Many Ways to Now

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, Jay Bernard, Reece Cox, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Mara Lee, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Alex Turgeon and James Schuyler.

Armin Lorenz Gerold, Many ways to now , 2023, installation view

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

Photos by Johan Österholm

Download exhibition handout

Download exhibition text

Cara Tolmie, Rian Treanor & Em Silén

Welcome to the final performance event of Cara Tolmie’s exhibition Cascade Bend Chamber at Mint. For this occasion Cara has invited past collaborators Em Silén and Rian Treanor to join her in an open experiment within the space of the exhibition, exploring the setting together through their shared languages in sound making and vocalisation.

We will also listen together to a piece by artist Nakul Krishnamurhty that invites another set of vocal sounds into the fabric of the installation.

Stine Janvin & Cara Tolmie

In this event at Cascade Bend Chamber, Stine Janvin and Cara Tolmie respond to the environment of the exhibition through their ongoing explorations with explorative ‘hand to mouth’ vocality and ASMR inspired intimacy. This responsive ‘functional’ music further expands their previous vocal explorations into the repeated, fragmented and extreme voice set within the uncanny setting of fabrics, unreliable echos and curious small sounds found at Mint.

Stine Janvin is a vocalist, performer, and sound artist based in Stavanger, Norway. Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Often drawing from electronic music, folk music, and contemporary media, she creates audio visual works for variable spaces from theaters, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms. Recent presentations include Performa Telethon, New York; Munch Live and CADS, Munchmuseet, Oslo; Deutschlandradio Kultur, Daadgalerie, and CTM Festival, Berlin; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger; Rokolective, Bucharest; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna; ISSUE Project Room, New York; and INA GRM, Paris.

Affective Infrastructures: Chronic Film and Decolonial Image Artefacts

Affective Infrastructures: Chronic Film and Decolonial Image Artefacts
Lecture performance and meeting with artist Alexandra Anikina

Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina is an artist and media theorist whose work focuses on image politics, algorithmic imaginaries and myth-making, feminist STS, and technological conditions of governance, labour, and affect. She is a Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Anikina works with moving image, computer simulation and lecture-performances, investigating affect, image politics, labour and temporalities in digital culture. The persistent themes in her practice involve procedural animism, algorithmic imaginaries, digital folklore and post-socialism.

During the meeting Alexandra will talk about her practice and present the lecture performance Chronic Film. Chronic Film (2019) is a generative algorithm that plays all possible images or all combinations of pixels that can be generated on a screen of a certain resolution. With the current resolution, the film will last for billions of years.

The lecture performance takes the mythology and the history of the colonial archaeology of the museum island of Delos, Greece, as a starting point, engaging in parallel thinking of images as archaeological and as technical artefacts. Sprawled between screensavers, game landscapes and documentary footage, it approaches the issue of commodification of images caught in the loop of attention economy and draws connections to the intent and distracted modes of seeing. Finally, using the algorithm of Chronic Film, the lecture performance breaks the consumerist model of spectator-screen relationship, entering, instead, a hallucinatory state of mental imagery and image-word sensing.

The exchange program was initiated by Mint and after_red in 2021. As a continuation of the project, six artists and one curator from Russia are invited to residencies in Stockholm during the period of October 2022–November 2023. This residency aims to support individual artistic practices, encourage collegial conversations in two different art contexts, and discuss the condition for contemporary art and thought today within dramatically shifting cultural and civil environments.

Tentative Transmits – Conversation and listening session with Meira Ahmemulic

Welcome to a conversation and listening session between Tentative Transmits and Meira Ahmemulic.

The platform Tentative Transmits will introduce their work and research about politics of memory, archives and storytelling, as well as post-socialist transitions.

Saturday’s program includes a conversation and listening session with the artist Meira Ahmemulic, featuring the premiere of her newly commissioned sound work När moster gav SKF fingret (translation, “When aunt gave SKF the finger”).

När moster gav SKF fingret is about the haunting power of words and cursing as resistance. Ahmemulic is inspired by curses from the villages Gusinje and Plav in Montenegro, situated in the shadow of Prokletije – the Accursed Mountains.

The conversation and listening session will be in Swedish.

The Family is the First Spectacle

With: Merima Dizdarević & Ivana Đida, Jörgen Gassilewski, Iris Smeds and Isak Sundström with L.M Klan.

Welcome to a stage event and performative study at Mint, where Iris Smeds presents her newly written performance Det tusenåriga riket, Merima Dizdarević and Ivana Đida perform the sound work The Bosnian Sigh 2, Jörgen Gassilewski reads from his upcoming book Leken, and Isak Sundström premieres Essay on Filicide accompanied by L.M. Klan!

The evening is organized by Andjeas Ejiksson, Emily Fahlén, and Iris Smeds as part of the ongoing project “The isolated bone,” about the state, the body, and their various enactments.

Cascade Bend Chamber

Cara Tolmie

13.5 – 26.8 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

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, Cascade Bend Chamber, 2023, Installation view

Exhibition view

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.

Download the exhibition handout

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

Neil Bhat, Kristján Breki, Dev Dhunsi, Vinicius Dos Santos, Ida Edin, Sol Emil Nørgaard Andersen, Gwen Gambet, Daniel Gardebrandt, Emil Kjærnli, Anna Lesiczka, Tilda Lundbohm, Johan Lundborg, Caio Marques De Oliveira, Lior Nønne Malue Hansen, Mio Nielsen, Breogán Xague

13.4 – 23.2 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.

Mint Poetry Festival

Saturday, March 25 at 14-18 we open the doors to the Mint Poetry Festival! It will be a day of readings and discussions where poetry’s relationship to the dramatic is highlighted from different angles. How is contemporary poetry portrayed on stage? How do playwrights work with poetry and how do poets work with drama?

The festival is put together by writers Donia Saleh and Hanna Johansson.

With: Shang Imam, Johan Jönson, Nachla Libre, Joel Mauricio Isabel Ortiz, Lizette Romero Niknami, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Axel Winqvist

A warm welcome!

The Poetry Festival is supported by the Swedish Arts Council and ABF Stockholm

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

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

Luzie Meyer, Period Piece, 2021

P Staff, Eat Clean Ass Only, 2021

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

P Staff, Ancient & Celibate, 2021, installation view

P Staff, Ancient & Celibate, 2021

Sofia Restorp. Installation view

Sofia Restorp, Crater, 2022

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

Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 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).