Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Marie Kølbæk Iversen (*Herning, Denmark, 1981) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Visual artist MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, and PhD in practice-based visual art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University in 2023. 

Since 2017, Marie Kølbæk Iversen has been the vocalist of performance-project Donnimaar, which is based on the ethnographic material collected on the West Jutlandic heathlands—among others from her great-great-great-great-grandmother Johanne Tygesdatter—during the 1870s, when the heath was being rapidly enclosed and agriculturally developed. The songs relate to a different cultural tradition than the Protestant Christian and national romantic cultural context of their collection: They are largely (and in places explicitly) proto-feminist, apocalyptic, anti-Christian, anti-materialist, and anti-Danish. 

Many of the heathlands' songs are well known across the North Sea region, but the Donnimaar-project lends its name from the song Æ Fåwanleng ('The Transformation’), obtained solely from Johanne Tygesdatter’s community in Sammelsted by on Ørre Heath, West Jutland. In the song, the main character Daughter Donnimaar is dancing with the lovely Knight of the Rose Garden, whom she suggests to transform into a line of different lifeless things, before they finally agree on turning him into a golden flaxthread. Venturing off to her father’s farm, they hide the knight by braiding him into her hair by her rosy cheek.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s first album Donnimaar. Vredens Børn was released in March 2022 as a vinyl LP on the occasion of TED Talks on Acid (TToA) | New Red Order Presents: One if by Land, Two if by Sea at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Her upcoming album, Donnimaar. O Tilli, will be released on January 24, 2025, by Swiss label Speckled Toshe on the occasion of her solo exhibition New Atlantics at Kunsthal Aarhus.

Donnimaar forms part of Kølbæk Iversen's practice-based artistic research in her recent PhD and her current post-doctoral research project, Fælledfuturisme | Futurities of the Commons, at SMK Thy, 2024-2026.