Researchers at ARKEN

Dorthe Juul Rugaard, MA

Senior Curator & Head of Collections

Dorthe Juul Rugaard (b. 1972) is Senior Curator & Head of Collections at ARKEN.

Rugaard has curated numerous exhibitions featuring Danish and international art, including Animals in Art (2020), Van Gogh (2018-19), Candice Breitz. Love Story (2018), My Music (2017-18), Art in Sunshine (2015 and 2016) and Palle Nielsen. The Model (2014).

Rugaard was part of the interinstitutional research network TAKE PART (2016-18), and she was part of ARKEN’s research project Deltagerisme. Dogme og mulighedsfelt (2014-16). In 2011–13, she was part of the interinstitutional exhibition and research project Museums and Cultural Institutions as Spaces for Citizenship. In that connection, Rugaard was co-editor of the anthology Rum for Medborgerskab (2014).

Rugaard has contributed to anthologies, journals and catalogues, writing pieces on art theory as well as articles on Danish and international artists such as Palle Nielsen, Karoline H. Larsen, Anselm Reyle and Peter Bonde.

Rugaard obtained her MA in art history from Aarhus University in 1999 with a dissertation on context-based and relational contemporary art in an aesthetic-theoretical and avant-garde historical perspective. In her research, Rugaard focuses on contemporary art, including various forms of participation, performativity and media.

You can read more about Rugaard’s research here

Gry Hedin, MA and PhD

Curator

Gry Hedin (b. 1974) has been a curator at ARKEN since 2018 managing ARKEN’s research and catalogues. She also edits the research journal ARKEN Bulletin and curates exhibitions.

Hedin holds an MA in art history from the University of Copenhagen and in 2012 obtained a PhD from the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen with the dissertation Skrig, Sult og Frugtbarhed (2012) about the reception of Darwin’s theories in Scandinavia. Her research focuses on the relationship between art, literature and science in Scandinavia from 1780 to the present day, and she also addresses various museological issues.

Hedin has written for and edited a range of research-based anthologies and exhibition catalogues, including Jordforbindelser. Dansk maleri 1780-1920 og det antropocæne landskab (2018), Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North. Climate Change and Nature in Art (2018) and J.P. Jacobsen og kunsten (2016). In addition to this, she has contributed more than twenty peer-reviewed articles to journals and exhibition catalogues in Denmark and abroad. She regularly speaks at international conferences and to museum audiences, and she arranged the conference Art and Presence. A conference on art, atmosphere, museums and presence (2017) at the University of Southern Denmark.

Hedin has been the initiator and project manager of several interinstitutional research projects, including Golden Age Art and Science supported by The Carlsberg Foundation, The Artists’ Colony in Faaborg 1880–1925 supported by The New Carlsberg Foundation, Kunst og nærvær supported by The Velux Foundation’s museum initiative and J.P. Jacobsen og kunsten supported by The Danish Ministry of Culture’s research committee and The Novo Nordisk Foundation. She is an external examiner at University of Copenhagen, where she has also taught.

You can read more about Hedin’s research here

Nanna Stjernholm, MA

Curator

Nanna Stjernholm is the curator behind ARKEN’s exhibition WOMEN. She has previously worked as an assistant curator at venues such as Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, and in her capacity as freelance curator she has curated a large number of exhibitions in Denmark and abroad. Examples include: Vibrant Matter (SAK Kunstbygning, 2018), Face of Another (Gallery Susanne Ottesen, 2018), Spooky Action at a Distance (Bus Projects, Melbourne, 2016) and Notes on Location (Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, 2015).

In her curatorial work, Nanna Stjernholm has a particular focus on contemporary sculpture, feminism, performativity new materialism and ecocriticism. Nanna Stjernholm has edited several books and exhibition catalogues, including the monographs Viera Collaro – Essence of Light (2017). She has contributed to the editing of the oeuvre catalogue Per Kirkeby – The Bricks (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2019) and the monograph Dea Trier Mørch (Louisiana, 2019). Nanna Stjernholm has also written a number of articles and texts for catalogues and exhibitions, featuring artists such as Silas Inoue, Amalie Jakobsen, Christine Overvad Hansen, Lea Guldditte Hestelund and Pia Eikaas.

Nanna Stjernholm holds an MA in art history from the University of Copenhagen (2018), where she completed her education with the thesis The Prince’s Garden – a New Materialist reading of Emil Westman Hertz’s oeuvre. Since then, she has written research-based articles on Emil Westman Hertz and is currently working on a monograph about his oeuvre.

Read more about Nannas research here

Dehlia Hannah, PhD

Post doc.

Dehlia Hannah (b. 1978) is researcher at ARKEN with a postdoctoral fellowship in collaboration with The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Visual Arts. The research project Rewilding the Museum was begun in April 2021 and is funded by the New Carlsberg Foundation. The project examines the art museum’s status within the fragile ecologies of the Anthropocene.

Hannah is a philosopher and curator and received her PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specializations in aesthetics, philosophy of science and philosophy of nature. A recuring theme in her work is an exploration of how emerging science and technology inform the aesthetic contestation of ideas of nature.

Hannah has written a great number of books, essays and articles. Her recent book A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018) reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate change by revisiting the environmental conditions under which Frankenstein was written and the global aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Her edited books include Julius von Bismarck — Talking to Thunder (Hatje Cantz, 2019) and Julian Charrière—Toward No Earthly Pole (Mousse, 2020), and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Art and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021).

Past exhibitions include Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (Milwaukee, 2015), and Control: Experiment (Stockholm, 2016), Dressing in a World of Endless Rainfall (Copenhagen, 2016), Emerge: A Festival of Futures (Phoenix, 2017), and the site-specific installation Fabian Knecht—Isolation (52°33’44.1”N 14°03’12.8”E) (Buchow, 2019).

She has held positions as postdoc at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, and Research Curator and Visiting Assistant Professor at Arizona State University and the University of Toronto. As Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art and Natural Sciences at Aalborg University, her most recent project An Imaginary Museum of Philosophical Monsters examined the role of thought experiments and imaginary creatures, places, and things in philosophical reasoning.

Read more about Hannahs research project here