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July 14, 2022 – Review
Jeannette Ehlers’s “Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms”
Tobias Dias
Jeannette Ehlers has for many years confronted viewers with the repressed history of colonial exploitation on which large parts of Denmark’s wealth is built. In the old and new works that comprise her solo show at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, “Archives in the Tongue: A Litany of Freedoms,” the Danish-Trinidadian artist looks at this history—in particular how it relates to the Black diaspora—across various media. As a whole, the show forms an open, lively archive with no definitive beginning or end: softly tangled braids of brown and black hair appear in several rooms and extend beyond the Kunsthal’s walls, with dance rhythms and singing voices carrying in one of the performance works taking place outside the museum.
In the first room of the exhibition, the large-scale, portrait-format video Moko is Future (2022) features Moko Jumbie, a mythical figure from Afro-Caribbean folklore. Dressed in carnivalesque clothes, masks, and stilts, Moko is shown ascending from the Atlantic Ocean and dancing through Copenhagen’s streets, with its monuments to dead white men, to bring spiritual healing. “Until the lion has their historian, the hunter will always be a hero” is spelled out in pink neon on one of the walls at Charlottenborg—a found text Ehlers saw …