@MEDELHAVSMUSEET

In this multifaceted exhibition, different ideas and areas of knowledge meet in the exploration of how a symbiotic thinking can inspire change and bring forward new ways of understanding the world. By applying a symbiotic perspective on contemporary and future events and challenges, we allow different methods and analyzes to interact in order to create new images and stories of a complex present and future.

Symbiosis is an exhibition, but also an experimental platform for imagining and shaping a symbiotic thinking, through art, theory and conversation, where different themes provide various points of view. The exhibition consists of theory sections with examples and illustrations, as well as works of art that freely relate to the issues.

Bonniers Konsthall presents one of the most expansive exhibitions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan to date, which includes a new series of work alongside pieces by Abu Hamdan that allow for an interrogation of witnessing and testimony. The title »Dirty Evidence« comes from Abu Hamdan’s definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence’s figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth.
Abu Hamdan recognizes the space for art as a site wherein attention can be drawn to real socio-political conditions in order to challenge the structures behind those conditions. Three major discourses have emerged wherein the representation of violence is permissible—juridical, media and art. Abu Hamdan engages the aesthetic practice of art as an alternative vis-à-vis the aesthetic practices of the media and juridical to uncover and challenge their representational logics. The artist can therefore push at the boundaries of what constitutes testimony.

Testimony is integral to understanding violence, human rights violations and state abuse. Abu Hamdan’s work in this exhibition draws us not only towards questions of testimony’s presentational circumstances and conditions of use, but also towards questions of who can speak in which spaces, what kinds of talk can and cannot be heard, and what conditions establish the possibility to make claims. The exhibition creates space for listening to testimony that might otherwise not be heard. For example, that of Bassel Abi Chahine, whom Abu Hamdan interviews in the two-channel video Once Removed (2019) and whose testimony not only concerns a war-crime but as a reincarnated subject upends given assumptions about presence and witnessing. Or as in the piece Earwitness Inventory, (2018–2019) comprised of 96 custom designed and sourced objects all derived from legal cases in which sonic evidence is contested and acoustic memories need to be retrieved, which challenges what we know about memory and testimony.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall and Lenz Press will publish the artist’s first major monograph. This richly illustrated publication will present a comprehensive overview of the artist’s practice accompanied by commissioned essays by Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff and Yasmine Seale.

In 2019 Abu Hamdan received the esteemed Turner Prize alongside Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani. Abu Hamdan has exhibited extensively, amongst others at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and the Hammer Museum. The artist’s audio investigations have also been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International together with fellow researchers from Forensic Architecture.

Image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Bassel Abi Chahine, Shot Twice (By the Same Bullet), 2021. Installation detail.

Index presents Pauline Curnier Jardin’s first solo exhibition in Sweden opening Thursday, 2 September 2021.

For the exhibition, Index transforms into a hybrid space between presentation and production where visitors can observe Curnier Jardin’s previous films and gain insight into her ongoing working process for the production of a forthcoming film. Hence, the exhibition takes as a starting point an artwork that actually doesn’t exist, but through the inclusion of a selection of completed works by the artist and information about her practice, one can previsualize options for what it could possibly become.

The exhibition space conceptually supports the upcoming work’s production, functioning as a changing machine rather than offering a defined result. Some aspects of this future artwork will be developed during the exhibition time through production gatherings where reference materials will be observed and collected for the artist to use. The Index team will be working on-site to gather information and facilitate the production of this new work.

Visiting Pauline Curnier Jardin’s exhibition means the opportunity to witness and contribute to the seed of an artist’s idea while simultaneously experiencing previous pieces from Curnier Jardin’s filmic and artistic oeuvre.

Pauline Curnier Jardin works with films and installation offering unexpected ways to understand narrative. She includes historical references, symbolic content, operatic gestures, musical scores, performativity and several approaches to desire and repulsion which in turn raise questions about feelings, ideas and information. Her layered practice moves from physicality to sensitivity, from image culture to secret languages, from surrealistic chaos to narrative structure. Opera or Classical theatre could be possible symbolic frames for Curnier Jardin’s work as it emotionally and subjectively moves the spectator.

For this exhibition, Index is collaborating with the Amsterdam-based art organization, If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution and their online space, ificantdance.studio, will host a poetic mirror following the process of the conceptual production at Index.


Index is supported by Kulturrådet, Region Stockholm and Stockholms Stad. Thanks to the French Institute of Sweden for additional support of Pauline Curnier Jardin’s exhibition.

Pauline Curnier Jardin (b. 1980, Marseille, France) is a Berlin and Rome-based artist working across installation, performance, film and drawing. She is the winner of the 2019 German Preis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize in Firenze and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome. Her work was included or commissioned over the last years in Steirischer Herbst Festival, Graz; Manifesta 13, Marseille; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Bergen Assembly, Bergen Biennial; International Film Festival, Rotterdam; the 57th Venice Biennale; Tate Modern, London; Performa 15, New York. Curnier Jardin’s solo exhibition, “Fat to Ashes” was recently on display at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin and she has an upcoming solo exhibition at Art Basel in 2021. She will also participate in the group exhibitions at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino; Galeria Municipal do Porto, Portugal; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Diaspora Letters är ett visuellt samtal mellan fotograferna och konstnärerna Nicolás Wormull, baserad i Chile och Ricard Estay, baserad i Stockholm, Sverige. Samtalet inleddes i samband med protesterna i Chile 2019 helt utan ord, där bilderna som de skickade till varandra fick tala. I två parallella dagböcker som demokratiskt samlas i Diaspora Letters får åskådaren ta del av en feberdrömsliknande resa.

En intim mikro-makro dialog som troligen pågått längre än arbetet sträcker sig. Till synes längre än de två känt varandra. Kanske till och med i generationer. Från en diaspora till en annan. Denna utställning är en inblick i hur samtalet har gått under de två år som dessa individer hade en konversation. Vad pratade de om egentligen? Och vad säger samtalet om de två världarna under denna tid?

Accelerator presents British artist Jonathan Baldock’s first solo exhibition in Sweden. Baldock is presented in parallel with the Swedish artist Adèle Essle Zeiss in an Autumn exhibition programme focused on transformation and how we relate to the human body and our personal space. Two exhibitions characterised by sensuousness, presence and a cautious hopefulness.

Please note some artworks contain dried lavender.

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.

For more than three decades, she has challenged, fascinated and confounded. Meet one of Sweden’s most prominent artists Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, in the exhibition “Alternative Secrecy”, featuring photographic works from von Hausswolff’s entire career, and see her personal selection of works from the Moderna Museet collection.
In this exhibition, you will find roughly one hundred works from Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff’s entire career. In addition to photographs, she has created with sculptures, textiles and installations. See art from her debut in the early 1990s to the recent series in enamel and acrylic glass.

As a child, Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff was fascinated by Nordisk kriminalkrönika, a magazine that reported on Swedish crime in text and images. Since then, women’s vulnerability, violence and psychoanalytical theories have supplied much of the subject matter for her art.

But this multifaceted artist’s career has not only concerned the arts and visual art. In the late 1980s, von Hausswolff was also a singer in the third edition of the legendary punk rock group Cortex.

50 works selected from the Moderna Museet collection

For the exhibition, Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff has also selected some 50 works from the Moderna Museet collection.

“Every image I’ve selected has asked me a question or argued its case. I have answered by affirming its existence. Together the pictures constitute an incomplete map of my own work,” writes Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff in the exhibition catalogue.

These works are shown as an independent part of the exhibition and in dialogue with von Hausswolff’s own works. Artists represented include Ivan Aguéli, Irving Penn, Ulla Wiggen and Francesca Woodman.

Welcome!

CFHILL's recurrent exhibition Ten by Ten aim at offering a diverse selection of iconic artworks, from different times and places, highlighting the great leaps in art history. This autumn we proudly present ten pieces that each illustrate important aspects of the rapid artistic development during the extraordinary 20th century. Created between 1908 and 2018 the selected works, by male as well as female artists, were executed in six different countries spread over two continents. Pieces strong enough to stand alone and yet here they are, placed in dialogue with one another in our gallery. Works by; Gustaf Fjæstad, Sigrid Hjertén, Christian Berg, Pablo Picasso, Antoni Tàpies, Arman, Kenneth Noland, Howard Hodgkin, Andy Warhol & Amoako Boafo.

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

By coiling, braiding and joining clays together, Maya Strandberg examines her own bodily and spiritual connection to the world. Her sculptural objects refer to experiences of loss, death and grief, but also of strength and courage. Essential to her work is an aspiration to get close to the world.



Strandberg's approach is an intuitive one, where the irregular and organic forms slowly emerge in the clay. The interplay between the work of the hands and the character of the medium suggests a unique will in the sculptures – as if they themselves seek their final form, but in their insufficiency fail to reach their ideal image.



While in the studio, the sculptures appear to be in different stages of a cycle – sometimes in need of rest, sometimes breaking down, drying out or being rebuilt. The ancient is constantly present in Strandberg's work and can be discerned in the shapes of the sculptures that might bring to mind archeological finds from an unknown civilization. The physical work with the clay is inspired by the fact that the material has been formed by weathering during eons of time, and slowly the sculptures assume the role of both man and nature.



In the exhibition "Allt det jag ser skymmer alltid allt det där andra" (Everything I See Always Obscures Everything Else), Strandberg is back in the apartment where she grew up with her mother. It is cluttered, beautiful and homely. Scattered around the apartment are traces of the alternative spirituality that the New Age movement brought about in the 1990s – a faint scent of musk, a Buddha in a window, chakra colors, plants, and gemstones. Back then, life was present, elevated, and magical. Thinking back on her mother today, Strandberg sees a single parent dealing with debts and strained finances turning to divination and feng shui to find comfort.



Maya Strandberg (b. 1981) was born and raised in Växjö. She now lives in Stockholm and works in her studio at Gustavsberg's old Porcelain Factory. She holds an MFA from HDK University of Design and Crafts in Gothenburg from 2009. Strandberg's work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in venues in Sweden, Denmark and Germany, including hangmenProjects (Stockholm), Röhsska Museet (Gothenburg) and CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art Denmark (Middelfart). Her most recent exhibition was "Jordkrets" at Gustavsbergs Konsthall together with Dominika Kemilä and Lina Sofia Lundin in 2020. She has produced several public commissions and is represented in the collections of Public Art Agency Sweden. Strandberg has received working grants from the Swedish Arts Grants Committee and the City of Stockholm, among others.

Through the Looking-Glass
A Portal into the Dark Fairy Tale

The ‘Looking-Glass’ is an older term for a mirror, and in times past even just the word ‘Glass’ would suffice for referring to this object so benign and yet mysterious. As mirrors were once thought to be an opening that led into the spirit world, it is understandable to see them as a portal yet again, when we consider the inner landscapes of artist Peter Köhler. At once, the looking glass becomes an entrance into not only another realm, but into a vast land of strange terrain where things are not at once what they seem.
To travel into the Looking-Glass then, we can expect to experience something extraordinary, at times unsettling, and yet wholeheartedly familiar. For this is the way that not just any fairy tale, but a dark tale works upon the human heart. The desire to understand something other than our comfortable and secure self-created life is powerful. Through the Looking-Glass, there awaits a story begging to be told. As one walks metaphorically into these images, many tender layers unfold. Our own inner secrets and desires are activated, as are the forces that repel them. As we observe the content therein, the shapes that we identify and the colors that we recognize are upon further inspection not what we first encountered. This is because the classic indicators of a dark fairy tale are present: symbols of death and its process, supernatural entities associated with evil powers, uncomfortable or impossible tasks, ill-omened animals and plants, grotesque and beautiful combinations, intertwining together. Along side these elements are in turn the mundane aspects of life, the common pathways that we are used to walking upon. The genius of these works lies in the way that they cleverly entice one closer by the familiar shapes that suddenly transform before our very eyes into something older, darker and far more intriguing than what we first expected.
For it is the attraction into something occult and hidden that dwells within most souls. Lurking within the Looking-Glass are remnants of age-old tales that reveal themselves as not only uncanny characters interacting within a curious theater of both natural and supernatural design. Somehow, we know the tales without the words, for here they are beholden in pictures. The two-dimensional scenes become alive and wake within us a narrative that at once understands the meaning. That is for each person to find for themselves, those who go Through the Looking-Glass and surrender to the complexity of Peter’s atypical detailing of ink and paint. It may come as a surprise what inspirations are born from participating in this exhibition, as a quiet observer. Indeed, that is the work of the artist, to meet the observer in some way in the between spaces, where the golden coins of Memory and the silver threads of Fate are exchanged. It is from that inner place that the art works upon one, and therefor sets into motion its own magics, from the inside out.

–Corinne Boyer

Artists’ Film International is a network of art institutions from around the world, first established in 2008 by the Whitechapel Gallery, London. From a selected theme, each participating institution chooses a film from an emerging artist. The theme for 2020 is Care.

Bonniers Konsthall has invited Victoria Verseau to participate with her film Approaching a Ghost.

Die Brücke — a group exhibition featuring Antwan Horfee, Conny Maier & Philip Emde.

The exhibition title is taken from the Avant Garde German artist group active at the beginning of the last Century known for playing a pivotal role in the expressionist movement in Europe. The featured artists — Antwan Horfee, Conny Maier and Philip Emde — carry the legacy into 2022 and beyond with their distinct artistic practices that reflect on our existence in the contemporary landscape. The exhibition is a collaboration with Ruttkowski;68 (Cologne & Paris) and curator Nils Müller.

Vad gör rutnätet?

Jag arbetar sedan några år på en serie av abstrakta målningar som alla bygger på en form av rutnät som jag lärde mig redan som ung konststudent. Det är en arbetsmetod och på samma gång ett verktyg som har använts genom konsthistorien av konstnärer när de komponerar/disponerar bildytor.

I utställningen utforskar jag rutnätets visuella struktur och bygger ut det i rummet, samt reflekterar kring dess betydelse i vår tid. Det med tanke på att vi lever i ett nu där vi är oavbrutet uppkopplade till ett världsomspännande datanät via våra skärmar.

Vad gör rutnätet? är också ett praktikbaserat konstnärligt forskningsprojekt som jag driver med stöd av Vetenskapsrådet, förlagt till Konsthögskolan i Malmö.

Utställningen skall ses som forskningens rumsliga/visuella gestaltning och hela projektet planeras att presenteras i form av en bok som presenteras senare under året.

Matts Leiderstam (f. 1956), lever och arbetar i Stockholm och Malmö.

Laleh Kazemi Veisari har tilldelats Beckers konstnärsstipendium 2022 om 200.000 kr för att hon enligt stipendiejuryn ”i sin ambitiösa strävan att förstå världen lyckas skapa ett mycket varierat visuellt uttryck, som förmedlar nya perspektiv på världen.”


Laleh Kazemi Veisari är född 1983 och verksam i Stockholm. Hennes konstnärliga process är tvärvetenskaplig, engagerar samarbetsprocesser samt utforskar det imaginära, både socialt och rumsligt, genom uttryck som måleri, teckning, skulptur och skrivande.


Laleh Kazemi Veisari tog sin masterexamen i fri konst från Konstfack 2019 med utställningen Letters from Water. Sedan tidigare har hon en masterexamen i tvärvetenskapliga studier från statsvetenskapliga institutionen på Göteborgs Universitet samt en kandidatexamen i nationalekonomi från London School of Economics and Political Science.