@MEDELHAVSMUSEET

A Quiet Spring Wanders Through the Apartment (original title En tyst vår vandrar genom lägenheten) takes its point of departure in the rooms we create for our being. These rooms can be physical places, but also mental states that enable interpersonal encounters as well as introspection and a shield from the noise of the outside world.

In this moment, when our society has been shaken to its core, we have been forced to relate to a whole new set of limitations and to create new conditions for how we meet. There has been a displacement between the private and public, and social conventions are being renegotiated and adapted to a new reality. Our conversations (often at a distance) have revolved around both the longing to be part of a community and how it can be reconciled with the need for privacy. What are the conditions for togetherness? When is the seclusion self-selected and when is it involuntary and isolating? Regardless of personal circumstances, we are all part of a greater context and need to relate to it in one way or another. These thoughts are not unique to the time we live in – they recur in artistic practice and accommodate an abundance of perspectives.

The exhibition brings together works from Magasin III’s collection that invite thoughts of the individual’s relationship to their broader context. The works evoke associations to issues of safety, personal freedom, restrictions and introversion – often with multifaceted perspectives.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the work En tyst vår vandrar genom lägenheten from 2015 by Jockum Nordström which took our thoughts to a silence, a pause, which may seem both trying and harmonious at the same time. By approaching these collected works, created between c. 1950 and 2018, we have found entryways to reflect on our current moment.

MAMI : AMA : MÖDRAR är en kollektiv process där 9 olika konstnärer och kulturarbetare gått ihop för att skapa en utställning som belyser och gestaltar mödrarnas berättelser.

”Vi är barnen som bevittnat hur våra mödrars liv trasats sönder av en arbetsmarknad med låga löner och slitsamt kroppsarbete, mödrar som kastats ur systemet rakt in i fattigdom.

Deras liv är en spegling av ett ekonomiskt system som bygger på ojämlikhet vilket har bidragit till deras undergång. Som barn vill vi bryta den tystnad och isolering som omgärdat våra mödrars liv. Vi vill skriva in deras berättelser i historien och tala om de styrkor, omhändertaganden och kärleksförklaringar som rört sig i det tysta.”

Bland verken synliggo¨rs de komplexa relationerna mellan mor och barn, vittnesma°l till mo¨drar som ba¨r pa° migrationens erfarenhet, och det ofta absurda i mo¨tet med va¨lfa¨rdssamha¨llets olika system. Ha¨r fa°r vi a¨ven ta del av intima bera¨ttelser fra°n vardagen vilka varvas med bera¨ttelser som ekar genom generationer. I utsta¨llningen visas skulpturer, ljudverk, storskaliga och interaktiva installationer, video, ett deltagarbaserat textverk, ma°leri, performance, fotografi, onlineverk och en konstaktion.

Utställningen skapades i samarbete med Botkyrka konsthall, med vernissage den 29 augusti 2020 och visades fram till den 16 januari 2021.

Mint presents A Careful Strike*; a group show that departs from the monumental painting The History of the Workers Movement by the sheet metal worker, musician and artist Ruben Nilson (1893–1971), permanently installed at ABF Stockholm. Painted during a ten year period around 1940. Following a tradition of workers’ art, the collective struggle for emancipation is at the centre of Nilson’s painting. The exhibition follows Nilson’s artwork both in its ambition and challenge: What does the reproduction of a movement’s history entail? What different roles can art play in social movements and through which expressions? How is art engaged in today’s movements? A dialogue with the specific struggles and the histories that inform Nilson’s composition of intertwined visual narratives, structured through visible conjoined cuts form the curatorial framework of the exhibition. The works historical connections to contemporary situations are put in relation to what is missing within the frame – the histories and experiences that are left out while establishing a prevalent worker’s history. A Careful Strike* is an exhibition and a public program (that preceded the exhibition during the fall of 2020), where workers’ art is confronted with Swedish and international contemporary works. The form and history of social movements are reflected through situated experiences of migration, care, exploitation and struggle. Through songs, poetry, talks, and artworks historical events and issues are made visible in a conversation on our current condition. What do we need to remember and what is to be done to win back the future? *The exhibition borrows its title from the militant feminist collective Precarias a la deriva (Precarious women adrift) 2004. The collective was formed in Madrid in 2002 in reaction to the male-dominated unions that were organising a general strike in reaction to labour law reforms in Spain. Precarias a la deriva wanted to highlight the challenges many face in participating in strikes, due to a reality of precarious employment and a higher burden of reproductive work. They wanted to create a collective situated narrative on the general tendency toward the precarization of life they were experiencing and the ways to revolt and resist in our everyday lives. – Precarias a la deriva, Una huelga de mucho cuidado (Cuatro hipótesis), 2004. The exhibition is produced with generous support from The Worker Movement’s Culture Fund, The Swedish Arts Council and The City of Stockholm.

Marabouparken konsthall continues this fall with a large-scale solo exhibition by Leif Holmstrand. The exhibition will include works from his entire time as an artist, from the 90s until present day. Leif Holmstrand is perhaps mostly known as a performance artist, and the performative is a clear red thread in the exhibition. Live performances will also be a part of the program during the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition highlights his comprehensive work as a visual artist. His many objects where the material is central – yarn, textile, black garbage bags, prams, tough nylon rope – have occasionally been actors in his performances, but are also independent works in their own right. They gather here on the stage that is the exhibition room – even though they have been created during a twenty five year period, they are all remarkably contemporary, sharing a distinct affinity among them.

A selection of costumes featured in performance situations are shown in the exhibition. One of them stems from the extensive project Asami Kannon, which manifests itself in both literature and performance. While the character gets its first name Asami from a Japanese horror film, Kannon is the Japanese name of an East-Asian deity, female at times, male at times, who is associated with compassion and charity. In the piece many recurrent themes of the artist congregate – the ritualistic, the violence, the vulnerability of the body and mind, the transboundary gender belonging, trash as culture and life’s ultimate consequence – but also a deep empathic understanding of mankind’s condition, warmth and compassion.

An interest in the mythological is consistent for Leif Holmstrand. In a series of photographic works from 2018, Holy Helpers, he presents “14 mutated saints” with the words: in a world of garbage bag plastic, make-up and new kinds of eyelashes; these saints can guide queer people through diseases and traps of the mind and dangerous surroundings”.
In another work we meet Aphrodite Anadyomene while she rises from the sea, an Aphrodite that drags the seas garbage with her from the depths – she too a goddess who far from Botticelli’s Venus, is connected to a darker history of rage and violence, born as she is from her fathers castrated genitals. The shapeless ocean, taking firm shape – an ideal image of creation and art – becomes an image of art as a place containing a versatile reality of raggedness, a place where experiences can be included and managed and where Anadyomene, partly risen, partly trapped in a wave of entangled nets and black plastic, claims her place in the world.

The, by format, largest work in the exhibition Breeder Covers (2017 – 18) takes up all of the gallery’s 25 metre long back wall. It consists of 24 objects, crocheted in black yarn. Shapeless, but precise, they reminisce of both body and garment. Alike, but all different, a kind of army, intimidating but pitiful. The yarn hangs and drapes, the crocheted forms seem waiting to be filled. The “breeder” from the title is gay-slang for heterosexual men. Each of the objects has also been given an individual title after a species of slime-mold, curious single-celled organisms who under certain conditions act as a mass, prepared to sacrifice its inefficient parts.

During the same period we are exhibiting Leif Holmstrand’s drawings in the project room on floor 1. They have a feeling of restlessness, the pencil seldom seems to leave the paper and the line’s long threads form nets, maps, figures reminiscent of the sculptures’ rope and yarn.

Leif Holmstrand’s extensive oeuvre also includes close to 40 published collections of poems, which we will emphasize in the public program of the exhibition.

The big misconception presents Carl Johan De Geer's textile works. Fabrics, print sketches, installations and photographs from the early 60s to the beginning of the 21th century are shown together with films where Carl Johan De Geer talks about his inspiration and output.

Concrete housing blocks floating out into dreamy color fields, a group of artists who map real estate ownership along the blue metro-line, a sound piece about the rootlessness of Tigrinya and an invention that might improve the water quality on Järvafältet. These are just a few of the artists’ proposals that were sent in after the open call, announced by Tensta konsthall last summer. Of 134 proposals, 26 will be presented in the exhibition Phantoms of the Commons.
Järva was one of the earliest and heaviest pandemic-stricken areas of Sweden. After years of gradual shutdowns of services and meeting places, Tensta became even more closed, and consequently became more isolated also. Even Tensta konsthall, which has for a long time functioned as a social non-commercial spot, had to close. Now, we open again with a presentation of works in the forms of video, painting, installation, publication and social activities, which move around issues such as language, ownership of our public space, art as care, sauna-bathing as a starting point for meaningful conversations and a big all women dinner party including individual food stories. For the visual exhibition design, Tensta konsthall has asked the Gothenburg-based artist Eric Magassa for a commission.

During the exhibition period, the Small Gallery will be transformed into an open working space for the course Art Mediators for Change, an EU-project entitled Agents of Change - Mediating Minorities.

The jury consisted of the artists Apolonija Šušteršic and Sam Hultin, along with the curator Jari Malta in collaboration with the Tensta konsthall team. The exhibition has been realized with the support of Region Stockholm.

Phantoms of the Commons will be open from 29.10 2021 till 16.1 2022. We are open Tuesday– Sunday 11.00 – 17.00

Painterly structure: Eric Magassa, Bring Me the Horizon

Gallery Steinsland Berliner is proud to present WHAT A WASTE an exhibition by AKAY & Olabo. You are welcome to join us at the gallery for the opening on Friday 5/11 between 17.00-20.00.


What a waste...

What makes something a valuable commodity and when is it garbage? Items on store shelves are precious enough to protect with security guards, surveillance cameras, special mirrors and alarm systems. But when food products pass the sell-by date, they end up in the dumpster. Unsold fast fashion garments are sent to a landfill after the trend ends. All the materials and resources and labor that went into their creation is, with one decisive action, suddenly made worthless. What is that moment? When does a must-have product of a multibillion dollar industry transform into literal trash?

And on the other hand, what is the alchemy that can transform discarded tarps and leftover cargo straps into art? Akay and Olabo have rescued refuse from gutters and construction site dumpsters and created pieces that are not out of place on a gallery wall—beautiful and remarkable and the result of their joyful resourcefulness and trickster ethics. They’ve harvested the city for these pieces. Making sure nothing goes to waste. And, as often in their process of creating, by navigating the gaps between what’s currently socially acceptable and what’s sure to be politically necessary, they’ve widened the path some. Provided a glimpse into something that was hard to notice beyond the aisles of commodified items and mountains of waste. One possible way through this mess, forged by impulsive curiosity and a casual disregard for the economic system that extracts, consumes, discards.


Stockholm based artists and frequent collaborators respectively known as AKAY & Olabo move around the city utilizing it as backdrop, tool and recourse to create thought provoking installations and public interventions characterized by a practical ingenuity and unflinching questioning of societal rules and procedures. AKAY & Olabo’s most recent exhibition at the gallery was Permanent Vacation in 2018.

Precis som jag trodde har skapandet engagerat er väldigt,
Och nu är jag fri att göra som jag vill,
Att ägna mig åt andra ting. Sagt i förtroende –
ni har inte längre något behov av mig.

Utdrag ur dikten Avtagande ljus (1992) av Louise Glück

I sin andra utställning på Galleri ID: I presenterar Snez?ana Vuc?etic´ Bohm en installation bestående av fotografi, objekt och måleri. Utställningens titel, Intervention här med i betydelsen ingripande, medling eller åtgärd, har en central roll i både utförande och tematik. Om måleriprocessen säger konstnären ”Jag använder måleriet som jag använder konsten, jag ser det som en metod; en del i den helhet som intresserar mig. Just i måleriet tillåter jag mig att improvisera mer än i andra uttryck”. Intervention (nu ska du inte avbryta mig) är en undersökning av förbindelsen mellan olika material såväl som mellan interpersonella relationer, privata samtal och offentliga rum, och hur dessa påverkar varandra.

I Den som vill skära i glas, måste ha diamant återanvänder Vuc?etic´ Bohm podium som skulpturbyggnad för ett flertal föremål.
Ett av föremålen är ett större fragment av en handblåst ljuskrona, en replika av författaren George Sands ljuskrona från hennes
sommarresidens i Nohant, Centre-Val de Loire, Frankrike. En transparent glasskiva lutar mot ena sidan av podiet, och håller samtidigt upp en bläckstråleutskrift med Jacqueline Kennedy som färdas i bilkortege genom Dallas, Texas, med sin make John F. Kennedy.
Inuti skulpturen, bildar en utskrift vikt på mitten, en rombisk form då den reflekteras i en spegel. Ett ljusrör belyser bilden omväxlande kallt och varmt.

Snežana Vuc?etic´ Bohms konstnärliga processer relaterar till och inkluderar film, dans, teater, historia, populärkultur och grekisk mytologi, vilka återspeglas även här i utställningen, där koncept och narrativ vävs samman i ett nät av associationer. Återkommande teman i hennes konstnärskap är exil och minne, med familjen som urscen, där den gemensamma nämnaren är en lek kring olika identiteter.

Välkomna!
Snez?ana Vuc?etic´ Bohm, född 1963 i Belgrad, Jugoslavien bor och arbetar i Stockholm. Utbildad på Nordens Fotoskola och Konstfack/Akademin för Fotografi. Hennes arbeten har visats på bland annat, Köttinspektionen/Uppsala, Kulturhuset, Centrum för Fotografi, Norrköpings Konstmuseum, Moderna Museet och Skulpturens Hus. Hon arbetar också med offentlig konst, senast med en installation på Universitetssjukhuset Karolinska Huddinge.
Snez?ana Vuc?etic´ Bohm finns representerad på Statens Konstråd och Moderna Muséet.

Sixten Sandra Österberg's first solo exhibition at CFHILL is curated in our Main Gallery and includes all new artworks. Sixten Sandra Österberg mainly works with painting in a classic pictorial tradition. In a more deconstructive process, the forms are modified in an attempt to allow other, not always given, expressions and gestures to be conveyed. It is a painterly practice that wants to linger on the perceptive body and how it can, through image processing, deactivate / activate contemporary political and social conventions.

Many artists take inspiration from their travels and their lives. In Jin-Sook So's work there is a sense of place – Sweden, Japan, America and Korea – and also a sense of Korea's past. She has lived and studied in these countries and views herself as neither being locked into a single nationality or a single artistic medium. She references each place in her work in ways that are strikingly modern and original. So's early electroplated, steel-mesh patchwork pieces are an illuminating example. While reminiscent of traditional Korean bojagi wrapping cloths, her soft, color-washed color palette, the additional texture of the mesh, even the frosted Perspex frames in which they float, are a reinvention. No longer a functional, decorative item, or even a textile, these patchworks have become contemporary artifacts – combining the fragility of silk in appearance and the strength of steel in execution.



It was in the 80s, during an extra year of study in the Metals Department at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, that So became familiar with hard metals. She began treating metals, such as stainless steel mesh, like textiles; bleaching, braiding, twisting, and oxidizing them, burnishing them with gold, silver and copper nitrate, using brushes, blow torches and wax. Her work for the Lausanne Biennial in 1989 reflected this new approach. For that piece, she worked directly with the flat steel mesh, developing the volume by pleating it manually, repeating and twisting the form and then coloring it, blue, black and brown, with a blow torch. Energy and voluminous dimension characterize the work.



The exhibition "Steel Mesh Untitled" features a selection of works executed in oxidated steel mesh, Perspex, wood and paper, that range from early on in So's career until present day.



Jin-Sook So (b. 1950) was born in Jeonju, Korea, and lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. She is educated at Soodo Women's College of Art in Seoul, the University of Art in Kyoto and Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm. Her work has been shown extensively around Europe, Asia and USA, and is represented in MAD Museum of Art and Design (New York), National Museum of Art (Osaka), Brooklyn Museum (New York), Röhsska Museet (Gothenburg), Nationalmuseum (Stockholm) and the Public Art Agency of Sweden, among other institutions and private collections.





Text: Rhonda Brown & Tom Grotta, co-curators Browngrotta arts