outreach
Jil Rissi Wins UZH Semesterpreis for Fall 2024
Jil Rissi‘s award-winning BA seminar project “(De)Colonization through Greenlandic Lenses: an Artistic Approach to History” was honored with the university-wide UZH Semesterprize for fall 2024. She wrote the paper as a contribution to my BA-Seminar “Art as a Means of Historical Inquiry” at UZH in Spring 2024.
Jil’s excellent paper engages with the Greenlandic past by studying and curating the work of indigenous photographers from three centuries. Her project makes several interesting contributions to the current state of research. By bringing to life abstract issues of representation in postcolonial contexts through the curation of documentary and artistic photography, Jil has successfully explored a complex humanities problem in a multidisciplinary way. Besides a rigorously argued seminar paper, Jil also constructed a three-dimensional installation that makes questions of archival formation, perspective and positionality tangible in an exhibition environment––thus developing an original analytical method at the intersection of history, museum studies, and creative arts.
Jil has conducted an impressive research effort on a little-known topic. Her work is timely and relevant beyond the academe: it engages actively and critically with the nature of memory in Kalaallit Nunaat / Greenland, and it even makes a contribution to recent controversies on the evaluation of Danish colonialism.
I am proud that the university-wide, multidisciplinary award committee for the second time in a row chose to honor one of my brilliant advisees, following on Vivianne Rhyner’s UZH Semester Prize for Spring 2024.
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Learn More about Jil’s award-winning project:
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Working Model for Jil Rissi’s “Black Box of Danish Colonialism:” an exhibition cubicle into which a sequence of historical photographs are projected. Visitors observe the cubicle’s inside through peepholes in the shape of the Greenlandic flag, the midnight sun.
