2022

16 Nov 18:00
Låt dikten lysa glöd ur min mun! – En kväll i solidaritet med revolutionen i Iran
Mint, ABF Stockholm

Låt dikten lysa glöd ur min mun!*
– A night in solidarity with the revolution in Iran

November 16, 18:00–20:00
Mint, ABF-huset, Sveavägen 41

There is a feminst revolution going on in Iran. We invite you to a night to gather and take part of literature, singing, poetry and art to show our solidarity and to honor the Kurdish, Iranian and Baluchian people’s struggle and courage. Woman, Life, Freedom!

Participants during the evening:
NASIM AGHILI
PARASTO BACKMAN
AFRANG NORDLÖF MALEKIAN
NEGAR NASEH
SARA PARKMAN
DONIA SALEH
TONE SCHUNNESSON
TRIFA SHAKELY
AILIN MIRLASHARI
SAMIRA ARIADAD
NIKO ERFANI
ZARA KJELLNER
FARVASH
SORIN MASIFI

More participants to be announced

Warmly welcome!

*The title is borrowed from a poem by the Kurdish poet Hêmin Mukriyani from Staten. Systrarna Dikten by Sorin Masifi

09 Sep – 09 Sep 17:00
Who else but the singer will raise our emotions
Mint, ABF Stockholm

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. More participants and detailed program are updated on Mint’s website!

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

09 Jun 17:00
Opening: Chiara Bugatti - Movement Patterns
Mint, ABF-huset

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.

21 Apr
Vernissage: Rymdrummet
ABF-huset, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm
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 Nestor

12 Feb 12:00
Vernissage: in front at below
Varbergs konsthall

Mint is hosted by Varbergs konsthall with the exhibition in front at below, with a vernissage on 12 February. The gallery invites you to mingling with bubbles, snacks and conversations with the artists Iris Smeds, Jörgen Gassilewski and Ksenia Pedan. Curator Emily Fahlén is also on site. Warm welcome!

2021

11 Dec 12:30
Finissage: A Careful Strike*
Mint, ABF Stockholm
Closing program with Hannah Wiker Wikström, Mattin, Andria Nyberg Forshage and Bini Adamczak
RSVP: https://forms.gle/tburzKu4zSTTzLQUA
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.
20 Nov 14:00
Performance lecture: Hanni Kamaly - Scrounge of the State
Mint, ABF Stockholm
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.
04 Nov 17:00
Launch of the app Together with Red Banners
Mint, ABF-huset
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.
07 Oct 17:00
Opening: A Careful Strike*
Mint, ABF Stockholm

Mint welcomes you to the long-awaited opening of A Careful Strike*. The exhibition opens at 17.00, and the programme begins at 18:00. Everyone is welcome. No pre-registration is required. Please respect current recommendations to minimize the spread of infection according to the public health authority.

Opening programme, Thursday, October 7, 17:00–21:00

17:00 The exhibition opens.

18:00 The military signal Ceasefire is performed on the trumpet by Kaspar Druml. As part of the work Eldupphör by Henrik Andersson.

Katarina Pirak Sikku presents the newly produced work Julevädno, basádismánno.

Bella Rune and Margareta Ståhl talk about the aesthetics of the worker’s movement through the banner as a textile craft and political symbol.

The Ruben Nilson Society performs Rubens Nilson’s songs.

19:00 Iris Smeds performs La Lega Creserà.

20:00 Hanni Kamaly performs the performance-lecture Scrounge of the State.

02 Sep 17:00
Opening: Emanuel Almborg – Bildningar
Mint, ABF-huset, Stockholm
08 May 15:00
Thinking about Monica: Artist tour Nadia Hebson
Mint, ABF Stockholm

An artist tour with Nadia Hebson in the exhibition Scène d’Amour at Mint.
NOTE! The tour will be held for a very limited number of participants. Registration is mandatory; please write to info@m-i-n-t.se to reserve a spot. Mint follows the guidelines from the Swedish authorities and takes measures to create a safe visit. We ask all visitors kindly to wear masks, which will be available for free at the exhibition. The tour will be held in English.

14 Feb 14:00
A striking Abundance: A workshop on the Political Imaginaries of Striking Otherwise
Zoom
A striking Abundance: A workshop on the Political Imaginaries of Striking Otherwise organised by Valeria Graziano, Giulia Palladini and Jenny Richards as part of the exhibition A Careful Strike* curated by Michele Masucci at Mint.

This event is a workshop on zoom, with limited space. To book a place or for any questions please email Jenny: jennyrichardsjenny@gmail.com.

The starting point of this workshop is the consideration that for many people the classical forms of strike – where workers withhold their labour and stand on picket lines in front of their workplace – is no longer, or has never been, a viable option. Workers tending to fundamental needs in the care sector, for instance, but also unemployed populations and those caught up in the gig economy that increasingly does not recognize their status as employees are all examples of a widespread condition that calls for an alternative political imaginary around what a strike is and what it can do.
The workshop will be structured in two sessions.

We will begin by looking at the current state of affairs with the right to strike in Sweden and beyond and by sharing some histories of powerful forms of struggle such as strike-ins, reverse strikes, alternative production strategies, plant takeovers, maintenance boycotts and self-reductions. What these different forms of strike action share is how they responded to their specific conditions of possibility by re-organizing labour otherwise. In doing so, they revealed the artificial nature of capital’s logic of scarcity, opening up instead a horizon of militant abundance.

In the second part of the workshop, we will facilitate some structured conversations to allow participants to actively engage with the question of strike organizing and explore together different political imaginaries applicable in their own locales.

The workshop is aimed primarily (but not exclusively) to those who are currently engaged in care work or precarious employment or thinking about ways to collectively address current working conditions, or for those putting pressure on employers within or outside unions.

Valeria Graziano is a theorist and educator currently based at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, UK. Her research focuses on cultural practices that foster the refusal of work and the politicization of pleasure. Over the years, she has been involved in several initiatives of militant research across the cultural sector and social movements. She is one of the convenors of Pirate Care (https://pirate.care), a research process focusing on collective learning and disobedient responses to the current care crisis.

Giulia Palladini is a researcher and critical theorist currently based at the University of Roehampton, London. Her work explores the politics and erotics of artistic production, social and cultural history. In her writing, critical and educational practice she has engaged temporality and affect, historiography and the archive, relation between labor and pleasure, work and free time. Her texts appeared in several international journals, and she collaborated as theorist in a number of critical and artistic projects. She is the author of The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and of Lexicon for an Affective Archive (Bristol: Intellect, 2017, co-edited with Marco Pustianaz).

The workshop forms part of the ongoing Bodies of Care study sessions organised by Jenny Richards in collaboration with Mint that explores practices that reflect and resist the current expansion of commercialized, individualized and outsourced care.

Accessibility: The workshop will take place in English. There is unfortunately no BSL interpretation.

*Precarias a la deriva, 2005.

2020

09 Dec 18:00
What is to be done? - Release med Jakob Jakobsen & Ana Teixeira Pinto
Online
Release conversation with Jakob Jakobsen and Ana Teixeira Pinto: what is to be done?
Part of Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary by Paletten Art Journal
What: Conversation with Jakob Jakobsen and Ana Teixeira Pinto, moderated by Frida Sandström (Paletten)
Art and culture are exposed to immense challenges due to various populistic agendas. This has an immediate effect on contemporary art and its complex habitat between the local, national and international. When publishing spaces are becoming more restricted in favour of ideological and market-driven communication – there is an urgency for expanding critical conversations, formats and languages. With the utmost integrity, we aspire to modify ways on how to relate to art and the world at large. Through the function of art, aesthetics and the artworld, can we further understand how the development of the democratic nation-state that emerged out of modernity – is deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism?
2020 was a year dominated as much by uprisings, as the repression of these, a crisis of social reproduction and health, and various forms of nationalist, logistic-economic and quite some socio-physical reconsiderations. Since the early spring, Paletten Art Journal has gathered writers from various perspectives, under the headline “Editorial meeting.” The emphasis on the notion of the ‘editorial’ was first meant to physically gather people in open editorial meetings, to propose, discuss and determine and alternative methods for future work. While these meetings had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, the conversation between editors and invited contributors continued, fuelled by critical reflections on phenomena such as the distribution of resources, concepts of care, a rising wave of neo-fascism, populism and conspiracy theories, and the role of editorial work and writing, in relation to various forms of political organising.
While the initial plan was to use the editorial meeting as a means to extend the scope of a singular or a few editors, making space for unforeseen encounters to result in unforeseen contributions, the physical restrictions dominating the year cancelled this plan. In collaboration with co-editors Patrik Haggren, Matthew Rana and Frida Sandström, local and international writers were invited with an attempt to both broaden a Northern-European centred discussion, and to dive into locally complex cases in the format of a number of exhibitions reviews.
One of the planned editorial meetings was supposed to take place at Mint – whose critical strivings also has been a great source of motivation during the development process of this editorial project. It is, therefore, a joy to also close this chapter at Mint – hopefully not to only make full circle, but to emphasise on future alliances and trajectories. Celebrating the publication of this compilation of texts that the project has resulted in, Frida Sandström meets the contributing writers, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Jakob Jakobsen, to discuss matters of future work: what is to be done, and what are we preparing for?
The resulting texts, recorded conversations and multimedia montages form this year’s attempts to examine practical possibilities of art criticism today. They are available at paletten.net.
Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary was commissioned by, and funded by Regionsamverkan Sydsverige.
03 Dec 18:00
Book launch - Johanna Hedva: Minerva The Miscarriage of the Brain
Online

Join Johanna Hedva for a presentation and discussion on their new book, Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Brain. The event is organised as part of the exhibition A Careful Strike* at Mint. (Due to the current pandemic the exhibition has been postponed until fall 2021).

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopaedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnopompic poems – in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form – Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labour of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.

27 Nov 14:00
Walk with banners -Bella Rune, Konstfack students and Margareta Ståhl
Konstfack

Please join us for a public walk with banners produced by Bella Rune and students from Konstfack University of Arts Craft and Design. We will walk from Konstfack to ABF Stockholm Sveavägen 41. During the walk scholar and researcher Margareta Ståhl will join us for a conversation about the project and the history and aesthetics for the workers movement.

Please respect social distancing measures, do not join the walk if you are sick or have any symptoms and walk with a two-meter distance.

Register: info@m-i-n-t.se.

25 Nov 18:00
Bodies of Care with Emma Dominguez, Macarena Dusant, Sonia Sagan and Sarasvati Shrestha
Online

Online event! Stream live on facebook or our website

Join artists Emma Dominguez, Macarena Dusant, Sonia Sagan and Sarasvati Shrestha for a discussion around their collective approach to addressing the lived detrimental effects of work and the inequality of access to care within the Swedish welfare system framed around their mother’s experience. The study session reflects on their current exhibition Mami: Ama: Mödrar at Botkryka Konsthall and artistic strategies that draw on resources within the art field to build infrastructures that seek to not only critique but work to transform the violent structures of work and the gendered and racialised work injuries they produce. We will consider how these methods also seek to refuse the unhealthy (re)production of culture to resonate beyond the confines of the art institution and its public.

The event will take place in English.

The event forms part of the Bodies of Care study sessions that explores practices that reflect and resist the current expansion of commercialized, individualized and outsourced care and is in collaboration with Botkyrka Konsthall.

This is the fifth in a series of conversations that precedes the exhibition A Careful Strike* at Mint opening on the 3rd of December.
*Precarias a la deriva, 2005

12 Nov 18:00
The Struggle for Ports and Logistics
Online

Follow the conversation at www.m-i-n-t.se/en-omsorgsfull-strejk/

During the past years, the Naples port has been affected by harsh labour conflicts. Employees have been fired on unclear grounds and the port businesses are unwilling to negotiate with the union. In Genova, dockworkers have gone on strikes to block ships with weapons cargo destined for Jemen. When the Black Lives Matter movement grew in the USA hundreds of dockworkers went on strike in Portland. In Sweden, the Swedish Dockworkers Union struggle has become significant in the rapid restructuring of the power relations on the Swedish labour market. What does the conjunction between political strikes and labour related strikes entail today?

This evening departs from a series of reports from different contemporary struggles that reflect the conditions to document and establish one’s public narrative. Based on this aspect, which historical continuities with earlier movements can we see in today’s struggles?

Reports by:

Papis Ndiaye, S.I. Cobas Italy

Martin Berg, chairman of the Swedish Dockworkers Union

Alessandra Mincone, journalist at Napoli Monitor

Mathias Wåg, activist and writer

Moderated by Julia Lindblom, journalist at Arbetaren and Benj Gerdes, artist and filmmaker.

05 Nov 18:00
Riot is to Love our Survival
Mint, ABF Stockholm

The struggle over history is the struggle for life, recognition and reparation. The conditions for an independent historical narrative are a recurring issue within the history of different movements. Which narratives are given a voice, which are suppressed? How is the ongoing struggle over history expressed today in different contexts? Participants: Judith Kiros, Stefano Harney och Fred Moten.

Follow the conversation online via Mint’s facebook page

15 Oct 18:00
Belarus: “Tomorrow should not be the same as today”
Mint, ABF Stockholm

Welcome to a conversation about the condition for artistic production, solidarity and strike in the moment of the uprisings in Belarus with Problem Collective (Minsk) as part of the exhibition A Careful Strike*.

The discussion will happen online: link and on-site at Mint, ABF Stockholm.

Participants:

Olia Sosnovskaya (artist and researcher, member of the Problem Collective)

Anna Bredava (LGBTQ+ activist, organiser of DOTYK Queer festival)

Andrei Karpeka (activist, co-founder of Minsk Urban Platform)

Nicolai Spesivtsev (artist and computer scientist, member of eeefff group and Work Hard Play Hard working group)

Anmälan: https://simplesignup.se/event/172951
Facebookevent

07 Oct 19:15
The Reproduction of Resistance
Mint, ABF Stockholm

A public conversation on the possibility of struggle and resistance within health and care work. The corona pandemic has made the vulnerability of society even more evident as a consequence of decades of neoliberal reforms. How can care rather than economic principles become the primary organizing principle for societies? In collaboration with Feministiskt Forum. Participants: Roya Hakimnia, Pamela Otarola, Yolanda Aurora Bohm Ramirez and Mani Shutzberg.

30 Sep – 04 Oct
Factory girls – The Wilful Textile Worker
Mint, ABF Stockholm

The artistic project: The factory girls – The wilful textile worker organize an exhibition and  conference at Mint Art Gallery in the ABF building in Stockholm. The conference wants to  highlight and discuss the conditions, knowledge and resistance of women in the textile and home  industry; their willingness and self-will, which is expressed in organization, professional pride and  strategies. During the week, parts of the play Fabriksflickorna – makten och härligheten [The  Factory Girls – The Power and Glory] are reactivated, in an exhibition by Åsa Norman (Sweden)  textile artist, and Frida Hållander (Sweden) PhD, craft artist. The play premiered in Skellefteå  under the direction of Suzanne Osten and Margareta Garpe in 1980.

In the exhibition, Norman and Hållander show parts of the multi-year artistic project The Factory  girls – The Willful Textile Worker through material and crafts investigations – as well as archive  material and sound. Artists and researchers are invited to the conference. They will hold  workshops and presentations to create a Nordic context for an in-depth discussion on textile  production and the home industry.

The project is carried out with support from the Nordic Culture Fund, The Swedish Arts Grants  Committee, the Helge Ax:son Johnssons stiftelse and Byggnads kulturstipendium. The exhibition  och conference is part of Stockholm Craft Week 2020.

Conference Week Program:

The conference is taking place in the ABF-house at Sveavägen 41 in Stockholm. The lectures is in  different lecture-halls (see schedule). The lectures will be available to follow online via Zoom and  we take a limited number of people in the audience. Pre-registration for all presentations are via  email to Åsa Norman:

asanorman@gmail.com

Wednesday September 30

The exhibition opens! Opening hours: 16.00-20.00.

Thursday October 1 Conference day 1, all lectures are in Katasalen at the first floor in ABF huset

The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00

10:00-11:30 Introductory presentation and lecture by Åsa Norman (Sweden) textile artist and  Frida Hållander (Sweden) PhD, craft artist, presents the ongoing artistic project Factory girls –  The Willful Textile Workers. Tjia Torpe (Sweden) educator and producer will tell about the play  Fabriksflickorna – makten och härligheten [The Factory Girls – The Power and Glory]. Language:  Swedish.

13:00-14:30 Leena Enbom (Finland) doctoral researcher in Social and Economic History in the  University of Helsinki. The lecture will shed light on the variations of home industries that  appeared as part of the secondary labour market in the urbanizing Finland from the late 19th century until the 1960s. Additionally, the lecture will discuss the disciplinary functions of the  workhouse and relief work institutions based on the obligation to perform crafts and sewing tasks.  Language: English.

15.00-16:30 Lecture with Malin Nilsson (Sweden) PhD Economic History, researcher at the  Department of Economic History at Lund University. She will present her dissertation Taking work  home: Labor dynamics of women industrial homeworkers in Sweden during the second industrial  revolution (2015). Nilsson’s talk will also focus on how women’s commercial home based textile  production became a highly politicized topic in Europe in the late 19th century. Language:  Swedish.

Friday October 2 Conference day 2, all lectures are in Katasalen at the first floor in ABF-huset The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00 

10:00-11:30 Sushmita Preetha (Bangladesh) journalist, writer and researcher, together with Karin  Elfving (Sweden) journalist and ethnologist. The lecture will be based on testimonies from textile  workers in Bangladesh were it is describe how their rights are constantly violated, also how  Covid-19 has pushed these workers into further difficulties. Preetha and Elfving will also include  the response from some of the Swedish brands. Language: English.

13:00-14:30 Lecture with Franz Petter Schmidt (Norway) Associate Professor of Textile Art at  KhiO – Oslo School of Fine Arts, textile artist and artistic researcher. Schmidt will present his  artistic dissertation project Reflection, Weaving Fabrics for Suits (2018), which touches on the  textile factory Sjølingstad Woolen Mill in Norway, and textile industry production through feeling,  longing, belonging, memory, pride and being queer. He will also present an ongoing project on a  diary written from 1925 to 1942 by the weaver Malli Berge. Language: Norwegian.

15:00-16:30 Emelie Röndahl (Sweden) PhD student at HDK – Gothenburg University in the Arts,  presents her ongoing artistic dissertation project “Crying Pixels: a practitioner’s narrative through  woven rya – aspects of time in hand made practice”. Language: Swedish.

Saturday October 3 Conference day 3, all lectures are in Hjärtat at the entrance level at ABF huset

The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00 

11:00-12:30 Munish Wadhia (Sweden) artist, will present his ongoing work on the match industry  Jönköping’s Match Factory AB. Wadhia will also present his work “Signs taken for wonders” in  which he returns to the images and objects that surrounded him during his childhood, but with a  decolonial gaze that questions their given meanings, here he refers to the experience from  different textile factories. Language: English.

13:00-14:00 Marie Hållander (Sweden) freelance poet and lecturer at Södertörn University.  Hållander will present the literary project “Among the girls and machines of the textile dust”  where she starts from textile stories and archives from Sjuhärad in Västergötland. Language:  Swedish.

14:00-14:30 Nino Mick (Sweden) poet and writer, they will read an adapted version of a novel in  progress that delas about Berta Bäckman (b. 1860) and other factory worker that works in a match  factory in Tidaholm. The historical novel moves on two times, 1875 – the time of the great fire in  the factory where 50 girls perished, 1909 – the Swedish general strike. Language: Swedish.

15:00-17:00 Go-slow action, along Sveavägen, start outside the ABF-house, public performance  led by Frida Hållander & Åsa Norman.

Sunday October 4

The exhibition is open 12:00-16:00 

With generous support from Konstnärsnämnden, Nordisk kulturfond, Helge Ax:son Johnssons stiftelse and Byggnads kulturstipendium in collaboration with Iaspis.

Illustration: Hanna Stenman

17 Sep 17:00
History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934)
Mint, ABF Stockholm

Welcome to an evening of lectures and presentations arranged by the independent research group Agentur, on Thursday, September 17, 2020, 5 pm. Please note that the number of seats is very limited! RSVP vital!

History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934)
A report by Agentur, within the framework of the research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts.

On February 12, 1934, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Paris, to protest against the advances of fascism. A few days earlier, extreme right and royalist organisations had held a large manifestation in the city, which had deteriorated into deadly riots and an improvised coup attempt. The threat was real: European fascism was gathering its forces. At the same time, the opposition was hopelessly fragmented. Liberals, social democrats, and communists were set violently against each other. Would their separate demonstrations collide in new street fights, in evidence of the paralysis of the opposition?

In March of the same year, the author Marc Bernard published his account of the events of those days, The Workers’ Days of February 9 and 12. In this short book – the mythical and mythologizing foundational text of Popular Front literature – Bernard documents what happened then, in careful detail. The demonstrations did not collide, they were united into one. The opposition set their differences aside in favor of a united front against a common enemy. The French Popular Front was created, and its model soon spread to other countries and continents. A chapter was opened in the history of anti-fascist organization.

 

History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934) takes its cue from Bernard’s text, which is now for the first time published in Swedish translation. It is a text that poses questions to the present: Is it still possible to think unity in resistance as a political and aesthetic principle? Is there still a progressive tradition that we can draw upon, and that stretches back to the moment of the popular fronts? If so, what continuities can we invoke? What discontinuities must we assert? With readings, presentations, artistic contributions, and critical commentaries by Emily Fahlén, Jörgen Gassilewski, Martin Högström, Ingela Johansson, Emma Kihl, Samuel Richter, Kim West, and Ellen Wettmark, we invite to common reflection regarding a central event in the cultural history of anti-fascism.

 

History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934) initiates a series of reports produced by the independent research group Agentur, within the framework of the research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts. The reports take the form of public events, arranged at different places and institutions in Sweden and abroad during the fall of 2020 and the spring of 2021; videos based on documentation of the events, directed by Agentur, and published on digital platforms; and printed publications, produced in collaboration with a number of Swedish and international publishing houses, platforms, and magazines.

 

The event History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934) – an evening with readings, presentations, critical commentaries, and discussions – takes place on Thursday September 17, 2020, 5–8 pm, at the art center Mint, located at the Workers’ Education Association (ABF), Sveavägen 41, Stockholm, Sweden. There is a very limited number of open seats for this event. RSVP to info@agentur.ooo (first come first served). Please note that the event will be documented on video. Language: Swedish. Welcome!

 

The video History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934), based on documentation of the event, as well as on specifically commissioned short films and presentations, will be published on October 15 at m-i-n-t.se and agentur.ooo. Tune in!

 

The publication History Is Not Over (February 12, 1934) will be published in the fall. The volume will contain Marc Bernard’s book in Swedish translation, together with essays and artworks based on the contributions to the event and the video. A joyful foray into the intellectual landscape of deep anachronism!

 

Thanks to Fabrique éditions, Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Michele Masucci, Benjamin Thorel, and our collaborating partners.

 

Coming reports

Must Be Written Later: Titanic October 15 / online November 8 / Chateaux in November.

Culture House Culture House Culture House: Cyklopen October 30 / online November 22 / Stockholmstidningen in December.

To Philosophize With Labor: Biskops Arnö week 47 / Tydningen in January.
For more information, see here.

 

About Agentur

Agentur is an independent research group for critical cultural production, based in Stockholm. Committed to an ideal of social equality, it seeks to invent new forms, methods, models, and functions for progressive cultural work in a new, postdigital public sphere and an increasingly precarious labor market. Agentur operates as a multidisciplinary critique bureau. It conducts longterm research projects on issues of public interest in a polarized and fragmented present. Among Agentur’s participants there are poets, artists, critics, researchers, designers, and public servants. In 2020–21, Agentur conducts the research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts.

 

About The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts

“Popular Fronts” was the common name of the coalitions of liberal, social democrat, and communist parties that were formed in several countries during the 1930s, in order to establish united fronts against the rise of fascism. Artists and authors, filmmakers and journalists, cultural workers and politicians mobilized for the purpose. The research project The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts is based on detailed studies of artworks they created, texts they wrote, projects they realized. The aim is to draw up a provisional map of a historical, cultural, and social situation, in order then to ask if that history can still be our history. Is there a tradition of anti-fascist unity politics that stretches back to the moment of the Popular Fronts, with which we may still be able to identify? The immediate background to the project is the rise of the new far right in Sweden, Europe, and globally today. It poses the question of how, at what levels, and with what means we can in the most effective way counteract that rise culturally and politically.

The project is supported by Kulturbryggan.

02 Sep 19:00
FILMFORM RE:VIEW - Mint
Filmform, Svarvargatan 2, Stockholm

Combined digital & physical screening on September 2th, 7PM CEST

Mint is opening this years FILMFORM RE:VIEW, and has selected works from the Filmform collection that, from different perspectives, reveal the shadow as position and strategy. FILMFORM RE:VIEW is the format where external professionals and institutions from spheres of culture or research are invited to botanize in the collection. Starting off from their specific areas of interest and questions a film programme is curated and thereafter presented as an open screening at Filmform.

This programme is shown in a limited screening format at Filmform in Svarvargatan and simultaneously streamed live at the Filmform website: https://www.filmform.com/calendar/filmform-review-mint/

PLEASE NOTE: Due to the current pandemic special restrictions apply for those who wish to attend the physical screening. Admission is reduced to a maximum of 12 people. The ticket price is 40 kr. You book a ticket by RSVPing to info@filmform.com after which you will receive information about the different payment options and confirmation. First come, first served. We urge those who experience even the slightest symptoms to stay at home and enjoy the live streamed version of the screening.

The screening is arranged with support from Stockholms Stad. Filmform is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Arts Grants Committee and the Swedish Arts Council.

21 Feb 19:00
A night with Armin Lorenz Gerold & Eli Levén
Konsthall C

Welcome to an evening with performances, poetry and bar at Konsthall C! During the evening participating artist Armin Lorenz Gerold (Berlin) will perform under his alias wirefoxterrier, and writer Eli Levén (Stockholm) will read from his upcoming book, to be published by Norstedts in August. This event marks the final weekend of this exhibition.

The performance starts 7:30

wirefoxterrier started as an online screen name created by Berlin based artist Armin Lorenz Gerold releasing sentimental song sketches and mixtapes into the tumblr/soundcloud pop ecosystem. His 2018 release ’Sex (play and being played), initially part of his self-released ‚fan-fiction‘ series ‚Radio Prishtina‘ became an almost coincidental feature on the viral TV show SKAM. Examining how virality shapes current writing, sounds and production methods, wirefoxterrier will perform a few songs of his upcoming first extended play Looking (tbr spring 2020) at Konsthall C.
https://soundcloud.com/wirefoxterrier

Eli Levén is a novelist and screenwriter. His debut “Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats” was adapted for film by Eli as “Something Must Break” and directed by Ester Martin Bergsmark. The duo also made the hybrid documentary “She Male Snails” together. In August 2020 Eli’s new novel will be published by Norstedts. An adaptation by the novel, to be directed by Eli, is currently under development.

‘The physical world was still there’
The physical world was still there but this exhibition turns its back on it. From a close perspective sound, video, painting and objects share the joy and fear of temporal ecstasy, rush, heat and mental confusion. When someone puts their hands on your body and your blood vessels seem to merge, when the last drink of the sun blurs your mind, when time seems so thick you lose any concept of that which was and will be, when the night is in motion.

Curated by Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari (Mint).

Free entry.

In collaboration with ABF.

18 Feb 18:00
Release: Found Review 7# Lost Spring 2019 Issue
Mint, ABF-huset

Welcome to the release of a new issue of Found Review!

The soon-to-be released 7 # Lost Spring 2019 Issue – A Threefold Critique of Tax Deductions Rut and Rot contains a series of reviews devoted to Rut- och Rot-avdragen: the tax deductions that subsidize domestic services (mainly cleaning and reconstruction) for the middle and upper classes of Swedish society. The issue highlights three problematic aspects of the deductions: an increased division of labor, a continuous commodification of everyday life, and a regressive distribution of wealth.

The issue also includes reviews of works by Cady Noland, Cia Rinne, and Bella Batistini (already up for view!)

Tuesday 18 February 18.00-20.00
Mint, Sveavägen 41

18.30 The Maids by Jean Genet: reading of excerpt
18.45 Found Review editor Karl Lydén in conversation
with Lina Rydén Reynols

(Reading and conversation in Swedish)

Found Review 7 # Lost Spring 2019 Issue includes contributions by Nina Canell and Robin Watkins, Johanna Gustafsson-Fürst, Anna Hallberg, Runo Lagomarsino, and Filip Lindberg.

Found Review is a publication for art criticism that uses only found material.

https://foundreview.com/

16 Jan 18:00
On being history: Taking matters into our own hands
Mint, ABF-huset

In this discussion the premises for resistance are investigated through an exploration of current and past movements. In a time where the social gaps are widening and segregation is destroying the city, critical reflections are needed on how current challenges are connected to historical processes, if we are to embark on a democratised future. With Nazem Tahvilzadeh, researcher of urban and regional studies at KTH, Hedvig Wiezell, operations manager at Folkets Husby and design historian Christina Zetterlund.

2019

12 Dec 18:00
Hands at work: Scuola Senza Fine
Mint, ABF-huset

Hands at work: Scuola Senza Fine, part of the film screening programme at Mint that looks at the body’s place in comporary work. During the evening the film Scuola Senza Fine will be discussed. With Sarah Browne and Jenny Richards. As part of Jenny Richards’ ongoing Phd research project Outsourcing the Body.

04 Dec 18:30
Bodies of Care with artist Fathia Mohidin
Mint, ABF-huset

The first in a series of study sessions that explore practices that reflect and resist the current expansion of commercialized, individualized and outsourced care.

As part of Jenny Richard’s ongoing Phd research project ‘Outsourcing the Body.’

The session shares some of Fathia Mohidin’s research into the strong body in capitalist society and its relation to the aesthetics, politics and labour of the gym. Centred around collective reading and discussion the session draws out the tensions between today’s responsibilising of care on the individual, and the resistance and strength that can be built through training with the help or hindrance of gym machines.

Fathia Mohidin works in various ways with installation, where she often takes sport and fitness as a point of departure to reflect on the body in relation to societal ideas and categorisations. She is currently exploring the strong body in capitalist society, with a focus on the gym and labour. Most recently her work has been shown in the solo exhibition New Geometries at Galleri Nuda (2018) as a part of the project Shaping Resistance, and in the group exhibitions Ndksdwu7jejjf, Biquini Wax EPS, Mexico City (2018); Laboratory Aperto, Asilo Sant’Elia/Fondazione Ratti, Como (2018) and I’m fine, on my way home now, Mossutställningar (2017). Mohidin is pursuing her MFA in Fine Arts at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

23 Nov 13:00
Mobilizing Culture Criticism
ABF-huset

A conversation about the conditions and strategies of cultural workers and the left in times of increasing political restrictions of artistic autonomy, during this year’s Socialist forum at ABF Stockholm.

Participants:
Athena Farrokhzad, poet, critic and translator
Farnaz Arbabi, director and playwright
Kim West, critic and translator

The conversation will be moderated by Frida Sandström, critic and writer.

03 Oct 18:00
Many Hands at Work pt 3: Discussion with artist Nadia Hebson
Palmesalen, floor 1, ABF-huset

A discussion informed by Nadia Hebson’s work into the Italian feminist, activist, historian and art critic Carla Lonzi’s notion of Resonance. At the time of her death in 1982 Carla Lonzi was working on a book in which she was in conversation with a group of fifteenth-century bluestockings. In this text Lonzi foregrounds her notion of Resonance which she described as as a relationship that can be established between two or more women, who do not necessarily live in the same place or period of time, as a way of seeing ones own experience reflected in the experience of someone else. A form of mutual recognition. Lonzi’s thinking offers a starting point for discussion around new forms of engagement which may draw on paying close attention, polyphony, biography, translation, fiction and auto-fiction, and their collective potential to make visible and audible previously obscured thought and experience.

The evening will see how we might think through resonance in relation to some of the voices, positions and concerns brought up through the film screening series so far, and how it might inform our methods for collective discussion.

Nadia Hebson is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She works across painting, objects, large scale prints, apparel and text through subjective biography most recently exploring the expanded legacies of American painter Christina Ramberg and British painter Winifred Knights, who she conceives as fictional mentors. Her recent exhibitions and commissions include Gravidity & Parity &, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne; one on one: on skills, The Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia, EKKM, Tallin; I See You Man, Gallery Celine, Glasgow; Alpha Adieu, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, M HKA and Choreography, Arcade, London. In 2014 with AND Public she published MODA WK: work in response to the paintings, drawings, correspondence, clothing and interior design of Winifred Knights (an expanded legacy). In 2017 with Hana Leaper she co-convened the conference, Making Womens Art Matter, at the Paul Mellon Centre, London. She is currently working on a new publication which explores the work of Christina Ramberg and her creative female circle.

Many Hands at Work is part of an ongoing series of film screenings and discussions that looks for the body’s place in contemporary labour relations from intersectional feminist positions, organised by Sarah Browne and Jenny Richards

*Please note the event will be held in English but we will try to support other languages in the room.

25 Sep 17:00
Vernissage: Exhibition with Inger Ekdahl (1922–2014, Ystad), Fernando Sánchez Castillo (Madrid) and David Väyrynen (Gällivare)
Mint, Sveavägen 41

Reading and music: 18.30
Vernissage bar at Café Cirkeln: 19-21

Exhibition period: 25 September–3 November 2019

Thanks to Ystad konstmuseum and Galerie Nordenhake

18 Jun 18:00
Hands at Work (part 2)
Mint, Sveavägen 41

Sarah Browne and Jenny Richards continue their series of screenings at MINT, exploring the body’s place in contemporary work. This time they will show: Rehana Zaman; Tell me the story Of all these things, Tina Keane; In Our Hands, Greenham and Ralph Lundsten & Rolf Nilson; Främmande Planet.

09 May 18:00
Painting and Poetry at People’s House
Mint, Sveavägen 41

A meeting between vagabond artist Hans Tombrock and playwright Bertolt Brecht while exiled in Sweden with Ingela Johansson, Margareta Ståhl / Arbetskonstgruppen

05 May 14:00
Hands at Work
Mint, Sveavägen 41

A film screening and discussion curated by Sarah Browne and Jenny Richards

24 Apr 18:00
Learning through struggle: Swedish dockworkers union and the right to strike
Mint, Sveavägen 41

with Benj Gerdes, a representative from Svenska Hamnarbetarförbundet and Michele Masucci