IKK research projects secure funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation

Five research projects at the School of Communication and Culture have recently been awarded grants from the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The projects span a wide academic spectrum, exploring everything from how contemporary art can help us comprehend climate change to how cultural ideals of beauty dictate material waste. Additional research will investigate the dynamics of guilt and shame within public spaces through a historical lens tracking back to the occupation period.

24 August 2026 by Mathias Holm Guldberg

Researcher: Jacob Lund, Professor, Aesthetics and Culture.

Project title: Towards an Aesthetics of Planetarity – Mapping and Material Mediation as Ecological World-Making

Amount: DKK 1,777,910.

What is your research project about?
The project investigates how contemporary artists can help us sense and understand our changing planet. As climate change alters environments and ecosystems in ways that largely escape our normal senses and habitual perception, art can open up new forms of awareness.

Why is it relevant?
The project analyzes artworks that explore how human and non-human worlds are closely connected through experimental mapping and the mediation of materials like soil, ice, plants, and living systems. Through the study of these artistic practices, the project develops a “planetary aesthetics”: a way of seeing and experiencing the Earth not as an object separate from us, but as something we share and inhabit together.

Researcher: Ingrid Halland, Associate Professor, Aesthetics and Culture.

Project title: Extraction and Aesthetics: Unsettling Pasts, Currents, and Futures of Blue Color in Denmark and Norway 1775 – 2030.

Amount: DKK 4,377,788.

What is your research project about?
Extraction and Aesthetics examines how notions of beauty influence which materials we extract, use, and discard. The project highlights the connections between aesthetics, resources, and waste. As a case study, the project tracks how blue color—specifically blue cobalt pigment—and blue clay have moved through different material hierarchies from the late 18th century to the present day.

Why is it relevant?
It is relevant because it shows how historical choices regarding beauty and materials continue to impact our relationship with nature, production, and consumption today. Furthermore, the project brings humanistic knowledge into close dialogue with the art field, and I collaborate with several artists and art institutions. Through a “research-by-display” methodology, exhibitions are utilized as a central research method to test interpretations. Among other things, I am collaborating with Danish Craftsmen & Designers on the project's first exhibition, Rariorum, which opens on September 3 at RERUM, Institute for X in Aarhus.

Researcher: Elle-Mie Ejdrup Hansen, PhD Fellow (as of 1 September 2026), School of Communication and Culture.

Project title: The Anatomy of Shame: History and Memory as an Artistic Material

Amount: DKK 2,607,384.

What is your research project about?
Between 1943 and 1945, the Danish state financed the construction of approximately 6,000 bunkers along the North Sea coast in Denmark, and 70,000 Danish workers built the Atlantic Wall, primarily after the end of the cooperation policy in August 1943 until late 1944.

With The Anatomy of Shame, I wish to advance my artistic research by bringing my archive and its embedded knowledge into dialogue with recent historical research on the occupation period and the cooperation policy, with a special emphasis on the question of our collective and personal responsibility in the face of political history.

Through archival research, the project seeks to create a space for reflection where artistic practice serves as a critical method to explore how the traces of war are managed through cultural hierarchies when heroic narratives dominate and shameful accounts remain under-illuminated.

Why is it relevant?
The Anatomy of Shame conducts an artistic investigation into how shame, guilt, myths, and memory continue to operate within public spaces. The core idea is to relate the mnemonic layers of various archives to the contemporary moment, characterized by war in Europe, increasing polarization, and shifting global power dynamics.

Researcher: Ane Fabricius Christiansen, External Researcher, School of Communication and Culture.

Project title: Rewilding White Gold

Amount: DKK 3,076,384.

What is your research project about?
Rewilding White Gold is a practice-based PhD project investigating porcelain as a material, cultural heritage, and form of cognition in a contemporary Anthropocene and ecological age. Focusing on raw materials from Bornholm—kaolin, quartz, and feldspar—the project examines whether and how contemporary Danish porcelain can be produced without being subordinated to historical and industrial ideals of purity, stability, and control.

Why is it relevant?
Through fieldwork on Bornholm, material experiments, and artistic practice, the project investigates the material agency of porcelain—its tendency to crack, deform, and change during drying and firing—as an active co-creator of form and meaning. The project contributes new knowledge on how practice-based material experimentation can serve as a method to rethink porcelain, cultural heritage, and the human relationship with nature in an era shaped by ecological crises.

Researcher: Anneke Kampman, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Communication and Culture.

Project title: Operational Personalities: Life-Casting, Livestream Labour, and the Choreography of Algorithmic Subjectivity

Amount: DKK 2,220,000.

What is your research project about?
Operational Personalities is an artistic research project investigating how livestreaming platforms turn personality, presence, and everyday life into economic value. Through installations and performances, it explores how interfaces and algorithms capture and monetize our desires in real time, choreographing bodily gestures and producing conditions of friction, endurance, suspension, and delay. The artwork functions as a form of conjunctural analysis: it brings technological, economic, and emotional forces into relation to reveal how platforms made to answer our desires also reshape who we are.

Why is it relevant?
Livestreaming increasingly organizes culture, labor, and social interaction. The project asks what happens when personality and emotion become part of the platform economy—and how artistic practice might expose, disrupt, and reimagine the infrastructures through which we perform and understand ourselves.