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.
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.
Mint presents A Careful Strike*; a group show that departs from the monumental painting The History of the Workers Movement by the sheet metal worker, musician and artist Ruben Nilson (1893–1971), permanently installed at ABF Stockholm. Painted during a ten year period around 1940. Following a tradition of workers’ art, the collective struggle for emancipation is at the centre of Nilson’s painting.
The exhibition follows Nilson’s artwork both in its ambition and challenge: What does the reproduction of a movement’s history entail? What different roles can art play in social movements and through which expressions? How is art engaged in today’s movements? A dialogue with the specific struggles and the histories that inform Nilson’s composition of intertwined visual narratives, structured through visible conjoined cuts form the curatorial framework of the exhibition. The work’s historical connections to contemporary situations are put in relation to what is missing within the frame – the histories and experiences that are left out while establishing a prevalent worker’s history.
Bella Rune. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Behzad Khosravi Noori. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Behzad Khosravi Noori. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole & Iris Smeds. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Iris Smeds. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Katarina Pirak Sikku. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Ingela Johansson & Gudrun Olsson. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Hanni Kamaly. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Patrick Kretchek. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Henrik Andersson. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Henrik Andersson. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Minus Miele. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Hito Steyerl & Problem Collective. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Salad Hilowle. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Ingela Johansson. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Dora García. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Harun Farocki. Photo by Johan Österholm.
A Careful Strike* is an exhibition and a public program (that preceded the exhibition during the fall of 2020), where workers’ art is confronted with Swedish and international contemporary works. The form and history of social movements are reflected through situated experiences of migration, care, exploitation and struggle. Through songs, poetry, talks, and artworks historical events and issues are made visible in a conversation on our current condition. What do we need to remember and what is to be done to win back the future?
*The exhibition borrows its title from the militant feminist collective Precarias a la deriva (Precarious women adrift) 2004. The collective was formed in Madrid in 2002 in reaction to the male-dominated unions that were organising a general strike in reaction to labour law reforms in Spain. Precarias a la deriva wanted to highlight the challenges many face in participating in strikes, due to a reality of precarious employment and a higher burden of reproductive work. They wanted to create a collective situated narrative on the general tendency toward the precarization of life they were experiencing and the ways to revolt and resist in our everyday lives. – Precarias a la deriva, Una huelga de mucho cuidado (Cuatro hipótesis), 2004.
Curator: Michele Masucci
The exhibition is produced with generous support from The Worker Movement’s Culture Fund, The Swedish Arts Council and The City of Stockholm.
In Scène d’Amour, Nadia Hebson presents a multidisciplinary work which continues her exploration of artistic recuperation through intuitive forms. Issuing from the desire to consider alternate Painting histories in the present, over the last decade Hebson has evolved a distinct and idiosyncratic mode of working that merges the role of artist, scholar and curator to realise constellations of objects, apparel, paintings, prints and text that think through the legacies of older peers, whilst making Hebson’s own subjective expression visible.
In Scène d’Amour the work of Swedish painter, writer, radical anarcho-eco-feminist Monica Sjöö (b.1931 Härnösand d.2005 Bristol) is presented alongside Hebson’s own. In response to the conditions of this current moment and Hebson’s own circumstance as a new mother, the exhibition, rather than offering conclusions, seeks instead to initiate dialogue around Sjöö’s expanded legacy and the intimate relationship between her painting, graphic design, activism and matriarchal scholarship as well as her role as an early exponent of the Goddess movement. Scène d’Amour is intended as both an introduction and an opportunity to pay close attention: where Hebson’s private comprehension of Sjöö’s work can form.
Nadia Hebson, Joy, 2021 & Monica Sjö, God Giving Birth, 1968. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Monica Sjö, God Giving Birth, 1968. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Nadia Hebson, Joy, 2021. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Portrait, (Monica Sjöö), 1977, 12.06 min., dir. Jane Jackson & Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021. Photo by Johan Österholm
Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021. Photo by Johan Österholm
Nadia Hebson, The Conditions, 2019 & Monica Sjöö, Aspects of The Great Mother, 1971
Nadia Hebson, Scène d’Amour, installation shot.
Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20. & Joy, 2021. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20. Photo by Johan Österholm.
Nadia Hebson, Autoritratto, 2019. Photo by Johan Österholm.
In parallel with the exhibition, Hebson has invited artists, art historians, curators and colleagues/friends to share in company their consideration and responses to Sjöö’s practice through public discussion and a screening. Over the course of the exhibition Hebson will realise new work and text in response to this concentrated period of exchange and contemplation, which will be installed sporadically throughout its duration.
Nadia Hebson is a British artist and educator based in Sweden. She uses painting, objects, large scale prints, apparel and text, to explore the work and biographies of older colleagues, including: American painter Christina Ramberg, British painters Winifred Knights and Marion Adnams and most recently, Dora Gordine as part of the Dorich House Museum Studio Residency, Kingston University, London.
Thank you Museum Anna Nordlander and the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library
24.4.21 Thinking about Monica: Monica Sjöö, an introduction
Ett samtal med Dr Sue Tate och Mariana Vodovosoff, båda del av Monica Sjöö Curatorial Collective, och Jane Jackson, regissör av Portrait (Monica Sjöö), 1977, modererat av Nadia Hebson del av utställningen Scène d’Amour.
Detta var det första av tre diskursiva evenemang som kommer att utforska den svenska målaren, författaren och radikala ekofeministen Monica Sjöös liv och arbete, samt samtida konstnärer, curatorer och konsthistorikers pågående konstnärliga rekupereringsprojekt. Hur kan vi kritiskt utforska komplexiteten i historiska personers liv och arbete samtidigt som vi undviker hagiografiska läsningar? Dessa evenemang arrangeras av Mint och är en del av Hebsons pågående forskningsprojekt Destroy She Said och realiseras med stöd från Kungliga konsthögskolan i Stockholm.
1.5.21 Thinking about Monica with Lina Bjerneld, Helena Lund Ek, Alisa Margolis, Raksha Patel & Nadia Hebson
Artists Lina Bjerneld, Helena Lund Ek, Alisa Margolis, Raksha Patel and Nadia Hebson, whose practices all centre around Painting, came together on May 1 for an informal discussion to consider in company the legacy of Monica Sjöö. The conversation ranged from shared experiences of their respective art educations in Scandinavia, the US and the U.K., personal readings of Monica Sjöö’s paintings, posters and manifestos and their current reception, archiving, misrepresentation, alternative Painting herstories and reflections on the ever expanding project of artistic recuperation.
This is the second conversation in the three part programme Thinking About Monica, which accompanies the exhibition Scène d’Amour at Mint and has been realised through the support of the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm’s artistic research fund as part of the research project Destroy She Said.
