Who else but the singer will raise our emotions

Two days before the Swedish election, we welcome you to Mint. We gather for a stage program of hope and hate, lament and poem, as well as the opening of an exhibition about friendship, two pregnancies and a runaway poodle.

Let us be reminded of our community in art, the city and friendship in the middle of an absurd election campaign!

The evening’s program includes performances by, among others, rip ME (live), the artist Iris Smeds as Vaska Fimpen and the poets Donia Saleh, Lizette Romero Niknami, Merima Dizdarevic and Daniel Boyacioglu. There will be a speech by the sociologist and researcher Majsa Allelin performed by Evelina Mohei, a film screening, dance and hangout at the Tranan bar with music by iInatti and Kablam.

Opening: During the evening we open the doors to the autumn’s first exhibition at Mint: Anything happens here. The acclaimed film Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters by the British artist Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978) is shown here together with dreamlike sculptures by Britt-Ingrid Persson BIP (b.1938). Exhibition period 9.9 – 8.10, 2022.

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

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

Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Den begränsade ljusskretsen (The Limited Circle of Light), 1991

Beatrice Gibson, Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs, 2019. Installation image

Anything Happens Here, installation view

Download exhibition handout

Movement Patterns

6 PM: Emily Fahlén, Ingrid Svahn and Chiara Bugatti introduce the exhibition.

We are happy to welcome you to our last exhibition before the summer: Movement Patterns with Chiara Bugatti. In collaboration with the International master’s program in Curating Art, Stockholm University and curator Ingrid Svahn. 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 takes place in parallel with Mints ongoing exhibition Rymdrummet with Eddie Figge & Agnieszka Polska.

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.

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.

Photos by Johan Österholm.

Rymdrummet

We are happy to finally welcome you to this spring’s exhibition at Mint! 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.

6 PM: Curators Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari introduce the exhibition. Poet Axel Winqvist reads from his new book Den sista människans leende, that will be released August 2022.

During the evening, Bar Cirkeln will be open upstairs serving food, music and refreshments! DJ: Mai Nesto

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, Rymdsyner, 1972

Eddie Figge, Farväl Voyager II, 1989

Eddie Figge, Rymdsyner, 1972 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019

Eddie Figge, Rymden, 1980 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019

Eddie Figge, Space Station, 2000

Rymdrummet, installation shot

Eddie Figge, Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1983

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.

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.

Finissage: A Careful Strike*

Closing program with Hannah Wiker Wikström, Mattin, Andria Nyberg Forshage and Bini Adamczak

Welcome to the final day and closing program of the exhibition A Careful Strike*. A celebration with performances and talks. The exhibition A Careful Strike* draws its curatorial framework from the monumental painting The History of the Labour Movement (c. 1940) by the plate metal worker, artist and musician Ruben Nilson (1893-1971). Nilson’s painting and music portray work conditions and life at the beginning of the 20th century in Sweden. Part of a tradition of workers’ culture where art and music were integral to the movement by maintaining the memory of crucial events and strengthening collective self-determination

Programme:

12:00 The exhibition opens

12:30 Time Call A(c)x(c)es(s) – Durational performance by Hannah Wiker Wikström

Time Call A(c)x(c)es(s) is a collaborative performance in the form of a polyphonous aria based on speculative texts of fragmented strike anthems, cross-written with translations and references. The work examines various temporalities as dramaturgical form and bodily memories of movement, songs and melodies; residual matter of lost agitations. The work is a collaboration initiated by Hannah Wiker Wikström with Josefin Jussi Andersson, Hugo Hedberg, Amalia Kasakove and Jens Masimov.

The performance is durational and will go on for 45 minutes, the audience is free to come and go as they please.

13:30 Exploitation – Performance by Mattin

During the performance Exploitation, the audience is invited to interpret the painting Arbetarrörelsens historia (The History of the Labour Movement) by Ruben Nilson, and update the depiction to bring it into the present with the help of mobile phones. This serves to emphasise the contrasts between Nilson’s visual representation and representations in contemporary art. In a similar way, the use of mobile phones highlights the way our daily interactions are mediated by extremely complex technology, raising critical questions about our ability to influence or control the various software and algorithms we engage with. The performance work will be recorded and made available on Mint’s website. This popular method of participation in contemporary art will itself become an issue discussed during the performance.

14:30 Bini Adamczak in conversation with Andria Nyberg Forshage

The afternoon ends with a conversation with the philosopher and artist Bini Adamczak and the theoretician and poet Andria Nyberg Forshage. Bini is one of the foremost thinkers on key revolutionary moments in the 20th century. Based on the historical failures of communism, we are invited to speculate together with Bini and Andria about the possibilities for a communist future – beyond deterministic fear of the recurrence of past disasters and pacifying capitalist realism.

The Swedish and English translation of a chapter in Bini Adamczak’s Relational Revolutions – 1917, 1968 and Revolutions to Come (Suhrkamp, 2017) can be found in the 9th edition of lulu journal (https://www.luleabiennial.se/…/nr-9/revolutionens-genus).

About the participants:

Hannah Wiker Wikström (Stockholm) works mainly within media like film, performance and installation and has a history of process-oriented collaborative projects. Her practice is based on an exploration of the symbiosis between form and ideology, how systems of belief are created and displaced, and how this is expressed in cinematic and performative strategies.

Mattin (Berlin) is an artist, musician and theorist who works conceptually with noise and improvisation. His work explores performative forms of alienation as a way of addressing structural alienation and questioning our own sense of self and freedom within capitalist relations.

Bini Adamczak (Berlin) is a Berlin-based philosopher and artist. Her work focuses on political theory, queer politics, and the past and future of revolutions. She is known for having coined the concept circlusion. Bini has published several books including the popular and widely translated Communism for Kids (MIT Press, 2017), her analysis of central revolutionary moments in the 20th C. Relational Revolutions – 1917, 1968 and Revolutions to Come (Suhrkamp, 2017), and her most recently translated book Yesterday’s Tomorrow: On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future (MIT Press, 2021). Bini Adamczak has also co-written the play Everybody Needs Only You. Love in the Time of Capitalism with Kostanze Schmitt performed in December 2019 at the Hebbel am Ufer theater in Berlin.

Andria Nyberg Forshage (Stockholm) is a theoretician and poet. She/they are part of the editorial board of Paletten and has previously published poetry in among others Datableed magazine, lectured at international conferences on trans studies, posthumanism and queer death studies. Andria was the initiator of the exhibition last sunset for today (Stockholm 2020) with the artist Vincent Duraud.

Launch of the app Together with Red Banners

On Thursday 4 November, the app Together with Red Banners by the artist Bella Rune will be launched as part of her contribution to the exhibition A Careful Strike*. The app is based on Augmented Reality technology and activates the aesthetics of the labour movement through the history and symbolism of the red banner. During the evening, Bella Rune will present the project in conversation with researcher Margareta Ståhl, students on Konstfack’s Master’s program CRAFT’s textile class of 2020, app developer Jonas Lythell and curator Michele Masucci. Margareta Ståhl, an expert in the art and aesthetics of the labour movement, will give a short lecture on the history and function of the banners. The audience will also be introduced to the app, available free of charge for download via Appstore and other platforms.

About the participants:

– Bella Rune is an artist that works with sculpture with performative elements and experiments through different materials and techniques in her works.

– Margareta Ståhl is a researcher in visual communication with a focus on the art and aesthetics of the labour movement. She has written extensively on the banners of the Swedish labour movement.

– Jonas Lythell is a freelance app developer focusing on Augmented Reality (AR). Lythell also works as a teacher at DSV, Department of Computer and Systems Science at Stockholm University.

Scrounge of the State

Welcome to Mint for another opportunity to see the performance lecture Scrounge of the State (2020) by Hanni Kamaly, part of the ongoing exhibition A Careful Strike*! Scrounge of the State is based on a series of articles known as the Pass-Skandalerna, (The Passport Scandals) written in 1921 by the Swedish communist politician Otto Grimlund. The lecture traces and retells the stories of communists Willi Münzenberg and Nathan Chabrow, among others – both arrested and expelled from Sweden during the interwar years of the 1920s. After his return to the USA, Chabrow was interrogated as a consequence of the Red Scare by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Münzenberg was a key figure in the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, a transnational organisation of political activists. At the same time, major figures in German National Socialism such as Wolfgang Kapp and Erich Ludendorff, who had been and would be involved in the failed coup d’état in collaboration with Adolf Hitler, also sought asylum in Sweden. Kapp and Ludendorff received much better treatment from the Swedish authorities than Chabrow and Münzenberg.