Borderland / Gränstrakt
Malmö Konstmuseum

Polyphonic Voices on Questions of Identity Processes and Heritage

Influenced by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, the curatorial framework navigates questions of art in relation to notions of a culturally homogeneous, original place in the past, and of how artistic representations have been used to create a sense of belonging from the nineteenth century to the present day. Malmö Art Museum and Ystad Art Museum’s collections of Scanian landscape paintings have traditionally been considered apolitical. However, they bear witness to hegemonic ideals and norms of what was thought of as beautiful and worth depicting and were used as tools to shape a national consciousness. Emphasizing the uniqueness of every landscape became important in the national rhetoric. Nature and depictions of it took on a vital role for a democratic form of nationalism.