10.5-30.9 2012
Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage) is an exhibition by artist Hinrich Sachs based on the television program Sesame Street. Shown in more than 140 countries, Sesame Street has become part of our international collective experience. The exhibition at Tensta konsthall focuses on the culturally specific Sesame characters who, since the show’s television debut in the United States in 1969, have been specially developed in over 20 countries as part of a license agreement with Sesame Workshop. These characters include Kami, the first HIV-positive Sesame figure from the South African version of the program; Zeliboba, a kind and imaginative spirit who lives inside an oak tree from the Russian production known as Ulitsa Sezam; and Khokha, an Egyptian girl muppet, who is keen to learn body-building.

Nine Sesame characters from different national versions of the TV show—from China, Egypt, Israel, South Africa, Palestine, Russia and elsewhere—have been gathered together at Tensta konsthall. This is a unique assembly since the characters only exist otherwise inside their respective Sesame programs. A new Stockholm character has also been added to the nine already united by Sachs’ international, hybrid muppet ensemble. The Stockholm character is developed directly from drawings and written narratives made by local school children at Askebyskolan in Rinkeby. From September 2011–May 2012 Tensta konsthall’s mediator Emily Fahlén, professional costume designer Sara Forsberg and numerous teachers from Askebyskolan have conducted workshops with the children. These lessons have revolved around Sesame Street and taken up various activities, like learning what a character is, practicing English language skills, sewing and creating puppets, and creating rap songs based on characters invented by the children.

Inside Tensta konsthall’s exhibition space the assembled Sesame characters performatively appear in a theatre-like setting against the backdrop of a hand-painted Stockholm skyline. The exhibition space is thus transformed into a gigantic installation, where set design helps prompt questions about how present-day children’s culture is created and represented through popular media. In particular the project investigates the ideological power of a children’s program as commodity that can be bought and sold. What happens when material from one cultural and economic context is translated and re-coded into another? What roles are played by imitation, interpretation, emancipation and cultural translation in the educational sphere surrounding children’s play?

Another layer of Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage) is developed by giving some characters a voice. In Arabic we listen to actress Dina Al-Saleh who is heard in the version of the show Alam Simsim, sharing a real-life memory but in a voice that would be easily recognizable to an Egyptian audience as her fictional muppet character, Khokha. A further aspect of the sound installation activates specific Swedish narratives, fantasies and meanings via the voices of two actors from the dubbed Svenska Sesam version of the program that aired on state TV channel 1 from 1979–1983. Here Lars Amble (Kermit) and Peter Harrysson (Ernie) perform a unique narrative—some of which includes scenarios imagined and authored by the children at Askebyskolan in Rinkeby.

Originally the producers of Sesame Street intended to use the addictive effects of television for good purposes—for instance, to prepare children for school—by mixing educational elements with features from commercial TV. Because of its expressive aesthetics, humor and music, Sesame Street became an instant success. Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage) offers up different interpretations of this original material. The Sesame puppets are put on display in an exhibition form, giving them a high cultural value. Labels, exhibition props and lighting—all familiar museological tools—accompany and expand the possibilities for their interpretation. The displacement of such materials from a child’s world into the art context allows us to question what our shared cultural heritage looks like in an era of cognitive capitalism. Ultimately the exhibition invites a broad cultural discussion around collective experiences shaped by concepts such as popular cultural, heritage and value.

Hinrich Sachs is an artist and writer based in Basel and Stockholm where he has been a professor at the Royal Institute of Art since 2007. He is interested in displacing and combining different kinds of cultural material by making critical comments and reflections on communicative and cultural frameworks. Working internationally, he has recently participated in exhibitions in Maastricht, Istanbul, Athens, Rennes and Tucson, and published Lost Once More, a volume of short stories, with Christoph Keller Editions/JRP, Zurich. A theatre play will be published with OEI editör in spring 2012.

The elaboration and transference of cultural material comprises the core of Five World Heritage Landscapes, a public artwork realized in collaboration with and for Cecilien-Gymnasium (Cecilien Highschool) in Düsseldorf (2004–2010). These ideas are also central to the exhibition Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (all together now) (2004), which illuminated the narrative structures of the children’s TV program Sesame Street, and to the project International Auction of the Basque Euskara Typefaces, Bilbao (2001). In another series Sachs has examined the content of contemporary image production. This has taken the form of “portraits”, where, for example, a photographer and a biologist have been invited to be presented and represented. Gäst hos: Anna Gili, Designer was part of this series and shown at Moderna Museet Projekt in Stockholm in 1999.

Events in conjunction with the exhibition:

Family Day
Saturday 19.5, 13:00–16:00
For children ages 6 and up with their parents, led by mediator Emily Fahlén. A special guided tour of the exhibition for children and their parents followed by an arts and crafts workshop. Come explore Tensta konsthall and meet muppets from around the world, learning all about their interests and personalities. See what Sesame Street episodes from Egypt, Russia and South Africa are like. Make your very own TV and Sesame scene diorama.

Learning How To Desire: Commodification and Children’s TV; Samo Tomšič and Hinrich Sachs in Conversation
Wednesday 23.5, 18:30
Philosopher Samo Tomšič will join the artist to discuss the role of commodification in the constitution of contemporary subjectivity—in particular looking at popular culture and education through media. What are the repercussions of integrating local traditions and cultural specificities into a commodity language? How do popular culture and education through television contribute to the integration of subjects in the capitalist social link? Psychoanalysis helps us understand that the success story of capitalism is intimately tied to the fact that it teaches human beings how to desire.

Tomšič is a philosopher and translator from Ljubljana. He completed his PhD
 studies at the University of Ljubljana and is currently Humboldt fellow 
at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Previously he was researcher at 
the Institute of Philosophy in Ljubljana and at the Jan van Eyck Academie
 in Maastricht. Fields of research include Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
 contemporary French philosophy, Marxism and structuralism.

Namegiving Party
Thursday 24.5, 12:30—14:00 at Askebyskolan in Rinkeby, Askebykroken 22, Spånga
A grumpy carrot, Jennifer Lopez and Mr. Pencil—these are some ideas for characters that have been considered in the collaboration between Hinrich Sachs, Tensta konsthall and the school class C5 at Askebyskolan, Rinkeby. Through storytelling, costume design and music making the students have collectively developed their own Stockholm character who is a part of the exhibition Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage)—a crazy, brave, helpful muppet in orange shaggy fur who works at a bread factory but loves to eat earth and raisins. The Namegiving Party features a colorful parade and musical performances by the children under the direction of music teacher and children’s TV personality, Rolando Pomo. The afternoon will include birthday cake and several surprises—including the unveiling of the name of this new Stockholm character.

Tea and Coffee Salon
Saturday 26.5, 11:00
Members from the Women’s Center Tensta Hjulsta invite the public for a cup of tea or coffee prepared according to their own traditions, such as coffee made on a charcoal grill. An assortment of cakes and pastries are served. The Women’s Center also offers their own handmade products from recycled textiles for sale. In conjunction with the exhibition Kami, Khokha, Ernie and Bert (World Heritage) children are welcome to a free face painting.

Guided Tour by Hinrich Sachs
Wednesday 30.5, 18:30
Tour of the exhibition led by artist Hinrich Sachs, contextualizing his project Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage) in relationship to his artistic larger practice.

Family Day
Wednesday 6.6, 13:30–16:00
For children ages 6 and up with their parents, led by mediator Emily Fahlén. A special guided tour of the exhibition for children and their parents followed by an arts and crafts workshop. Come explore Tensta konsthall and meet muppets from around the world, learning all about their interests and personalities. See what Sesame Street episodes from Egypt, Russia and South Africa are like. Make your very own TV and Sesame scene diorama.

Guided Tour by Laurel Ptak
Saturday 16.6, 14:00
Tour led by Tensta konsthall curator Laurel Ptak focusing on issues of intellectual property, edutainment, and cognitive capitalism at stake inside the exhibition Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage).

Guided Tour by Hinrich Sachs
Wednesday 29.8, 18:30
Tour of the exhibition led by artist Hinrich Sachs, discussing specific aspects of his artistic practice and the project Kami, Khokha, Bert and Ernie (World Heritage) in relationship to the notion of voice.

Class visits
10.5—30.9
Free for schools, led by mediator Emily Fahlén. Exhibition tours and workshops specifically created for school classes can be scheduled by contacting Emily Fahlén at emily@tenstakonsthall.se or 08 36 07 63.

Past—10.5, 14:00–21:00
Opening 18:00 Introduction to the exhibition by artist Hinrich Sachs and Maria Lind, director Tensta konsthall

Past—12.5, 13:00–17:00
Tea and Coffee Salon. Members from the Women’s Center Tensta Hjulsta invite the public for a cup of tea or coffee prepared according to their own traditions, such as coffee made on a charcoal grill. An assortment of cakes and pastries are served. The Women’s Center also offers their own handmade products from recycled textiles for sale. In conjunction with the exhibition Kami, Khokha, Ernie and Bert (World Heritage) children are welcome to a free face painting.

12.1-30.9 2012
The Bidoun Library, founded in 2009 by Bidoun Projects, is a mobile library consisting of books, magazines and other printed matter. Bidoun Projects is a non-commercial project producing exhibitions, publications and various events aiming to support contemporary culture from the Middle East. Since the turn of the last century, the term “Middle East,” which was coined in the West, has existed more as a subject for discussion and study than a geographical area. Bidoun Library is an attempt to survey this territory through its printed matter. Books, magazines and other materials are treated as objects in which complex and historical facts and ambitions meet. They are not amongst the most representative or refined objects from the Middle East—they are cheaper and more perishable. Bidoun Library acquires a new form everywhere it stops. At Tensta konsthall, printed matter associated with the Middle East and published in Sweden will be examined. Prior to its Tensta stop, the library will have visited Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, New York, and most recently, the Serpentine Gallery in London.

29.2-24.5
Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question
Florian Schneider, Antonia Hirsch, Marina Vishmidt, Matthew Stadler, Marysia Lewandowska, Laurel Ptak

What do notions of production, property, ownership and exchange mean to us right now? At a moment when the distribution between what is privately owned and publicly shared in society is being fundamentally scrutinized, questioned and protested in many parts of the world, such inquiry becomes urgent. Publishing in Process: Ownership in Question is a series of public seminars led by artists and writers attempting to address precisely this question. The program seeks to establish an ongoing context from February to May 2012 to investigate, discuss and recalibrate our working definition of such terms collectively. Special focus will be placed on ownership in relation to publishing.

At Tensta konsthall, Florian Schneider (Brussels/Munich), Antonia Hirsch (Berlin), Marina Vishmidt (London), and Matthew Stadler (Portland), will present and discuss their projects and perspectives around the intersection of intellectual property, art, political economy and the public realm. The seminars are organized and moderated by artist Marysia Lewandowska (London) and curator Laurel Ptak (New York), and part of a larger, ongoing collaboration between the two that will culminate in a book publication in 2012.

All seminars in English.

29.2, 18:30
Florian Schneider on Property

Imaginary Property. What does it actually mean, today, to own an image?

Ownership is a matter of communication and constant re-negotiation, it is gained and performed on an increasingly precarious basis rather than grounded on a stable set of eternally valid laws which follow traditional ideas of property and personhood. From invention, creation and distribution to recognition, exhibition and conservation, images are subject to an infinite variety of operations that are not only characterized by conflicting powers of producing, possessing and processing them. Images appear as the products of struggles for imagination. This struggle is not about the relationship between the owner of some thing and the object that is owned. It deals with the imagination of social relationships with others who could also use it, enjoy it, play it or play with it. The concept of Imaginary Property operates at the intersection of two axes—property that becomes increasingly a matter of imagination and images that are subject to ongoing propertization.

22.3, 18:30
Antonia Hirsch on Exchange

What is the value of the immeasurable and what is its agency?

This seminar is based on ideas that have propelled Hirsch’s The Surplus Library On Affect & Economic Exchange as well as Intangible Economies, a discoursive project she organized and edited with the magazine Fillip. These projects speculatively investigate the interrelated nature of economic exchange and affect. Rather than merely being a construct that describes the fairly abstract flow of goods and capital, an economy could be regarded much more generally as a system in which “exchange” is a dialectical operation that creates representation. The abstract and abstracting function of value becomes a fulcrum in this constellation—both with regard to its functional role in a capitalist economy and in its relevance to an ethics. While affect is to be recognized as a generator and consequence of economic exchange, it is, conversely, also the modality of those exchanges that structure affect, resulting in topographies of the sensible that underpin everyday life. The seminar also specifically considers the circulation of ideas—looking at books as “idea objects.” Libraries, understood as social sites, find their defining characteristic in the circulation of ideas and, similar to capital, the ideas contained in books must circulate to be of, or generate, value.

11.4, 18:30
Marina Vishmidt on Production

Rent and debt can be seen as, respectively, the property and governance regimes of the speculative mode of production.

Examining the politics of rent and debt as they achieve unprecedented economic centrality in geopolitics, access to social goods, and production of subjectivity, Vishmidt will lead a seminar based on her research project Speculation as a Mode of Production (in Art and Capital). The guiding principle of this research is to see how modes of production which can be considered exceptional to capital’s law of value—such as art or education—are not at the same time exceptional to the value-form, either from the side of labor or from their products. Rent proposes an indefinite relation to time—a licensed good may be sold any number of times in regimes of intellectual property—and a purely formal relation to property, which can be intellectual, immaterial, symbolic, etc. Debt, on the other hand, locks down the future into payment schedules, often also for imaginary commodities such as education. What seems to be at issue here is the dialectic between the disruptive and the controlling tendencies of rent and debt, as we can see from the sovereign debt crisis in Europe, and the explosion of social critique in the sites of social contraction that we occupy (or Occupy) and that occupy us.

24.5, 18:30
Matthew Stadler on Ownership

Can our ideas be borrowed, or are they only ever stolen?

As work circulates it moves from what we call private into public and back again, over and over. In markets, crossing this threshold is the flashpoint of value: a price is named and the exchange is enabled—you buy it, you own it. The value assigned by markets can obscure or erase other kinds of value. Further, privacy and publicness prescribe narrow uses and relationships for work. Can we play someone else’s music? Can the vibrancy and amplitude of your text be increased by someone else’s writing? Who’s is who’s? How can we remain in possession of that which we value and know—our work—while entering it into exchanges that amplify its value and meanings? “Private” and “public” need to be questioned. This talk will look at recent destabilizations and reconfigurations of private and public that promise to undermine the hegemony of market exchanges while opening up the range of ways we can work and live together.

Self-Presentations:

Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, curator and writer who currently lives in Brussels and Munich. He is an advising researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie of Maastricht. He teaches at the Academy for Fine Arts in Trondheim, and he is working on a doctoral project on the subject “Imaginary Property” at Goldsmiths College in London. Schneider is one of the initiators of the Kein Mensch Ist Illegal (no one is illegal) campaign at documentaX and subsequent projects such as the “noborder network.” He is the founder of the online-network kein.org and directed of the new media festivals Makeworld (Munich 2001) and Neuro (Munich 2004). He has developed the multimedia performance project “Dictionary Of War” (2006-2010) and organized “Summit—non-aligned initiatives in education culture” in close collaboration with Irit Rogoff. At the moment he is preparing together with Hila Peleg, the first release of Issue Zero a new magazine for documentary practices in networked environments that will be released at the Berlin Documentary forum in June 2012.

Antonia Hirsch is an artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her practice consistently engages with systems—economic, geographical, quantitative, syntactic—that underwrite the most basic understandings of the world. She questions the often invisible hierarchies of these epistemological structures by relating them to more familiar territory: embodied experience. Her work has been exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Power Plant in Toronto, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, and ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, among others. Her work can be found in public collections such as that of the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry, Miami Beach. Her artist projects and writing have been published in magazines and journals such as Fillip, The Happy Hypocrite, C-magazine, Westcoast Line, and artecontexto. More information on Antonia Hirsch’s practice can be found at antoniahirsch.com.

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer occupied mainly with questions around art, labor and the value-form. She holds an MA from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and is currently conducting PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London titled “Speculation as a Mode of Production (in Art and Capital).” Research posts have included the Montehermoso Research Grant (2011/12), critic-in-residence at the FRAC Lorraine (2009) and a fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academie (2007/8). Vishmidt is co-editor of Uncorporate Identity (2010) with Metahaven, and Media Mutandis: Art, Technologies and Politics (NODE. London, 2006). She is a frequent contributor to catalogues, edited collections and journals such as Mute, Afterall, Parkett and Texte zur Kunst. She also takes part in the group projects Unemployed Cinema, Cinenova and Signal:Noise.

Matthew Stadler founded The Back Room, a peripatetic series of drunk dinners with publications, Clear Cut Press, an independent subscription press, suddenly.org, a periodic multi-scalar assemblage inquiring by foot and mouth into the new shapes of cities, and Publication Studio, a print-on-demand publishing house working under the motto “free is bullshit.” He was literary editor of Nest Magazine and is the author of five novels for which he received a variety of prizes. Most recently he and Canadian poet, Lisa Robertson, have together compiled and annotated Revolution: A Reader. He lives in Portland, Oregon, USA.

Marysia Lewandowska & Laurel Ptak have since 2009 collaborated on a long-term research project on the subject of intellectual property, art, political economy, and the public realm. They are co-organizers and co-moderators of the series of public seminars Publishing In Process: Ownership In Question at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm. Lewandowska is a Polish-born artist based in London and professor of Fine Art at Konstfack in Stockholm. Through her collaborative projects she has explored the public function of archives, collections and exhibitions in an age characterized by relentless privatization. Ptak is curator at Tensta konsthall in Stockholm, previously based in New York City. Her current projects scrutinize art’s relationship to labor and intellectual property inside our knowledge economy, and explore the possibilities and limits of online space as a deterritorialized form of public space.

27.5 2012
Starting at 14:00 at Stockholm Library, Sveavägen 73
Duration: 4 hours, free of charge

T.451 is performed one-time only on 27.5 starting at 14:00 at Gunnar Asplund’s Stadsbibliotek, Sveavägen 73. The walk is about 4 hours long ending at Tensta konsthall. A limited number of tickets are available for free at Tensta konsthall from 10.5 and at Stockholm Library at Sveavägen from 14.5. For more information, please contact: katrin@tenstakonsthall.se

Visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Paris) and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers’ (Berlin) scenic walk in Stockholm with surroundings traces a classic story in a current reality. The one-time only performance T.451 is inspired by Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and the filmed version by François Truffaut (1966) with music by Bernard Herrmann. In Bradbury’s original story, set in a future society, the only communication is made trough TV and images. Literature is regarded dangerous for the unified community and has thus been classified illegal. The printed word is actively searched for and destroyed by firemen, who instead of putting out fires, burn books to prevent disillusioned human conditions.

In T.451 the public becomes witnesses to re-enactments played out in Stockholm city and in the suburbs of Hjulsta and Tensta. By inserting scenarios and music into architectural environments and public places such as Gunnar Asplund’s famous Stockholm Library; the subway; and the late-modernist housing area Tensta, Gonzalez-Foerster and Meyers are testing the possibility of an imagined future through a new form of musical and performed narrative.

Like many of Gonzalez-Foerster’s works, T.451 is based on time, situations and the public presence, rather than material and structures. Her works, which since the early 1990s, often are inspired by literary classics or films, reflect more than just a narrative. They attempt to capture the public situation, the immediate encounter with art. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that her works appear as multi-dimensional enactments where sound and visual elements, combined with the existing environment, make the work into an experience, which reveals the potential of art to produce imagined, as well as real change. Gonzalez-Foerster and Meyers first started working together in 2007 as part of Il Tempo del Postino, the group show/artist opera curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno, which premiered as part of the inaugural Manchester International Festival. Their first full production as collaborators followed in 2008 with the work NY 2022 for the Peter B. Lewis Theater in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York. In 2009 they premiered the Performa 09 commission K.62/K.85 at the Abrons Arts Center in New York. In 2011 this production subsequently traveled to Kaaitheater, Brussels (K.62/K.73/K.85) and then to Hebbel Theater Berlin (K.62/K.85/M.31). In addition to T.451, they are working on a number of new projects, as well as a web-based archive. Their work together often takes its inspiration from specific films or pieces of music and has been described by themselves as being “audience-based”.

T.451 is a collaboration between Stockholm konst and Tensta konsthall, produced by Stockholm konst. With support by Stockholm Library and Tensta Library. A special thanks to, The Greater Stockholm Fire Brigade, the organization Röde Hanen, The Stockholm City Museum and Kurdiska föreningen Spånga.

Special events:
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ari Benjamin Meyers
Artist talk
Tuesday 8.5, 18:30 at Tensta konsthall

In conjunction with upcoming scenic walk in Stockholm T.451, visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Paris) and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers (Berlin) present past and current projects from their individual practices and collaborative work, such as: Sol is Going Home for Il Tempo del Postino at Manchester International Festival in 2007; NY 2022 for the Peter B. Lewis Theater in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York in 2008, and the Performa 09 commission K.62/K.85 at the Abrons Arts Center in New York. In English.

Fahrenheit 451
Film screening of François Truffaut’s film from 1966
Wednesday 23.5, 18:00 in the auditorium behind Stockholm Library, Odengatan 61

Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 is based on Ray Bradbury’s novel from 1953 of the same name. Original music by composer Bernard Herrmann. The lead characters Montag and Linda/Clarisse are played by Oscar Werner and Julie Christie. As in Bradbury’s novel, literature has been illegalized and is searched for and destroyed by firemen. Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 communicates the novel’s theme of destruction of reading material both in storyline and in formal presentation. The film’s credits are for example spoken, not read in text. Runtime: 122 min. Language: English with Swedish subtitles. The screening is for free.

January 2012
As part of Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies the report Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Scenarios for the Future, edited by Olav Velthuis and Maria Lind, is published in January 2012 by Sternberg Press. With contributions by Stefano Baia-Curioni, Karen van den Berg/Ursula Pasero, Isabelle Graw, Goldin+Senneby, Noah Horowitz, Suhail Malik/Andrea Phillips, Alain Quemin and Olav Velthuis. Design by Metahaven.

This report explores a number of interrelated institutional developments in the last couple of decades, which have had a significant impact on the way art is marketed and perceived by its audiences. For instance, the rise of the art fair, the internet and the increased competition of auction houses on the contemporary market both reflect and further propel the globalization and commercialization of the art world; the latter much to the dismay of numerous artists and critics who claim that commerce has an uneasy relationship with art production and perception.

Copies of the report can be ordered from Sternberg Press.

March to May 2012

What is fashion and how does it come into existence? In this project fashion is placed in a wider context encompassing both artistic and political issues. The project starts in February and will continue to May 2012 with a group of 15 girls between the ages of 15 and 22. The group will meet every other week and participate in 2-hour workshops. There will be 10 meetings where Tensta Konsthall will invite a variety of lecturers—for example, artists, fashion experts, designers, political debaters. The project has both a practical and a theoretical point of departure based on ideas concerning physical objects, materials and clothes and involves collaboration between Emily Fahlén, mediator and Safiya Guleed, who is a guide at Tensta Konsthall. In collaboration with the Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University.

From June 2011

Cluster is a network of eight internationally operating contemporary visual art organisations situated in residential areas on the peripheries of major European cities (plus one in Holon, an industrial zone outside of Tel Aviv). Each of these organisations are actively involved in their local contexts, fostering their embeddedness within their surroundings. Cluster was initiated in June 2011 in order to facilitate internal and public exchange of knowledge about how these types of institutions function and also to establish further collaborations between them.

During 2012-2013 the group will collectively visit each of the organisations in the network. Each visit will include a combination of closed meetings, site visits, and public events, through which we will share the ongoing dialogues that will be generated through the project. Cluster members include Casco — Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht, The Netherlands; CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge, France; Les Laboratoires D’Aubervillers, Aubervilliers, France; Tensta konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden; The Showroom, London, UK; CA2M Centro Dos De Mayo, Madrid, Spain; The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon, Israel; and P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Meeting 1: The first Cluster meeting will be held in Utrecht on 22-23 February, in connection with Casco’s long-term project The Grand Domestic Revolution – User’s Manual, particularly in the framework of its final week programme. A public discussion with Cluster members Binna Choi, Maria Lind, Eyal Danon, Ferran Barrenblit and Emily Pethick will take place on the evening of 22 Febrary at 20:00.

October 2011-2013
Lars Bang Larsen, Magnus Bärtås, Ane Hjorth Guttu, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Hito Steyerl

The second seminar took place on 11.3, 12:00-17:00. The Model and the City: A Seminar on Palle Nielsen’s project The Model (Moderna Museet 1968) and Tensta. With Palle Nielsen, Gunilla Lundahl, Erik Stenberg.

In 1968 artist and architect Palle Nielsen initiated The Model: A model for a qualitative society which was a playground for children installed at Moderna Museet as part of Action Talk, a series of urban events in Stockholm. Despite the fact that The Model became a legendary event at one of Sweden’s most prestigious museums, it has taken a long time for the project to find its way into the history books. The reasons for this delay is undoubtedly due to the project’s dual nature—a mix of artistic research and activism—as well as its collective character and deep roots inside Nielsen’s activist network.

With pivotal agents from The Model and Action Talk present, this seminar at Tensta konsthall will take up the project from the perspective of art and cultural history—looking at how as it was perceived at the time and in its historical context of 1968. The seminar also explores the question of how contemporary experience and theory can inform historical events, which are still important and timely for us today.

Participants and program:

12:00-12:30 Introduction by Maria Lind and Lars Bang Larsen

12:30-13:30 Palle Nielsen, initiator of The Model: A model for a qualitative society at Moderna Museet 1968. On The Model in his own words.

13:30-13:45 Coffee break

13:45-14:30 Gunilla Lundahl, co-organizer of The Model. On Action Talk and city activism in Stockholm.

14:30-15:15 Erik Stenberg, Dean of The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and resident of Tensta from 1999-2011. On Tensta, the “Million Dwelling Programme” and the new satellite towns.

15:15-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:30 Discussion

16:30-17:00 Visit to the “museum apartment” of Stockholm Stadsmuseum (The City Museum of Stockholm) furnished like when the first family lived here in 1969.

The Model and the City: A Seminar on Palle Nielsen’s project The Model (Moderna Museet, 1968) and Tensta is a collaboration between Tensta konsthall and The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. It is part of The New Model and The Million Program c/o The Royal Institute of Technology.

Started in 2011 at Tensta konsthall, over a period of two years, The New Model will investigate the heritage from The Model: A model for a qualitative society in a number of projects, seminars, workshops and exhibitions. Participants will include Lars Bang Larsen, Magnus Bärtås, Ane Hjorth Guttu, Dave Hullfish Bailey and Hito Steyerl.

With its starting point in this seminar, the project The Million Program c/o The Royal Institute of Technology will explore The Million Dwelling Programme from an architectural and historical as well as its current and future status.

Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian, curator and writer based in Kassel and Copenhagen. He has co-curated exhibitions such as Pyramids of Mars (2000—2001), Populism (2005) and A History of Irritated Material (2010). His books include the monograph Sture Johannesson (2002) and The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968 (2010), about Palle Nielsen’s mass utopian adventure playgrounds for children. In Danish have appeared the booklets Kunst er Norm, Organisationsformer and Spredt væren (Art is Norm, Forms of Organisation and Dissipated being, 2008-2010), an attempt at writing a poetics against the experience economy. Lars wrote his PhD at the University of Copenhagen about psychedelic concepts in neo-avant-garde art. This autumn will appear the book The Critical Mass of Mediation, written with the artist Søren Andreasen.

Magnus Bärtås is an artist and writer. In his work he often usesconstructed narratives related to places and buildings. By employing literary modes and methods his works privilege the meaning of the local, the situated and the neglected detail. Fundamental to the works are meetings, conversations and storytelling—activities that are closely linked to the biographical genre, but also to the oral dissemination of artworks. His dissertation in artistic research You Told Me—work stories and video essays (2010) is an observation and analysis of certain functions and meanings of narration and narratives in contemporary art. You Told Me is also about the making of video essays—about listening and talking to images, and making transferences between the working instances of narrative video. Since 2008 Magnus Bärtås is professor of fine art at Konstfack in Stockholm. He has participated in Void of Memory/Platform—98, Seoul; Modernautställningen, Moderna Museet 2006 and 2010, Stockholm; the 4th Bucharest Biennial 2010; and Swedish Conceptual Art, Kalmar Konstmuseum 2010; among other group exhibitions. Gävle Konstcentrum made a solo presentation of his work in 2010.  His video essay Madame & Little Boy won the first prize at Oberhausen International Film Festival 2010 and has since been screened at a number of film festivals. Together with Fredrik Ekman he has published three books of essays.

Ane Hjort Guttu. An artist and curator born in 1971, based in Oslo. Her artistic work investigates representation strategies and power structures—particularly within architecture and pedagogy—through analytical essays, image collections, video and photography. She has also created several projects where she examines specific historical works of art. Recent shows include Looking is political  (Bergen Kunsthall 2009), Making is Thinking (Witte de With, Rotterdam 2011) and Genius without Knowledge (de Appel, Amsterdam 2011). Forthcoming shows and projects are, among others, Sunlight on the Upper Part of a House (Kunsthall Oslo 2012),  Don´t Tell Me (Sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern) and Learning for Life, Henie Onstad kunstsenter, Oslo. Guttu is currently a research fellow at the National Academy of the Arts, Oslo.

Dave Hullfish Bailey. Born 1963 in Denver; lives in Los Angeles. Bailey’s practice is research-based and takes form as site-based interventions, exhibitions, publications, expeditions and workshops. Recent presentations include For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, ICA London, De Appel, and other venues, 2009—10); Surrounded by Squares: Dave Hullfish Bailey and Nils Norman, Raven Row, London (2009); Biennale de Lyon (2007); What’s Left to its own Devices (On reclamation), Casco Office for Art, Design and Theory, Utrecht (2007); and CityCat Project, Brisbane (2006/ongoing). Published books include Elevator (Secession, Vienna: 2006), What’s Left (Casco/Sternberg Press, Utrecht/Berlin: 2009), and Union Pacific (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin: 1999). Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, Springerin, artext, Untitled, Nu: The Nordic Art Review, and other journals. Bailey is currently Adjunct Associate Professor in the Fine Art department at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, and has guest-taught widely. He studied science, philosophy and theology at Carleton College and Harvard Divinity School, and received an MFA from Art Center College of Design. Grants include Durfee Foundation, California Community Foundation and Philip Morris Kunstförderung.

Gunilla Lundahl. Cultural journalist and author. Lundahl began her career at the daily newspaper, Arbetaren  (The Worker) in 1955 and has since then been employed by Form at different times from 1965 to 1985. She was the editor for Arkitekttidningen for six years in the 1970s, guest editor and employee of the journal Arkitektur during the 1980s and columnist in Hemslöjden in the beginning of the 2000s. As a freelance writer she has written about design, art and architecture and contributed to more than 100 books, anthologies, catalogues and reports, working as writer, co-writer or editor. Gunilla Lundahl has been in charge of exhibitions such as Modellen (The Model) and Ararat at Moderna Museet; Den naturliga staden (The Natural City) and Kvinnorum (Women’s Space) at the Architecture Museum; Himla skönt (So terribly lovely) for Riksutställningar (the Swedish Travelling Exhibitions). Her research includes projects around collective living and arts and crafts. In the beginning of the 1970’s she was a teacher at the Royal Institute of Technology. Books include: Hus och rum för små barn (House and Space for Small Children), 1995; Karaktär och känsla (Character and Feeling), 1999; Kontinuitet och förändring (Continuity and Change), 2011.

Palle Nielsen was born in 1942 in Copenhagen. He studied painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1963 to 1967 and participated in several exhibitions while still a student. He concluded his education with employment with the municipal architects in a large suburb of Copenhagen where he designed and supervised the building of several playgrounds.

Nielsen participated in a series of urban actions in Copenhagen in the beginning of 1968 and later went to Stockholm to take part in the planning of Aktion Samtal (Action Talk). In July 1968 he received a grant from the Royal School of Architecture in Copenhagen to do research on the subject of “children and urban space” under the auspices of Professor Sven Ingvar Andersson in the department of Landscape Planning.  This meant that, together with a group of friends in Stockholm, Nielsen could realize the exhibition Modellen. En modell for ett kvalitativt samhälle (The Model. A Model for a Qualitative Society) at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, October 1968.

In the beginning of 1969, ideas from the exhibition at Modern Museet were tested in a residential area in Västerås. The project was called Ballongen (The Balloon). Nielsen has done research on children’s play in urban space; he has studied pedagogy at the University of Copenhagen and taught the subject. He has been an architecture critic and has built playgrounds as an architect and designed ornamentation for public buildings. He has also worked for a long time as a supervisor for unemployed people in conjunction with large creative projects.

In 1998, Lars Bang Larsen brought to light documentation material from The Model (1968) which had been buried for 30 years in Nielsen’s home. Since then, this material has been shown in exhibitions in Europe and distributed through magazines and journals. In 2009 Nielsen donated the material to MACBA (Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum), where it was recreated visually and with sound; MACBA also published a book on The Model. The work was subsequently exhibited at the Biennial in Sao Paulo and in Paris. In 2009 Nielsen presented the piece, The Children’s Peace Square in Utrecht.

Erik Stenberg. Head of the Department of Architecture at KTH, has been engaged in the practice and politics of restructuring the large scale modernist housing areas in Sweden for the last decade. He has redesigned apartments, organized a housing fair, and started an introductory architecture school in Tensta—one of Stockholm’s largest modernist housing areas. Further, he has lectured extensively, led design studios, organized lecture series and held seminars focusing on interventions and strategies for repurposing the housing stock. He is currently in the early stages of planning an exhibit at the Swedish Museum of Architecture concerning the fourfold set of forces pressuring the Swedish post war housing areas: maintenance/renovation, integration/segregation, energy/sustainability and preservation/history.

Hito Steyerl. Filmmaker and writer. Written and visual essays about traveling images and their relation to spectacle, history and violence. Teaches New Media at University of Arts Berlin. Shows include dOKUMENTA 12, biennials in Shanghai, Gwangju, Taipeh, Berlin, Manifesta 5 and many other places. Steyerl has had solo shows at nbk Berlin and Henie Onstad Art Centre, Norway among many others. One of her favorite works is the thorough dismantling of the facade of the Linz Art School, a large Nazi building (2009) sitting on the city’s main square. Recent books include The Color of Truth 2008, Beyond Representation (forthcoming) and The Wretched of the Screen (forthcoming).

The point of departure for The New Model is Palle Nielsen’s legendary project from 1968, Modellen. En modell för ett kvalitativt samhälle (The Model. A model for a qualitative society). By transforming Moderna Museet into an adventure playground Nielsen wanted to give children a chance to ”be themselves” and express their own reality. The children would be able to play in an environment that was free and separate from the adult world in general and from the urban milieu in particular, and in an environment adapted to their own energetic activities. In contrast, nowadays, more or less every aspect of our lives is capitalized and culture is dominated by entertainment. Our lives in 2011 do not share much in common with the social and cultural upheavals of 1968. Today, not even play is an unspoiled, intact freedom; it is in part a function of the creative industries. How can we re-articulate and renew the questions Nielsen posed with his Model? How can we create a qualitative society out of a totally other reality? During the course of two years, The New Model, will be investigating the heritage of the Model in a number of projects involving seminars, workshops and exhibitions.

The first seminar featuring lectures by the participants, took place at Blå huset in Tensta on Saturday, 8.10 featuring presentations by critic Lars Bang Larsen and artists Magnus Bärtås, Dave Hullfish Bailey and Hito Steyerl.

During school breaks
Tensta konsthall arranges art camps for children and teenagers, 10-19 years old. We offer participants a one-week daytime camp under the guidance of a professional artist. The art camp may revolve around specific mediums, themes, or the artist’s own practice. On the final day the public is invited to see and experience the works made during the week.

To sign up contact Emily Fahlén at emily@tenstakonsthall.se or 08-36 07 63.

Upcoming
25.6-29.6 2012
Hut building
With Stefan Petersson (KTH School of Architecture)
Age: 10-12 years

Let us go to Järvafältet and build little houses! In the middle of nature, we will use the material that we find there: branches, twigs and foliage. We will get to know the field and use it as our workplace and that’s where we’ll talk about architecture, nature and freedom to roam/everyman’s right. We will measure, sketch and design, make clever knots and become experts in hut construction.

25.6-29.6 2012
Parkour and Gardening
With Elin Wikström and colleagues (Göteborgs konstskola)
Age: 10–100 years

Throughout the week we will discover and explore Tensta’s public spaces. We will examine how to activate different locations, often very literally with the body through Parkour, but also with gardening. This art camp is intergenerational, anyone 10 years or older is welcome.

6.8–10.8 2012
Painting and Portraits
With Filippa Arrias (The Royal Institute of Arts)
Age: 13–16 years

We will make portraits with brushes and paint. How do you mix paint and how can the brush be used? We will train ourselves to make choices about what to keep in our images, but also what to take away. Each day we begin with a new portrait—it can represent someone you know, someone important, a family member or a place. All together they tell a story about ourselves.

Past—10.4-13.4 2012
Theater
With Ruben Lopez (Unga Dramaten)
Age: 15-18 years

Do you like theater and drama? For one week we will occupy the small theater space at Blå huset in Tensta. This will be a place for experiments, improvisations and vocal exercises. Our bodies and voices are our most important tools. We will improvise plays with the guidance of a professional actor based on our own experiences, stories and imagination. We will learn how to produce a theater play and visit backstage at Dramaten. At the end of the week we will perform together, in front of an audience.

Past—27.2-2.3 2012
Sports + Art
With Victoria Brännström (BI, Konstfack)
For: Girls 11-14 years

For a week we will explore how to combine art with sports. Can we make a dance out of boxing, a song out of swimming or an image out of acrobatics? Sports can create team spirit and sisterhood and art can give us freedom to break the rules. It doesn’t matter if you are interested in sports or not, bring comfortable clothes and join us as we rethink sports in our very own way!

Past—2.1-5.1 2012
The Noise Machine
With Ola Nilsson (Nyckelviksskolan)
Age: 10-12 years

Let’s build noise. What sounds are we able to produce? Rumbles of thunder, cannons and whistles. A choppy sound, a flipping sound, and bowling sound. Together we will construct machines of noise using timber, cardboard, strings, metal and various materials. We will challenge the very idea of what constitutes sound and what constitutes noise. The final day of the art camp will be celebrated with a spectacular concert of noise! Assistant: Alladin Babeker.

Ongoing
Café T at Tensta konsthall serves home-baked bread and fresh seasonal organic dishes straight from eg Hästa farm at Järvfältet. Very good coffee and tea are also essential ingredients.

Café T is run by Blå Vägen (The Blue Way), a cooperative working throughout the county of Stockholm. The cooperative runs a large cleaning firm, sewing and handicraft outlets, cafés, provides gardeners and gardening services, dog daycare and second-hand shops for children’s clothes. In all these places people are given opportunities to practice language and work skills, and many eventually may be offered jobs.

Ongoing
In the spring of 2011 Konsthallsklubben (Gallery Club) was initiated by a group of 11 year-old girls from a nearby school. The club is aimed at children, 10-13 years old, who meet every Tuesday to discuss and make art together with invited artists and staff. Club activities are based in the konsthall but can also take place at other locations in Tensta. The Gallery Club also makes excursions to other parts of Stockholm for projects and activities. The participants themselves discuss and decide these activities and projects, which range from visits to exhibitions, film projects to building volcanoes.

Ongoing

Together with the Amsterdam-based design studio Metahaven, and Jorge Munguia, from Mexico City’s Salon, Tensta konsthall has developed a new website and a communication strategy specific for the art space and its program. Curator Laurel Ptak.

Ongoing
The spatial concept for the new Tensta konsthall has been developed by architect Nikolaus Hirsch who was responsible for strategic changes such as painting the black ceiling white, installing strip lights and taking down a wall to the old office providing more presentational space. Architect Filippa Stålhane has developed the details, including the interiors of the office and the cafe.

October-December 2012
This is the first comprehensive presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s multi-faceted artistic oeuvre since 1998. The exhibition, shown in cooperation with Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, places Marie-Louise Ekman’s work in an international context.

September 2011-May 2012

The seminar series, What Does an Art Institution Do? carried out in collaboration with the Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts and Design), began this fall and will continue into the spring. The purpose of this series of five seminars is to discuss how a well-considered selection of art institutions from different parts of the world operate and what function they have, locally as well as globally. Quite simply: it concerns what institutions do. It is about what kind of art they work with, how they are financed, what rules their decision-making and, not least of all, how they were established. At a time when art is under pressure to be easily understood and entertaining, it is important to draw attention to how art institutions can go their own way and offer other possibilities to both artists and the local community. In other words, how art institutions can play an active part in the public sphere? (All lectures in English.)

13.9, 18:30
Same Same: Chus Martinez on Documenta and Gavin Wade on Eastside Projects in Birmingham. Local referent: Bettina Pehrsson, Marabouparken. On working from and with a specific location.

17.11, 18:30
In the Beginning: Vasif Kortun on SALT in Istanbul and Anthony Huberman on The Artist’s Institute in New York. Local referent: Magdalena Malm, MAP. On starting a new institution.

2.2, 18:30
How Size Matters: Chris Dercon on Tate Modern in London and Gabi Ngcobo on Center for Historical Reenactments in Johannesburg. Local referent: Kim Einarsson, Konsthall C. On the potentials and problems of large and small-scale institutional work.

29.3, 18:30
All Over the Place: Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy on the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Foundation and Kate Fowle on Independent Curators International. Local referent: Lena From, Stockholm Konst. On the mobile institution which works with various partners and sites.

 3.5, 18:30
Community Matters: Sofia Victorino on the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London and Abdellah Karroum on L’appartement 22 in Rabat. Local referent: Diana Baldon, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. On institutional work which relates directly to communities in the immediate vicinity of the institution.

12.1–22.4 2012
Doug Ashford, Claire Barclay, José León Cerrillo, Yto Barrada, Matias Faldbakken, Priscila Fernandes, Zachary Formwalt, Liam Gillick/Anton Vidokle, Goldin+Senneby, Wade Guyton, Iman Issa, Gunilla Klingberg, Dorit Margreiter, Åsa Norberg/Jennie Sundén, Mai-Thu Perret, Falke Pisano, Walid Raad, Emily Roysdon, Tommy Støckel, Mika Tajima, Haegue Yang

Abstract Possible deals with abstraction and contemporary art. In the exhibition three prominent tendencies in contemporary art are followed, examined and problematized: formal abstraction, economic abstraction and “withdrawal” (Latin ab strahere lit. ‘drag away,’ to withdraw). Formal abstraction encompasses painting, sculpture and installations that reflect abstract styles, especially geometric abstraction, which often recalls the classic avant-garde’s development of what was then a wholly novel visual expression. Economic abstraction concerns art and economy, taking up, for instance, the genuine abstract value of money. “Withdrawal” refers to the wave of artists’ initiatives during the last 15 years that have deliberately not joined what we can call the “mainstream” in order to create a greater degree of self-determination for the artists. Curator Maria Lind. www.abstractpossible.org

Tensta konsthall: 11.1–22.4
Taxingegränd 10, Tensta. Open Wednesday/Thursday 11:00–21:00; Friday 11:00–18:00; Saturday/Sunday 12:00–17:00.

Bukowskis: 27.1–12.2
Berzelii Park 1, Stockholm. Open daily from 14:00–18:00.

Center for Fashion Studies: 12.1.2012–December 2013
University of Stockholm, house D, 8th floor. Works by Mai-Thu Perret and Emily Roysdon are on view inside seminar room. Open Fridays 10:00–15:00 (except 17.2) and Tuesdays 12:00–17:00 (except 31.1, 17.4), or as agreed with Rita Jonson or Petrine Knight.

25.1-18.4
A series of lectures at Tensta konsthall in collaboration with ABF. How did abstraction within art emerge in the western world at the turn of the century? How has abstract art functioned and been received in other parts of the world, for example in Latin America? What has been the role of abstract art inside Muslim cultures? How do artists use abstraction today? (All lectures in Swedish.)

25.1, 18:30
Abstraction and the Classic Avant Garde, Maria Lind

21.2, 18:30
Signs. Abstraction in Traditional Muslim Art and Architecture, Jan Hjärpe

21.3, 18:30
Latin American Challenges, Maria Lind

18.4, 18:30
Formal and Economic Abstraction in Contemporary Art, Maria Lind

14.4, 14:00
Performance by and with artist Falke Pisano. A “Complex Object” is an object constructed to provide the structural conditions for a moment of transformation. The object is constructed around, and its internal logic is based on, a specific unfeasible proposition. Therefore conditions are created in which the problematic nature of the proposition dissolves and it becomes possible to effect its ‘taking place’. At the same time this linguistic object is a construction that offers the possibility to address the question to which extent the process of an object is still present in the object itself. Performance as part of Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies. Performance with PowerPoint presentation, 25/30 minutes, 2007. (In English.)

19.1-12.4 A series of lectures at Tensta konsthall in collaboration with the Royal University College of Fine Arts. As part of the exhibition Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies. (All lectures in English.)

19.1, 18:30
Doug Ashford

Talk by teacher, artist and writer Doug Ashford. Ashford is Associate Professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City where he has taught design, sculpture and theory since 1989. His principle art practice from 1982 to 96 was as a member of Group Material and since that time he has gone on to make paintings, write and produce independent public projects.

9.2, 18:30
Wade Guyton

Wade Guyton’s black painted wooden floor functions as an abstract pedestal for many of the works in the exhibition Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies. At the same time, the floor becomes an enormous monochrome painting, partaking in a somewhat daunting tradition. The very means of artistic production, particularly painting, are the focus of many of Wade Guyton’s works. Standardized procedures such as printing with basic commercial printers have been appropriated in order to generate paintings where the mechanical meets the incidental with wrinkles, blurbs and other “errors”, not unlike in any office environment. Guyton also collaborates with Kelley Walker as Guyton/Walker, whose work has been shown at the Venice Biennale in 2009. He is also a member of the publishing and performance collective Continuous Project. Next year Whitney Museum of American Art in New York will present a solo exhibition with Guyton.

15.3, 18:30
Mai-Thu Perret

Mai-Thu Perret’s work combines radical feminist politics with utopian literary texts, homemade crafts and 20th century avant-garde aesthetics. Her striking wallpaper is covering parts of both Tensta konsthall’s exhibition space and a seminar room at the Center for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University. Forming an important part of Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies the wallpaper harks back to the origin of abstract art, to the textiles with abstract patterns that the constructivist Varvara Stepanova made in Moscow in the 1920s. Geneva-based Perretʼs most recent solo exhibitions have been at Mamco, Geneva; Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; and Le Magasin, Grenoble.

24.3, 14:00
Walid Raad

As a part of Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies, artist Walid Raad (Beirut/New York) speaks about his practice. Lebanon’s recent history is at the core of Raad’s multi-layered and now classic work, The Atlas Group Archive (1989–2004). As in other works, he uses facts as a starting point—historical, sociological, economic, emotional and aesthetic facts—claiming that some facts can only be experienced in fiction. Raad is Associate Professor of art at Cooper Union in New York, is 2011 recipient of the Hasselblad Award, with recent solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and Kunsthalle Zurich.

12.4, 18:30
Sven Lütticken (critic and theorist)

What are the tangible symptoms of abstraction in today’s economic and social life—and in artistic production? Building on Lütticken’s text “Living With Abstraction” this talk will draw on lessons from the ongoing European and global crisis for the aesthetic economy in which we labor.  Lütticken teaches art history at VU University Amsterdam. He regularly publishes critical essays in various journals, magazines and catalogues, and is the author of Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (2006) and Idols of the Market: Modern Iconoclasm and the Fundamentalist Spectacle (2009). Currently he is in the process of completing his new book, History in Motion. He is the curator of the exhibitions Life, Once More: forms of reenactment in contemporary art (Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005) and The Art of Iconoclasm (BAK, Utrecht, 2009). Currently he is doing a public research project on Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture for If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam).

Past—29.1 and 26.2, 13:00
Cinema Zita, Birger Jarlsgatan 37, Stockholm

A film by Liam Gillick/Anton Vidokle whose starting point a manifesto written by Gao Shiming, the Executive Curator of the latest Shanghai Biennial. The manifesto is an attack on the art system and its limiting monoculture and artists Gillick and Vidokle have responded by inviting a handful of emerging artists, curators and critics to interpret and extrapolate from the text itself. The 22-minute long film hovers between cultural criticism and soap, borrowing its title from the longest running soap opera on American television. As part of the exhibition Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies.

Past—23.2, 18:3

During recent decades, both the public and the private infrastructures of art have undergone changes that have affected how art is produced, presented and perceived. Internationally, studios connected to individual artists, which resemble companies with more than hundred employees, have become increasingly common. Artists are expected to be entrepreneurs within the “creative industries” as well as researchers within a growing “practice-based” area of research. Public art institutions are required to come up with their own revenues and high public attendance figures and art is more and more considered to be entertainment. In many places, for example, in municipalities, we see how public financial support has decreased, on the one hand, and on the other, become more controlled than only a decade ago.

Art has been commercialized: at present it is an object for investment and speculation, which is underlined by the fact that sales of art at auctions have increased eight times between 1998-2008. Despite strong opposition from many galleries, the distance between them and the auction houses has shrunk and art sales are multiplying in arenas like fairs and on the Internet, which—especially the Internet—have the potential of weakening traditional “gatekeeping” in both commercial and non-commercial spheres. In addition, art has become part of the kind of celebrity culture represented by fashion and the music industry. In this situation, what will happen with contemporary art? What kind of art and which artists will be privileged and which will be disregarded?

Six representatives from public and private actors in Sweden have been invited to hold a short presentation, ten minutes, describing their present guidelines and modes of working and what consequences have these guidelines and modes for artists and their conditions of production. What are their prospects? What are the risks involved? What will be the situation for art and artists in ten years time?

Invited participants (all presentations in Swedish):

Cilene Andréhn, Galleri Andréhn-Schiptjenko
Ann Larsson, Swedish Arts Grants Committee
Ingrid Lomfors, Kulturbryggan (Culture Bridge)
Michael Storåkers, Bukowskis (Auction House)
Ellen Wettmark, Swedish Arts Council
Måns Wrange, Royal University College of Fine Arts

Moderators: Kim Einarsson (Konsthall C) and Maria Lind (Tensta konsthall)

The debate is in cooperation with Konsthall C and is part of the exhibition Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies at Tensta konsthall 12.1 – 22.4 2012.

11.2, 12:00-17:00
Cuts can be booked from 11:00

Do you want a free haircut in exchange for your thoughts and opinions? The Cut transforms Tensta konsthall into a public discussion forum in the shape of a hair salon. London-based artists/activists and professional hairdressers Richard Houguez and Lewis Bassett from The Hair Cut Before The Party invite the public to share their personal living and working experiences in exchange for a free haircut.

In addition to drop-in hair cut sessions for the visiting public, during the day of the event a number of specially-scheduled cuts with invited speakers with experience and knowledge in different social organizations will take place. The conversations focus on questions around experience-based understanding, free knowledge and the possibilities of self-organized action. Through the specific interests of the speakers, the talks explore questions of immediacy and ways to sustain change, but also current and historical Swedish educational movements and their relation to political ambitions.

The Cut is a collective attempt towards an anti-hierarchical platform of knowledge exchange initiated by a group of artists, curators and activists: Emanuel Almborg, Karin Bähler Lavér (Prekariatet), Richard Houguez and Lewis Bassett (The Hair Cut Before The Party), Katrin Ingelstedt (The Institute of Continuation), Egle Kulbokaite, Zoë Poluch and Jens Strandberg.

Participating guests (all cuts performed in English except Per Sundgren):

12:30 To Understand the History of Swedish Public Education

Per Sundgren is currently a lecturer at the department of History of Ideas at Södertörn University. Sundgren has previously been involved in cultural politics and has served as head of the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company (UR). In 2007, Sundgren published his dissertation Kulturen och arbetarrörelsen (Culture and the Working-Class Movement) that maps cultural and political ambitions of the Swedish working-class movement addressing a variety of perspectives—from socialist activist August Palm to leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party Tage Erlander, from the first tentative steps of popular education at the end of the 19th century to the first cultural political programs fifty years later. Sundgren’s visit to The Cut is his first professional haircut in 47 years.

14:00 To Create a Nuanced Image of the Suburb

Saadia Hussain is artistic director of Förorten i Centrum, an organization which supports children and youth through creating platforms of dialogue and collaboration within and beyond the borders of the suburb. Using mural painting as their foregrounding method, Förorten i Centrum aims to create a sustainable platform that can later be run by the youth themselves.

15:00 To Understand Your Space and Act Out of Your Situation; A Simultaneous Haircut Between Karin Bähler Lavér and Laurel Ptak

Karin Bähler Lavér studies Aestethics at Södertörn University and is a founding member of Prekariatet. Prekariatet is a project that focuses on issues around the uncertainty of living and working conditions. Lately they have expanded the space for comprehension and politicization of the uncertain by organizing reading circles on the topic of materialist feminsim and post-Fordist work, by intervening in discussions at the think-tank Timbro, and by supporting local occupation movements. By using their website prekariatet.se as a hub to spread political, intellectual and artistic media production, Prekariatet attempts to establish more space for discussion about the precarious.

Laurel Ptak slept her last night in New York City at Zuccotti Park before relocating to Stockholm to work as curator at Tensta konsthall in the fall of 2011. Her current projects look at questions of intellectual property, art’s relationship to labor, and the possibilities and limits of online space as a deterritorialized form of public space.

The Cut is organized by The Institute of Continuation. The Institute of Continuation creates and continues conversations in the field of art together with Stockholm-based artists at the studio collective Platform Stockholm in Liljeholmen. Sometimes these conversations result in exhibitions, performances, workshops or events where international guests are invited to challenge our thoughts and ideas.

Previous salon interview with David Graeber and The Haircut Before the Party: http://vimeo.com/16869102

28.1, 14:00
Tensta Träff, Hagstråket 13, Tensta

What will art look like in 2022 and how will artists operate? Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets is a symposium on the occasion of a report with the same title, exploring a number of interrelated institutional developments in the last decades which have had a significant impact on the way art is marketed and perceived by its audiences. The rise of the art fair, the internet and the increased competition of auction houses on the contemporary market both reflect and further propel the globalization and commercialization of the art world; the latter much to the dismay of numerous artists and critics who claim that commerce has an uneasy relationship with art production and perception

Participants: Stefano Baia Curioni, economic historian and director of the arts, cultures, media and entertainment master of science program at Bocconi University Graduate School, Milan; Noah Horowitz, art historian and managing director of The Armory Show, New York; Andrea Phillips, reader in fine art and director of research programmes, art department, Goldsmiths, London; Mika Tajima, artist, New York; Olav Velthuis, associate professor at the department of sociology and anthropology, University of Amsterdam; Thea Westreich, art advisor, Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services, New York; Moderator Tone Hansen, director Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo.

Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios is edited by Olav Velthuis and Maria Lind. Contributions by Stefano Baia-Curioni, Karen van den Berg/Ursula Pasero, Isabelle Graw, Goldin+Senneby, Noah Horowitz, Suhail Malik/Andrea Phillips, Alain Quemin and Olav Velthuis. Published by Sternberg Press and Tensta konsthall. Design by Metahaven.

As part of Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies, Tensta konsthall 12.1-22.4 2012.

Stefano Baia Curioni is an economic historian, director of the Arts, Cultures, Media and Entertainment Master of Science program at Bocconi University Graduate School, and visiting professor of Arts markets and Heritage Management at IMT Lucca at the PhD Cultural Heritage Management. He has been engaged in the study of the relationships between arts and economies and between cultural policies and cultural institutions for more than ten years. His recent research activities include an assessment of the public Italian heritage Institutions (for the general direction of Italian Ministry of Culture); planning activities for museums and cultural institutions in Milan  (the Milan contemporary art museum) and the development of a research on the status creation processes in the contemporary world art markets. He is also a board member of Piccolo Teatro o Milan, Fondazione Ratti in Como, and scientific board member of Palazzo Tè in Mantova and Fondazione Civita in Rome.

Tone Hansen is newly appointed Director of the Henie Onstad Art Centre, Oslo. Previously, she worked as curator for the art centre for three years. Hansen is the editor of the reader(Re)Staging the Art Museum and responsible editor of  Thousand Eyes: Media technology, law and aesthetics. Recent exhibition projects include: In Translation with Saskia Holmkvist, World Rehearsal Court with Judy Radul, the reader and symposium A Thousand Eyes: Media technology, the law and the aesthetics, Creative Act, Hito Steyerl and To be Heard is to be Seen. Hansen held a research position at the Oslo National Academy of Art in Oslo from 2003-2008. Other projects include the 2007 exhibition and publication Megamonstermuseum; How to Imagine a Museum of Today? As well as the anthologies The New Administration of Aesthetics and What Does Public Mean? Art as a Participant in the Public Arena in 2007.

Noah Horowitz is Managing Director of The Armory Show. He received his PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and formerly served as Director of the inaugural VIP Art Fair in 2011. He has written widely on contemporary art and economics for publications including The New York Times, The Observer and ARTINFO as well as for institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, and the United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office. Horowitz teaches on the faculty of the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, and is author of Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, published by Princeton University Press.

Andrea Phillips is Reader in Fine Art and Director of Research Programmes, Art Department, Goldsmiths, London. Recent publications include: “Too Careful: Contemporary Art’s Public Making,” in Caring Culture: Art, Architecture and the Politics of Public Health (SKOR/Sternberg 2011); “Education Aesthetics,” in On Education (MIT/Whitechapel, 2011); “English Pastoral,” in LOG 23 ( Fall, 2011), “Making it up: aesthetic arrangements in the Barents region,” in Hotel Polar Capital (August, 2011); “The Politics of Practice-based PhDs,” in Investigacao em Arte e Design (Universidade de Lisboa, 2011); “List Aesthetics,” in Inventive Methods (Routledge and Taylor & Francis, 2011), “The wrong of contemporary art: aesthetics and political indeterminacy,” (with Suhail Malik) in Reading Rancière (Continuum, 2011).

Mika Tajima was born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California, and currently is a New York based artist. Connecting geometric abstraction to the shape of our built environment, Tajima’s work explores possible forms and activities defined by divisive spaces in which objects outline performer action and viewer positions. Abstraction operates at the edges of rationalism, décor, and representation, reframing the modernist project in a post-Fordist context – the world of immaterial circulation and information. Tajima received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003.Select solo exhibitions include Seattle Art Museum; Visual Arts Center at University of Texas; Bass Museum, Miami; X Initiative, New York; The Kitchen, New York; RISD Museum, Rhode Island; Circuit, Switzerland. Group exhibitions include 2008 Whitney Biennial; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, OH; PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, NY; among others.  Tajima is founding member of New Humans, a moniker for collaborative music, art, and actions. Collaborations include Charles Atlas, Vito Acconci, C. Spencer Yeh, Philippe Decrauzat, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, among others. Group and Solo performances include South London Gallery, UK; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; ICA Philadelphia; Artissima, Italy; Ballroom Marfa; Swiss Institute, NY; Walker Art Center, MN; Whitney Museum, NY.

Olav Velthuis is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Imaginary Economics (NAi Publishers, 2005) and Talking Prices: Symbolic Meanings of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton University Press, 2005), which received the Viviana Zelizer Distinguished Book Award from the American Sociological Association for the best book in economic sociology (2006). Velthuis has worked as a staff reporter on globalization for the Dutch daily de Volkskrant, as a visiting post-doc researcher at Columbia University, and as Assistant Professor at the University of Konstanz. Currently, he is studying the emergence and development of art markets in the BRIC-countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). His journalistic writings on art markets have appeared in, among others, Artforum, The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times. Velthuis is board member of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB), which is the main government-sponsored foundation for visual artists in the Netherlands.

Thea Westreich After numerous years working as a volunteer in the visual and performing arts, and following board associations with The Friends of Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the National Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, and the Museum of African Art, Thea Westreich founded Thea Westreich Art Advisory Services—a private consultancy serving individuals build­ing fine art collections. Since 1982, she has advised private collectors throughout the United States and Europe. She has worked with clients to build collections focused variously on Impressionism, American, Modern, and Contemporary Art. She has curated collections in specific media, such as video and film, photography, and works on paper, in addition to the more traditional genres of painting and sculpture.

PAST—22.1, 14:00

A reading by Metahaven accompanied by images of their recent design work at Tensta konsthall.

Transparency used to be a high modernist ideal, perfectly suited to design objects and institutions. More recently, transparency has become a loose set of strategies and tactics to scrutinize and expose the existing order—the behavior and secrets of governments, corporations and other organizations. The techniques and methods deployed by the new transparency are: leaks, investigative journalism and database hacks. Together, they form a departure from the modern paradigm of the glass house.

This new “black transparency” is vigilant, eclectic, immediate and often humorous. From the revelations of WikiLeaks to the actions of Anonymous, it is more insurgent than institutional, and more civic than corporate. In Black Transparency, Metahaven investigates, questions, proclaims and illustrates design principles of this new unofficial movement, as well as surveys its significance for architecture and design.

The presentation at Tensta konsthall takes the form of a reading accompanied by images and is part of their forthcoming book project Black Transparency—comprised of not just a print publication, but also talks, blog posts, articles and events.

A studio for design and research, founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden. Metahaven‘s work—both commissioned and self-directed—reflects political and social issues in provocative graphic design objects. Metahaven released Uncorporate Identity, a book on politics and visual identity, published by Lars Müller in 2010. Solo exhibitions include Affiche Frontière (CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 2008) and Stadtstaat (Künstlerhaus Stuttgart/Casco, 2009). Group exhibitions include Forms of Inquiry (AA London, 2007), Manifesta8 (Murcia, 2010), the Gwangju Design Biennale 2011 (Gwangju, Korea) and Graphic Design: Now In Production (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2011).

Metahaven have created Tensta konsthall’s new communication strategy and website and are currently in Stockholm through January 2012 as residents at IASPIS. Their forthcoming book, Black Transparency, will be published later this year.

PAST—14.1, 16:00 Thirteen pop songs in honor of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein make up the core of artists José León Cerrillo’s and Sara Lundén’s collaborative musical performance The Wittgenstein Suite in conjunction with the exhibition Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies. Remarks on Colour—Wittgenstein’s fragmentary deliberation on the language surrounding color—is the starting point for this extension of Cerrillo’s three-dimensional work, first performed as part of his exhibition Hotel Eden in Mexico City in 2009. Here an evocative shadow play grew out of his screens and sculptures, accompanied by Lundén singing. The work was later staged at Los Angeles’ renowned Schindler house where the house itself—with its early Modernist simplicity—became the vehicle for the shadow projections.

For Abstract Possible: The Stockholm Synergies Cerrillo and Lundén have produced six new songs, thus closing the project with twelve songs in total, an entire album. Here music as abstract art form and writer Pierre Gyotat’s psychotic and visceral novel Eden Eden Eden continue to be important references. A small pamphlet with the original Wittgenstein text in German and Swedish will accompany the performance at Tensta konsthall.