Artist talk by Michelle Eistrup
Funen Art Academy is proud to announce that the Academy will serve as the host institution for visual artist Michelle Eistrup’s upcoming PhD project, Echoes in Motion. Re-enacting Cultural Heritage Through Artistic Practice and Transnational Collaboration.
This is the first time the Academy is hosting a PhD project supported by Novo Nordisk. To mark the occasion, we are pleased to invite you to a public artist talk by Michelle Eistrup, who will talk about her project and artistic practice in general. Se more below…
The artist talk will take place in the Lecture Hall on Tuesday, September 8, from 3–4 pm. Everyone is welcome.
The artist talk will be held in English.
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Michelle Eistrup’s work explores how histories of rupture, displacement, colonialism, memory, and healing are carried through bodies, landscapes, materials, archives, and cultural forms. Through sustained research and collaboration, her practice brings different perspectives and forms of knowledge into relation, with particular attention to listening, embodied experience, and material processes.
For the talk, Eistrup will take as her starting point works developed in Australia and Leipzig, including In the Deep Underground and Up Above, Breathing Archives, and Mineral Emissaries. She will speak about the working processes and considerations that shaped these projects, and about how artistic inquiry develops through research, collaboration, intuition, and material experimentation.
The talk will also touch on earlier points of departure such as Housing Spirits in Ouidah, Benin, and the BAT platform, where creating spaces for different people, disciplines, cultural perspectives, and forms of knowledge to meet became an important part of her artistic method.
A central question in the talk is how visual and material form changes as understanding deepens. How can an artist remain open to uncertainty, trust the process and the people involved, and allow questions to return and transform across different projects and contexts? Eistrup will conclude by introducing her current PhD research, which has already taken shape through an initial artistic prototype and continues to develop and transform.
Michelle Eistrup (b. 1969) is a visual artist, PhD candidate, and artistic researcher at the University of Copenhagen, with Funen Art Academy as her host institution. She was educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1994 to 2000. Eistrup is the founder of BAT (Bridging Art + Text), a platform for sustained dialogue and research between artists, writers, and curators. From 2022 to 2026, she was the Aaron Douglas Artist Fellow in Residence at The John Lewis Center for Social Justice at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Arnolfini, Alice Yard as part of documenta 15, Borås Art Biennial, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Moderna Museet, Momentum, and the National Gallery of Jamaica.