Having Your Cake and Eating It? : The “Painful Cake” Incident of 2012 Examined

On the 15th of April, 2012, The Modern Museum (Modernamuseet) in Stockholm celebrated the World Art Day by having a reception with the Swedish cultural minister present, at which an artwork in the form of a cake made in the likeness of the body of a caricatured black woman was served, cut up and eaten, while the artist, masked as the cakes head, screamed. This conceptual, relational, and contextualizing artwork, which leads to a much heated debate in Sweden and which was also internationally picked up on, was made by the explicitly anti-racist artist Makode Linde. In this article, we explore the problem of this event in terms of its sociocultural significance. How did we react upon the drama that we were following from a distance? What did it make us see? What questions did the incident raise about the Swedish society of today? These are examples of the questions we as gender researchers working in Sweden will discuss in the form of a triptych. We use the triptych metaphor as a tool for opening dialogue. By opening its panels it becomes possible to decommodify the single image of the artwork and make relations between agents traceable, visible, and readable.
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