Many ways to now

Opening: September 21, 17-20

During the autumn, Mint presents a new commission by the Austrian artist and composer Armin Lorenz Gerold. The artist invites visitors into an audio-visual system of ceramic sculptures, vibrating devices, sound and screens, transforming the exhibition space into a sensory acoustic landscape.
The artist draws inspiration from Anne Boyer’s work The Fallen Angel of the Senses, in which the author and poet maps the decay of the minor senses; touch, taste, and smell, in our “present arrangement of the world”, hyperextended or fractured from “capitalism’s distortions and pressures”. Working across a multitude of media, Gerold primarily focuses on voice and sound, making audio plays, live-performances, broadcasts, and installations. For the exhibition at Mint, Gerold has invited a range of artists and poets to contribute texts that negotiate questions about time and temporality through a variety of cultural, political and poetic angles that disrupt, alter or shape the present.

With contributions by: Lori E. Allen, Anne Boyer, Reece Cox, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Mara Lee, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Alex Turgeon and James Schuyler.

Armin Lorenz Gerold (*Graz/Austria) is an artist and composer based in Berlin. His work has been presented at Halle für Kunst Steiermark, KW Berlin, LambdaLambdaLambda (Kosovo); fluent (Spain), mint (Sweden) and the Gothenburg Biennale for Contemporary Art (in a collaboration with Doireann O’ Malley). In 2021, the artist published his first artist book including his most recent play Manuel or A Hint Of Evil, alongside a collection of essays and texts. The publication was published by Mousse Publishing, Milan, supported by the Ruisdael Stipend. In November 2022, Manuel or A Hint Of Evil premiered as a live audio play at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

The exhibition is supported by the Swedish Arts Council, BMKOES and the Austrian Embassy in Stockholm

Cascade Bend Chamber

Cara Tolmie

13.5 – 26.8 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

Opening hours:
Wed-Fri 13-18
Saturday 12-16

Cascade Bend Chamber is a major new commision at Mint, led by artist and musician Cara Tolmie. It takes shape through installation, music and performance and is made in dialogue with various collaborators including, amongst others, Julia Giertz, Susanna Jablonksi and live performances with Stine Janvin and Em Silén.

The project at large stems from a vocal method that Cara Tolmie has been developing over the past five years called Internal Singing. This is a practice that explores a sensitised voice- body bind by investigating the relationship between sounding on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries, slight movement, circular vocal sound, and self-administered touch that attunes her body in states of over-sensitivity.

The exhibition hosts a series of listening spaces expanding out from Internal Singing – These environments are constructed from textiles, sonic objects, sound and sculpture, inviting the audience into an enigmatic landscape built to hold and guide them through various states of listening and bodily attention. Across each of the three rooms the elements of listening, presence and sound weave together, presenting an experience of vocality in multiplicity, persistently in movement – coaxing, calming, amusing, disorientating and at times discomforting.

Throughout the exhibition there will be a series of performances that bring to the fore the particular qualities of the live singing voice. Using the various listening rooms as stages or sets for these musical gatherings, each performance will use elements of vocal improvisation explore co-produced landscapes of affect, vocal multiplicity and the curious territory of unknowns that exist in between.

Cara Tolmie & Em Silén Circularly Tender, Lilt Resplendent Köttinspektionen Uppsala 7/5 2022 Revolve Performance Art Days foto: Pär Fredin

Cara Tolmie (b. 1984, Glasgow) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.

Her practice at large centres itself upon the voice, the body, and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body
as two co-dependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within
this she often explores performative techniques that disorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice. Cara Tolmie is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.

Mejan Internationale: Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to

Cara Tolmie

13.5 – 26.8 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

The conceptual point of departure for the exhibition is the notion of return. How does the decision to leave condition the idea of going back? For artists the decision to leave, to return, to leave again—to exist as a maker between Brazil, Norway, or France and Stockholm—also means opening one’s practice to distance, alienation, and complexity. It becomes necessary to multiply returns, to shuttle back and forth between an original place that is increasingly imagined and an elsewhere that develops undeniable solidity. The process of returning becomes endless, a fact that crucially undermines the notion of stable or consistent national artistic identity.

The works presented reflect each artists’ practice, but as a collective endeavor Mejan Internationale: Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to manifests the fact that the emerging art scene in Stockholm is plural, multilingual, riven with elsewhere. The choice to work together reflects a desire to interrogate what it means to live abroad post-pandemic and in the middle of a historic rise of the essentializing nationalism.

Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens as part of a Calling Card.

Calling Card is a working group at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm committed to anti-racism on a structural level and to freedom from all forms of discrimination for students, staff, faculty, and guests. We borrow our name from an artwork by Adrian Piper, “My Calling Card” (1986-1990).

Image: Emil Kjaernli, King of Comedy, 2023. Silkscreen on canvas, 220 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Third Eye Butterfly

Storm de Hirsch
Nat Marcus
Luzie Meyer
Sofia Restorp
P Staff

1.12 2022 – 18.02 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

Open by appointment only until March 7

The exhibition Third Eye Butterfly brings together an extraordinary range of artistic voices working at the intersection of language, music and film including Nat Marcus, Luzie Meyer, Sofia Restorp and P Staff, to expand on the work of American filmmaker Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000), who is considered one of the key figures of the 1960s New York avant-garde scene. De Hirsch, who’s artistic contribution remains largely overlooked within an institutional context, began her artistic career as a poet, and developed her film based practice through her understanding of language. Her work is strongly influenced by an interest in mysticism and occult practices, which is reflected in her exploration of analogue effects. Distinctive to her work is also the rhythmic interplay between image and sound.

The film Third Eye Butterfly (1968) which lends the exhibition its title, is a result of multiple visual experiments inspired by the diverse range of colorful and abstract butterfly wing patterns. Kaleidoscopic shots and superimpositions come and go in the image, in tune with the soundtrack’s repetitive scheme, it appears as an attempt to translate the multi-color effect of butterfly wings into an expanded film experience. Intended to be projected on a double screen using two synchronized projectors, the film creates the illusion of seeing two butterfly wings animated by the flicker of the projected images. An eye, “the great Eye,” appears several times in the center of an endless spiral framed by the words “Third Eye Butterfly.” On this matter, the American theorist Casey Chanress explains that “the 70mm like effect of Third Eye Butterfly encourages the mind to work as a third eye by fusing the two side-by-side screens into a third meaning, just as Eisenstein caused the meaning of two juxtaposed shots to result in a third implied meaning.”

Installation view

Installation view

Luzie Meyer, Period Piece 2021

P Staff, Eat Clean Ass Only 2021

Nat Marcus, The Velvet Sound (I) + (II) 2022

Installation view

P Staff, Ancient & Celibate 2021

Installation view

Sofia Restorp. Installation view

Sofia Restorp. Installation view

Sofia Restorp, Crater 2022

Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly (installation view), 1968

Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly (still), 1968

Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly (still), 1968

Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly (still), 1968

By using rhythmized imagery that incorporates colors, stenciled shapes, and sound into an audiovisual continuum, de Hirsch evokes an experience which relies on the interrelationship of sensory modalities. Following this idea of a multilayered perception of the world and tracing the interconnectedness of language, music and film young international artists Nat Marcus (lives and works in Berlin), Luzie Meyer (1990, lives and works in Berlin), Sofia Restorp (1986, lives and works in Berlin) and P Staff (1987, lives and work in Los Angeles and London) were invited.

The idea of being transported into other states of reality emphasized by the pieces present in the show continues in the design of the conventional exhibition space of Mint and is characterized by the work of lighting designer Ines Bartl. Together with the curator, she came up with a concept for the corridors and places of transition for the light situations inspired by the color spectrum from Third Eye Butterfly.

In the exhibition, not only light is used to mark the places of transition, but also the medium of language emerges through various works to describe transformative processes: the audio work Period Piece (2021) by Luzie Meyer for example playfully explores the manifold meaning of the word period that is used to describe how bodies, language and time are regulated. Similar to Meyer’s work, Nat Marcus who produced two new fabric pieces The Velvet Sound (I) and The Velvet Sound (II) (2022) which on their surface are layering graphics, paint and text as well as P. Staff’s poems displayed on hologram fans, engage the idea of multiple, fluid meanings of words to talk about bodies that encounter themselves in transitory states. Sofia Restorp’s newly created drawings, on the other hand, return to a purely visual world, but are thoroughly poetic due to the ambiguous surrealistic interiors that are depicted. Rather than dwelling on the surface her pieces can be characterized by the idea of a reflective looking inward.

Third Eye Butterfly can be seen as an attempt to reflect on Storm de Hirsch’s psychedelic view of the world and how surpassing common notions of what reality is, is more relevant than ever to artists working in the here and now.

Curator: Cathrin Mayer

Cathrin Mayer (b. 1988 Vienna) is currently the associate curator at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark (Graz, AT). Until 2020, she was curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. In addition to her curatorial work, she teaches regularly and is holding a guest professorship for curatorial studies at The University of Art and Design Linz (AT).

Anything happens here

Beatrice Gibson
Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP)

9.9 – 8.10 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

In the room, two eggs are resting in a nest. In the same place, a drama unfolds. It is told through a dreamlike montage with a poodle, a beauty queen and two sisters who are not sisters in the roles. Here in this place, which is the exhibition, experiences and things are duplicated. Pregnant events without redemption. Anything could happen here. There is both anticipation and anxiety in the air.

The exhibition Anything happens here includes the acclaimed film Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters), 2019, by British artist Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978 London) and sculptures by Britt-Ingrid Persson BIP (b. 1938 Stensele).

Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Äggets och stråets minne (The Memory of the Egg and the Straw), 1991. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Den begränsade ljusskretsen (The Limited Circle of Light), 1991. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Beatrice Gibson, Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs, 2019. Installation image. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Anything Happens Here, installation shot. Photo by Johan Österholm.

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Movement Patterns

Chiara Bugatti

9.6 – 18.6 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

Curator: Ingrid Svahn (International master’s program in Curating Art, Stockholm University)

The exhibition Movement Patterns explores the meeting between the body and the monument, the fragile and the eternal, movement and stillness, history and memory.

Movement patterns can be something deeply personal, unique to each person. They can be seen from a distance – human activity as dots on a satellite image from above. They can be discerned throughout history – how the pendulum swings back and forth. They are found in materials – through sedimentation processes, marble can tell us what has slowly been created over time.

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

Photo by Johan Österholm

In her artistic practice, Chiara Bugatti examines materials that seems to have lost their main function. Through three works of sculpture, installation and video, she explores the memory of materials, their historical associations and narrative possibilities, such as allowing marble to break down to then re-emerge in perishable room installations, or possibly eternal forms. Sudden external influence, or slow decomposition processes, make visible the fragile and temporary in the constant and solid, when human movement is put in relation to a monumental stillness. One of the works in the exhibition is made in collaboration with artist Sebastian Moske and choreographer Alessandro Giaquinto.

Chiara Bugatti (Lecco, Italy) is a visual artist based in Stockholm. Bugatti holds a BFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT, 2014), an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (SE, 2016) and a Postmaster from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (SE, 2021). She was recently a grant holder at IASPIS (SE) and fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (DE). She is part of the current exhibition Släpljus at the Carl Eldh studio museum, as well as the 15th Trienniale Kleinplastik Fellbach in Germany and her work has been exhibited in institutions across Europe.

Sebastian Moske is an artist based in Berlin. After studying acting and working in the theatre, he studied art under Rosa Barba at HfK in Bremen and was part of IASPIS international residency program in Malmö (2021). Alessandro Giaquinto is a dancer and choreographer based in Stuttgart. In 2016 he joined the Stuttgart Ballet after completing his training at the John Cranko Schule.

Ingrid Svahn is a freelance curator and student in the international master’s program in Curating Art at Stockholm University. This exhibition is made as part of her graduation project and made possible with the support of Mint and Stockholm University.

Lighting design by Seth Margolies, graphic design by Julian Redaelli.

Thank you to Studio Pica for the loan of installation material.

Image: Picture of Study for a Monument I, Jellified Carrara Marble, 2021. Photo: Chiara Bugatti.

Rymdrummet

Agnieszka Polska
Eddie Figge

21.4 – 18.6 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

In Rymdrummet, two artists meet who get to grips with physics and the poetry of gravity. Through painting and animation, respectively, an aesthetic connected to the weightless state, movement and a transformative variability is examined.

Eddie Figge, Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1983. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Rymdrummet, installation shot. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Space Station, 2000. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Space Station, 2000. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Rymden, 1980 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Rymdsyner, 1972 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Farväl Voyager II, 1989. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge, Rymdsyner, 1972. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Eddie Figge (1904–2003 Stockholm) was an artist and poet, an innovator in modern painting in Sweden. After working at the theater and ballet, she began her artistic career later in life. During the 1950s, she found her language through informal painting with a world of motifs that revolved around light, darkness and space. Her style was characterized by a strong sense of color, movement and rhythm. She found inspiration in space travel, quantum physics and the poetic dimensions of science. Eddie Figge had her breakthrough at Galerie Blanche in 1961, and during the 80s and 90s she had several large museum exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 1989, Figge participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale with a selection of her space paintings. The last major solo exhibition with Eddie Figge was shown at Liljevalch’s Art Gallery in Stockholm in 2003, curated by Olle Granath. Figge is represented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Museum of Sketches in Lund.

Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985 in Lublin, Poland) creates videos, animations and photographs, often using archival or stock material, combining it with animation. There is a certain state of emergency present in her works. It derives from the political and social environment of our time. But rather than moralistically referencing specific matters like ecological issues, or the rise of nationalistic sentiments, the artist focuses on creating an immersive experience for the audience. As a distant but diligent observer, the viewer becomes a prisoner of the video footage and events unfolding before his eyes. It’s the immersion that charges Polska’s videos with political potential. She has presented her works at international venues, among them, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Polska also participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th Biennale of Sydney, and 13th Istanbul Biennial.

The exhibition is supported by The Swedish Arts Council, the City of Stockholm and the Region of Stockholm

in front at below

Cecilia Edefalk
Flaka Haliti
Gordon Matta-Clark
Iris Smeds
Jörgen Gassilewski
Ksenia Pedan
Thea Ekström

9.6 – 18.6 2022

Varbergs konsthall, Engelbrektsgatan 7, Varberg

There was something uncanny about Thea Ekström’s studio on Brunnsgatan in Stockholm: one day a crack opened in the wall, causing the artist anxiety. But she found a solution to the problem by painting a crack of her own on a hardboard and hanging it in front of the actual one. Ekström’s own crack opened towards a blue sky – a painting created by the imagination worked as an antidote to reality, concealing it from view.

Ekström’s crack sets the tone for this group exhibition, in which the common factor is that the works make up a kind of stage design, exhibited in rooms where they both relate to and directly influence their surroundings. As physical objects or empty space, art can be situated under the sea, as a backdrop to the sky, in-between walls, and in the occupation of an abandoned shopping mall. To a certain extent, these artistic invasions change the character of the given environment. But the illusion is never complete, and the transformation never total; the meeting between two worlds always generates gaps.

framför vid under (in front at below), installation shot.

framför vid under (in front at below), installation shot.

framför vid under (in front at below), installation shot.

Cecilia Edefalk, Ultramarina (still), 1984

Gordon Matta Clark, Day’s End (still), 1975.

Iris Smeds, The Zombie Function, 2021.

Ksenia Pedan, Meditations on living in the present, 2022

The exhibition in front at below features artists from different generations and backgrounds, born between 1920 and 1986. In their works, the physical and the poetic constitute two parts of the same whole, as do the spatial and the human. Here we present the newly produced installation Meditations on living in the present (2022) by Ksenia Pedan, in which a claustrophobic drama takes place between raised walls. Jörgen Gassilewskj has written Ball One Ball Two Ball Three (2022), a poetic work in three parts, created specifically for the exhibition rooms. Iris Smed’s combined stage design and performance The Zombie Function (2021) takes place within the framework of an abandoned food court that has been occupied by actors in search of alternative family constellations, and Cecilia Edefalk’s film Ultramarina (1984) lowers us to the bottom of the sea along with paintings and other objects. Thea Ekström carves a rift towards the sky (1962), Flaka Haliti’s photo series I See a Face. Do You See a Face. (2014) sketches ten faces in the sky, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End cuts an opening towards the heavens, so that the sun shines in through the façade of a dilapidated warehouse.

Cabaret Crusades

Wael Shawky

23.9 – 16.10 2021

Ateljé SKHLM, Bredholmsgatan 3, Skärholmen

For the first time in Sweden, Wael Shawky’s epic video trilogy Cabaret Crusades is presented, which includes The Horror Show Files (2010); The Path to Cairo (2012) and The Secrets of Karbala (2015). Using 200-year-old puppets and custom-made ceramic figures, a suggestive drama is created that recounts the history of The Crusades from an Arab perspective. The trilogy is inspired by the Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf’s Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983). The exhibition takes place in a former shop in the centre of Skärholmen, at the invitation of the cultural association Folk.

Wael Shawkey, Cabaret Crusades, installation shot.

Wael Shawky, Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015

Wael Shawky, Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015

Wael Shawky, The Horror Show File (still), 2010

Wael Shawky, The Horror Show File (still), 2010

Wael Shawky, The Path to Cairo (still), 2012

Thanks to Sfeir-Semler Gallery

A special thanks to Konsthall C for supporting the production

Address: Ateljé SKHLM in Skärholmens Galleria, Bredholmsgatan 4 (Next to Kjell & Company)

Bildningar

Emanuel Almborg

2.9 – 25.9 2021

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

The exhibition was presented in conjunction with Emanuel Almborg’s defence of his PhD dissertation at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm with the artistic research project Toward a Pedagogy of the Utopian Image. The main part of the project are the three film works Acorn, The Nth Degree and Talking Hands, which are shown together for the first time at Mint.

Switchers, Acorn, 2021. Installation shot. Scenography by Ksenia Pedan. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Switchers, Acorn, 2021. Installation shot. Scenography by Ksenia Pedan. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016. Installation shot. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016. Installation shot. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Emanuel Almborg, The Nth Degree, 2018. Installation shot. Photo by Johan Österholm.

Almborg is interested in communist pedagogy, revolutionary psychology, fiction and theatre, to speculate on lost futures and potentials; subjects and methods that are treated in differently in the three works. If we assume that there is a need for new “utopian” political and collective visions, then what role can art play in sketching them? With the help of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, revolutionary psychiatrist Franz Fanon and science fiction writer Octavia Butler, these works explore artist film’s potential for education, resistance and equality.

Curator: Karin Bähler Lavér.

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