Bombshell, Boom! 2024

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After months of research in the extensive photo archive of JP/Politiken Media Group—Denmark’s largest media house—Maja Malou Lyse turned her focus to one of its most contested collections: Ekstra Bladet’s Page-9-Girl. This daily semi-nude feature has appeared in the Danish tabloid for nearly 50 years, charting shifting depictions of sexuality, femininity, and the erotic image.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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In 2022, the 20,000 image heavy Page-9 archive came under public scrutiny and debate when it was revealed that many of the models were under 18 years old when photographed. Ekstra Bladet announced plans to destroy the images, but reversed the decision after resistance from the models themselves, who argued that erasure would also erase history. ​

Lyse exposes this dilemma with a framed email from one of the models and blurred outlines of the censored Page 9 Girls, exactly as they appear in Ekstra Bladet’s digital e-archive. Alongside a readymade locked archive cabinet, Lyse frames the archive as both a monument to what we remember and a battleground over who controls those memories. As political and moral compasses shift, she asks: What should be done with a media history that no longer aligns with contemporary ethics, where past narratives clash with present ideologies? By bringing the hidden images and their housing into view—without revealing their contents—she underscores the paradox of the archive: simultaneously present and absent, exposed yet inaccessible. The sealed cabinet and the blurred body mirror the dynamics of eroticism, where what remains unseen can hold more weight than what is revealed.

 

Outside the building, a monumental billboard shows a pair of women’s eyes—those of Sofia, a current Page-9-Girl—staring across the main square, her gaze becoming the gaze of the media building itself. She looks back at the people who have looked at her for the past 50 years: observing, examining, watching over them.

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As part of the project, Lyse stepped inside the very tradition she was investigating—appearing as the Page-9-Girl of the day in Ekstra Bladet on the exhibition’s opening. In doing so, she not only examined the archive from the outside, but becomes part of it. 

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Exhibition text by Ida Schyum, Director and Curator, Politikens Forhal