Postdoctoral project: Cobalt blue circulations in Norwegian art history, 1775-1890

My postdoctoral project investigates the extraction of cobalt blue pigment in Norway, where I "trace" the pigment in various art materials and expressions. Can cobalt tell us something about the relationship between design, art, politics and resource use in the 18th and 19th centuries? How can we look at today's technological dependence on cobalt through its origins in the arts and crafts?

The cobalt project stems thematically from my PhD research on Danish-Norwegian colonialism, where I investigated how the state visualized territories through mapping, landscape paintings and graphic prints. Through several visual media, the Danish-Norwegian state made the Danish West Indies productive as an agricultural and trading colony, and thereby also attempted to justify slavery and ideological racism. I have published this research in several article publications, and I am also working towards the publication of a monograph.

 

 

My postdoctoral project contributes to the Norwegian Research Council project TiO2: How Norway Made the World Whiter. Along with PI Ingrid Halland and senior researcher Tonje Haugland Sørensen, I am editing the anthology Deep White: Unsettling the Colour White in Western Art History and Aesthetics (Brill, forthcoming). 

I was co-curator of the exhibition Nordmandsdalen: Art, power and materials in 18th-century Denmark-Norway (Kode, 23 May-12 October 2025)

 

Exhibition production

• Morten Spjøtvold; Helene Engnes Birkeli; Tonje Haugland Sørensen et al. (2025). Nordmandsdalen: Kunst, makt og materialer i 1700-tallets Danmark-Norge. (external link)

Exhibition catalogue

• Peder Valle; Mathias Danbolt; Tonje Haugland Sørensen et al. (2025). Nordmandsdalen: Kunst, makt og materialer i 1700-tallets Danmark-Norge. (external link)

Academic article

• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2020). Cutting the contact zone: race, temporality and history in Peter Lotharius Oxholm’s map of St. Croix (1799). (external link)
• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2021). Den svarte “barnepiken” og rasismens melankoli. (external link)

Journal review

• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2019). Review of Charmaine Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Routledge, 2016). (external link)
• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2024). A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America 1890-1930 by Isabelle Gapp. Lund Humphries, London, 2024, 208 pp.. (external link)

Non-fiction book chapter

• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2026). Camille Pissarro at the Crossroad of the Plantation. (external link)
• Helene Engnes Birkeli (2024). Touching Difference: Race and Portraiture in Danish Colonial Space. (external link)

See a complete overview of publications in NVA.

I am editing the book Deep White: Unsettling White in Western Art History and Aesthetics (Brill, 2025) together with Tonje Haugland Sørensen and Ingrid Halland.

As a Postdoctoral Fellow, I am a part of the NFR project "NorWhite: How Norway Made the World Whiter" and collaborate with, among others, Kode, Blaafarveværket and Moving Monuments: The Material Life of Sculpture from the Danish Colonial Era (University of Copenhagen).