Performance: LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising
19.9, 8:30pm – 9:30pm
Sandlersalen, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm
Book your ticket here
Exhibition: LOVE TEST: P.O.V.
19.9 – 27.10, 2024
Mint, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm
Opening 19.9, 5:00pm – 8:00pm
LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising is a collaboration between artist Rosa Aiello and actor Dylan Aiello. Building on a lifelong creative collaboration, the siblings stitch together film and live performance to stage the slippery dynamics of testing love, attention-seeking, and pushing past thresholds of social comfort—power plays in search of meaningful connection. This piece is made up of short comic routines, or “Lazzi”, performance units from Commedia dell’Arte theatre used to construct, break into, and unravel plots. Here they serve to destabilise the roles we take on as friends, family, professionals, lovers.
LOVE TEST: Cruising for a Bruising puts a spotlight on the urge to act, to control, to make something happen: it is a variety show, an ecstatic conversation, a road trip, a succession of interruptions, asking “Who is in charge?” The one behind the camera, in front of the audience, the one driving, the one watching?
In the main space of Mint, Rosa Aiello and Dylan Aiello will be mounting a solo exhibition of new video works, LOVE TEST: P.O.V. The stage is a skull. The camera is a hole. The body has at least nine holes. This show is a series of experiments in communicating and embodying point of view. The central video work “Povera Noi,” was shot this April with their family and community in Lamezia Terme, Calabria, using three police-style body cams worn by five neighbours. Sounds come through the wall, introducing the knowledge that something is going on over there, the picture changes when you stand in a different place.
The performance and opening of LOVE TEST is organized in conjunction with September Sessions – A Contemporary Art Festival in Stockholm. A four-day programme spread across various art organizations in the city as well as public spaces in Stockholm. The festival hosts exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings, IASPIS Open Studios, and a bar.
The original performance piece was commissioned by Anorak e.V, and premiered at their location in the Green House, Berlin in May 2023.
In collaboration with ABF Stockholm.
Category: 2024
Images fantômes – Hervé Guibert
Welcome to an evening at Mint, dedicated to the writer Hervé Guibert. Three contemporary Swedish writers, critics and translators – Eli Levén, Hanna Johansson and Mathias Westin – take a look at Guibert’s versatile practice. The participants read partly from Guibert’s texts, partly from their own texts that engage with Guibert’s writing, approaching the authorship from different angles and opening it up for interpretation.
In recent years, several books have been published based on the life and work of the French writer, critic, filmmaker and photographer Hervé Guibert (1955–1991). In Sweden, his writing has reached a new generation thanks to the reissues of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Blindsight, and his perspective on memory and transience, obsession, illness and sexuality, as well as his distinctive voice – which gives the reader a rare strong illusion of closeness and familiarity – has, since his untimely death in 1991, never ceased to captivate.
The evening takes place in Polys Peslika’s ongoing exhibition Young Predictions at Mint (11.4 – 15.6, 2024) .
The event is free and does not require advance registration. In Swedish.
With:
Eli Levén is the author of the novels Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats and Hur jag skulle vilja försvinna, as well as critic and filmmaker. He has written the foreword to Norstedt’s new edition of Blindsight, 2021.
Hanna Johansson is the author of the novel Antiquity as well as a critic and art editor at SvD. She has written about Hervé Guibert in, among other things, SvD’s Under Strecket (“The art of getting to know a dead stranger”, 2023).
Mathias Westin is a psychologist and translator. Among other things, he is working on a translation of Hervé Guibert’s novel Le protocole compassionnel, 1991.
Young Predictions
Polys Peslikas
11.4 2024 – 15.6 2024
Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm
Opening hours:
Wednesday 13–17, Thursday 13–20 and Friday 13–17
Saturday 12–16
My desire is local, says Polys Peslikas. He refers to its origin being traced to a specific landscape where abstractions are formed in a particular light, in a particular temperature and among specific colors. A sexual identity and the desire to paint intertwined early in life in a confusing yet inseparable feeling.
“Summer 1988. Limassol / Germasogeia. By the sea front. The eastern outskirts of Limassol known as the Tourist area. Favorite places to go were THE CLUB and THE CARIBBEAN. The illuminated glass and the gelatine flashing lights were coloring everyone in monochromes of fuchsia pink, blue, red, yellow”
The exhibition Young Predictions at Mint is Polys Peslikas’ first presentation in Sweden. Collages from the early 90s are shown alongside new paintings and other works. The opening also marks Mint’s anniversary, celebrating 5 years as an art space in Stockholm.
Polys Peslikas (b. 1973, Cyprus) is a painter based in London. His practice also includes works on paper, performance and photography. Peslikas is interested in the constructed narratives of image and desire, and in notions of the physical in the history of western art. In his own image creation, he strives for an open and intuitive process where particular elements are often repeated in a sequence of motifs based on different technical and emotional inputs. He draws his references from classical mythology, film, iconography as well as pop and trash culture. Since 1986, he has compiled a library of printed images and cutouts that form important references for his imagery.
Solo exhibitions include among others: This Delusive Sentiment, ARCH (GR); And leaned shoulder against the window, Radio Athènes (GR); Reenactments (Bacchus), ICA (IT), The Future of Color, Cyprus Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017. Recent group shows include: Ah, This!, FELIX GAUDLITZ (AUT); How to Build a Garden, Point Center (CY); Nuit Blanche, Villa Medici (IT)
Image: Polys Peslikas, Collage on bank statement notes,1993-1996
Mint Poetry Festival 2024
With: Anne Boyer (US/UK), David Wojnarowicz & Marion Scemama (US), Judith Kiros (SE), Hanna Rajs (SE), Karl Holmqvist (SE/DE), Kim Hyesoon (KR) distantly with Andjeas Ejiksson (SE) & Jennifer Hayashida (US/SE), Shadi Angelina Bazeghi (DK), XTC in the XIV (SE).
Mint Poetry Festival 2024 follows a dramaturgy defined by the ecstatic. In the displaced temporality of illness, through revelation, death, and pleasure, language stretches towards an ‘other’ reality. At the center of the event is human vulnerability and rapture, conveyed through reading, song, and film.
The Poetry Festival is produced by the artists Andjeas Ejiksson and Iris Smeds and Mint’s curator Emily Fahlén, as part of The Isolated Bone, a project that touches on a collective concept of truth that is being put out of play. Through a disintegration of public and private, via the spectacle of the family and the rule of law, ideas of a shared reality versus testimony – along with a precarious sense of not being believed – are negotiated.
Mint Poetry Festival is organized in collaboration with ABF Stockholm and with support from the Swedish Arts Council.
The People’s Family Court
This is an invitation to participate in the performance The People’s Family Court by Iris Smeds. The performance is organised as part of Mint’s ongoing exhibition The Isolated Bone. Please find the mandatory sign up form below!
On Saturday, 17 February at 1–4 pm, The People’s Family Court will be held in Katasalen in ABF-huset (floor 1). Four people stand accused: Mom, Dad, Child and Dog. On stage are the four family members, and in the audience are the people holding them to account.
During the performance – which is also a filming of a scene for Smeds’ upcoming film “The Little House in the Food Court” – the audience will make accusations against the family members. These are formulated and submitted in advance in the form below. The accused character can be acquitted or convicted, the penalty for a conviction being exclusion from the family.
The People’s Family Court runs for a total of three hours, from 13-16, including replays.
Instructions for you as an audience / extra
You book your seat by writing an accusation to a family member using the online form below. You will not read out your allegations yourself. It is important that you address your accusation in a maximum of 250 characters to ONE family member; Mum, Dad, Child or Dog. You can accuse your own mother, father, child or dog, or the symbol of the mother, father, child or dog,
As a spectator and extra, you will take part in the event and will be filmed at the same time. As the whole scene is documented, it is important that you can stay from the beginning to the end.
Since 2020, Iris Smeds has been working on the film project The Little House in the Food Court, whose story consists of a queer theatre group that in an undefined future settles in a mall’s food court and stages an adaptation of Laura Ingalls’ book series The Little House on The Prairie as a play. The theatre group creates scenes that confront and renegotiate different roles and power structures within a family, where the concept of family also serves as an allegory for the state. Scene 5 is currently on display in Mint’s exhibition The Isolated Bone.