The project Playing with ghosts – affective ambivalence in contemporary arts practices examines and explores forms and modes of playfulness – e.g. humor, irony, satire, grotesque, excess – in contemporary decolonial art. We investigate the forms and modes of playfulness in contemporary decolonial art often expressed as playful inversions of structural asymmetries. We are interested in the bodily forms and subjectivities that these humorous forms afford and how they alter static and stereotypical representations. We argue that playful forms make worlds in resisting dominant structures as the former colonized bypass the stereotypical positions of subjugation and supplication and in putting former power-relations into play. Playful forms can also be capable of disrupting the implied subject positionings that hegemonic majority populations normally take: the villains, the saviors, the good Samaritan, to perform much more ambivalent and equivocal interpellations. Playfulness can be seen in many genres and across media and we would like to embrace them all: comic books, memes, film, tv-series, installations, performances, visual arts, protesters tactics, etc.

Playing with ghosts work at three levels: an analytical level with primarily but not only artistic expressions from Greenland, The Virgin Islands and in the arts from migrants and descendants from the Global South in Denmark. Secondly, we want to see decolonial artworks develop in using digital tools. This is the idea of our arts-based workshops during which both established and emergent artists work together to produce their critical art in playful manners. We consider artists as mid- space actors capable of mediating btw different publics to build worlds in which differences could co-habit. Thirdly, we would like to see whether and how critical and playful modalities could create mood changes and bypass antagonism and rejection when displayed publicly.

The project Playing with ghosts – affective ambivalence in contemporary arts practices examines and explores forms and modes of playfulness – e.g. humor, irony, satire, grotesque, excess – in contemporary decolonial art. We investigate the forms and modes of playfulness in contemporary decolonial art often expressed as playful inversions of structural asymmetries. We are interested in the bodily forms and subjectivities that these humorous forms afford and how they alter static and stereotypical representations. We argue that playful forms make worlds in resisting dominant structures as the former colonized bypass the stereotypical positions of subjugation and supplication and in putting former power-relations into play. Playful forms can also be capable of disrupting the implied subject positionings that hegemonic majority populations normally take: the villains, the saviors, the good Samaritan, to perform much more ambivalent and equivocal interpellations. Playfulness can be seen in many genres and across media and we would like to embrace them all: comic books, memes, film, tv-series, installations, performances, visual arts, protesters tactics, etc.

Playing with ghosts work at three levels: an analytical level with primarily but not only artistic expressions from Greenland, The Virgin Islands and in the arts from migrants and descendants from the Global South in Denmark. Secondly, we want to see decolonial artworks develop in using digital tools. This is the idea of our arts-based workshops during which both established and emergent artists work together to produce their critical art in playful manners. We consider artists as mid- space actors capable of mediating btw different publics to build worlds in which differences could co-habit. Thirdly, we would like to see whether and how critical and playful modalities could create mood changes and bypass antagonism and rejection when displayed publicly.