‘A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities’

This article offers a reflection on the solo exhibition ‘For Alberta and Victor: A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities’, by visual artist La Vaughn Belle, of which I was guest curator in 2021. As a site-specific intervention at the Women’s building in Copenhagen, the exhibition sought to engage the residue of Danish colonial history, in particular the traces surrounding the 1905 Colonial Exhibition at Tivoli Gardens. I look back on this collaboration with Belle to expand key concerns that the exhibition dealt with and to shed light on the stakes of exhibiting in the afterlife of colonial history. Moving between curatorial reflections and readings of Belle’s artistic practice, I unfold the notion of archival encounter with a focus on the temporal and embodied dimensions of engaging colonial archives. I suggest that the stakes of encountering vexed archives beg us to reconsider relations between archives, performance, the embodied and the spectral, and that the exhibition offered a vocabulary and sensorium with which to contemplate these relations anew.