterial or digital monuments, but interestingly, none went that far.
Jamie Robert’s Proposal: Performative Recurring Monuments
One particularly interesting proposal came from Jamie Robert, who works extensively with performance. He proposed an exchange of soil between Gothenburg and Saint Barthélemy (the Caribbean island). While this physical earth shift was impossible to realize, the concept was compelling: the monument would be activated performatively on a recurring basis—once a year as a memory tradition, working with school children.
Rather than placing a memorial image or reading of the past, Robert’s proposal aimed to continuously ask: How are we situated in relationship to this history? Where am I in relationship to this history? How has it impacted who I am today? The idea was to place the bodies of citizens (in this case, school children) on that plot of land, making them physically engage with the site and its layered meanings.
The Biennial as In-Between: Recurring Temporality
Lisa has written about recurring temporary projects like biennials as an in-between point between the permanent and the temporary. This recurring temporality acknowledges that history is constantly being reread in relationship to the present. We understand the past in different ways as our own present changes. The return to a certain site or set of problems becomes a method for narrating history or developing memory culture—tracking something over time in the present rather than fixating a statement about the past in one moment.
Oana recognizes this as potentially preventing acute conflict points. Sculptures stood for decades with nobody caring, but when the relationship with the present changed during Black Lives Matter, the narrative changed and physically embodied in protest and toppling. Recurring engagement might function as “updates”—regularly asking how we look at the past from our current point of view, potentially easing possible conflicts.
The Paradox of Permanent Traces
Lisa acknowledges the complexity: if the offensive artworks on the French plot of land hadn’t been there, her response to that site might have been different. Their presence made clear there were voices that needed to be contested. If we take away those voices, we risk erasing the problems in our own history and continuing to pretend we don’t see them. She doesn’t have a simple answer to whether contested monuments should be removed or remain.
Spatial Narration and the White Cube
The conversation explores spatial narration—how spaces themselves tell stories and shape what can be said within them. Lisa discusses how exhibition spaces are never neutral; they carry ideological implications in their very architecture and organization.
She makes a provocative connection between the white cube gallery concept and colonial ideology. The idea of a space that is empty, where you can put anything, then erase it and start a new story—this whole way of thinking about territory is actually very connected to the colonial idea. “We can just go to the Americas, there’s nothing there, we just erase the culture that is there, we say it’s not even a culture, and then we build a whole new world.”
This reframing reveals how supposedly neutral curatorial spaces embody particular worldviews and power relations. The white cube relates to colonial capitalist violence in its fundamental assumptions about emptiness, erasure, and unlimited possibility.
Who Initiates Matters: Process and Power
Oana asks a crucial practical question: If someone wants to put public art or a monument in public space, where do you begin? Do you talk to neighbors, artists, museums, municipalities? Who has priority—artists, anthropologists, or ordinary people living next door?
Lisa’s response is that it depends completely on what type of monument and what it’s commemorating. There’s no generic answer because it depends on what kind of history is at stake—whether it connects with a very particular group of people, a national story, one particular person who might be an icon of something, or whether the monument should be a meeting place.
Crucially, who initiates the project really matters. In Gothenburg’s “Possible Monuments” project, Lisa was the one asking “should we have a monument here?” As a Swedish person invited to deal with the city’s history, she felt simultaneously responsible (this is my history, I have a responsibility for talking about this because nobody told me when I was learning about my own heritage that we had this colonial past) and uncertain about her authority (who should we be commemorating, from what perspective, and who am I to decide that?).
This became a very complicated question discussed with many different people in different forums. If the city decided they would like to commemorate or not forget the colonial relations that actually built the city, then a very concrete sequence of events would follow, and in every step there would have to be questions asked and different perspectives included.
Overlapping Motives and Ongoing Narratives
Oana observes that Lisa’s case demonstrates overlapping motives—different views upon the same spot coexisting. Perhaps it’s not a good time to erect something permanent because there are ongoing discussions, ongoing narratives forming. You cannot put something more or less permanent when narratives are still being negotiated.
Lisa agrees but adds a counterpoint: we also risk that certain issues are ignored or not allowed to take space in the city. It’s a fine balance. The historical artworks on the French plot of land were commissioned by commercial shipping companies—why should we be surrounded with their stories about themselves?
The Role of Artists as Mediators
Throughout the conversation, the role of artists emerges as extremely important but not necessarily as mediators in a neutral sense. Rather, artists function as makers-visible—helping us see what’s already there but trained to be invisible, connecting historical traces to contemporary understanding, and proposing alternative ways of engaging with contested histories.
The biennial format allowed artists to make temporary interventions without the pressure of creating definitive permanent statements. This created space for experimentation, for asking questions rather than providing answers, and for acknowledging that our relationship to history is ongoing and changing.
Temporary Exhibitions and Lasting Impact
The conversation reveals a paradox: temporary exhibitions like biennials, which are “pinpoint, very focused, very intense experiences” that then disperse, may actually have longer-lasting impact than permanent exhibitions precisely because of their recurring nature and their acknowledgment of change. By returning periodically to contested histories rather than fixing them in stone, temporary formats create opportunities for evolving understanding and engagement.
The proposals from “Possible Monuments” remain accessible through a website and documented in the book “Biennials as Sites of Historical Narration” (2022), creating a different kind of permanence—not as physical monuments but as ongoing resources for thinking about how we commemorate, what we commemorate, and who decides.
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More about the “Nordic Insights” project here
The “Nordic Insights: addressing cancel culture in public spaces through artistic dialogue and cultural innovation” project is implemented by the Formare Culturala platform from Romania. It is funded by the Nordic Culture Fund through the Globus Opstart+ program.
