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.

A Careful Strike*

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.

Bildningar

Cabaret Crusades

Wael Shawky

23.9–16.10 2021

Ateljé SKHLM, Bredholmsgatan 3, Skärholmen

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

Wael Shawky, Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015

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

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

Thanks to Sfeir-Semler Gallery

A special thanks to Konsthall C for supporting the production

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

Bildningar

Emanuel Almborg

2.9–25.9 2021

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

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

Switchers, Acorn, 2021. Installation shot. Scenography by Ksenia Pedan.

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

Emanuel Almborg, The Nth Degree, 2018. Installation shot

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

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

Curator: Karin Bähler Lavér.

Photos: Johan Österholm

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A Careful Strike*

Bini Adamczak, Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole, Black Audio Film Collective (John Akomfrah), Henrik Andersson, Problem Collective, Chto Delat, Harun Farocki, Dora García, Benj Gerdes, Salad Hilowle, Sam Hultin, Ingela Johansson, Hanni Kamaly, Patrick Kretschek, Mattin, Minus Miele, Ruben Nilson, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Gudrun Olsson, Oliver Ressler, Bella Rune, Katarina Pirak Sikku, Iris Smeds, Hito Steyerl, Margareta Ståhl, Hannah Wiker Wikström

Programme:
17.9 2020 – 21.2 2021
Exhibition:
7.10 2021 – 11.12 2021

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm

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.

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.

Bella Rune

Behzad Khosravi Noori

Harun Farocki

Dora García

Ingela Johansson

Salad Hilowle

Hito Steyerl & Problem Collective

Minus Miele

Henrik Andersson

Patrick Kretchek

Hanni Kamaly

Ingela Johansson & Gudrun Olsson

Katarina Pirak Sikku

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole

Iris Smeds

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole & Iris Smeds

Behzad Khosravi Noori

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Thinking about Monica

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.

Scène d'Amour

Nadia Hebson
Monica Sjöö

17.3 – 29.5 2021

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, 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

Monica Sjö, God Giving Birth, 1968

Nadia Hebson, Autoritratto, 2019

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20. & Joy, 2021

Nadia Hebson, Scène d'Amour, installation shot.

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions, 2019 & Monica Sjöö, Aspects of The Great Mother, 1971

Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021

Portrait, (Monica Sjöö), 1977, 12.06 min., dir. Jane Jackson & Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021

Nadia Hebson, Joy, 2021

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

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Programme

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.

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.