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.

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.

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. 

SIGN UP HERE

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.

Please join us this Sunday, 24th of September at 12 noon for tea and a conversation between artist and composer Armin Lorenz Gerold and experimental gardener Barbara Urbanic moderated by Mint’s artistic director Emily Fahlén. Gerold and Urbanic will discuss Mint’s upcoming exhibition ‘Many ways to now’ – an audio-visual system of ceramic sculptures, vibrating devices, sounds and screens, transforming the exhibition space into a sensory acoustic landscape –their collaborational installation ‘Verstärkung (amplification), 2021’, sound vessels, melancholy and their approaches to finding strategies against time.

Barbara Urbanic (*1982) studied History of Religion in Vienna, where she lives and grows an experimental cut flower garden. In her practice, semi-jokingly referred to as “The Politics and Aesthetics of Flowers”, she brings both a theoretical cultural studies approach and a creative process reflecting her historical research to floral and botanical designs. Beyond the garden, she co-organizes the literature format „Linkes Wort“, held since 1975 at the Austrian Communist Party’s annual summer fair.

Armin Lorenz Gerold (*Graz/Austria) is an artist and composer based in Berlin. His work has been presented at Halle für Kunst Steiermark, KW Berlin, LambdaLambdaLambda (Kosovo); fluent (Spain), mint (Sweden) and the Gothenburg Biennale for Contemporary Art (in a collaboration with Doireann O’ Malley). In 2021, the artist published his first artist book including his most recent play Manuel or A Hint Of Evil, alongside a collection of essays and texts. The publication was published by Mousse Publishing, Milan, supported by the Ruisdael Stipend. In November 2022, Manuel or A Hint Of Evil premiered as a live audio play at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Welcome to the final performance event of Cara Tolmie’s exhibition Cascade Bend Chamber at Mint. For this occasion Cara has invited past collaborators Em Silén and Rian Treanor to join her in an open experiment within the space of the exhibition, exploring the setting together through their shared languages in sound making and vocalisation.

We will also listen together to a piece by artist Nakul Krishnamurhty that invites another set of vocal sounds into the fabric of the installation.

In this event at Cascade Bend Chamber, Stine Janvin and Cara Tolmie respond to the environment of the exhibition through their ongoing explorations with explorative ‘hand to mouth’ vocality and ASMR inspired intimacy. This responsive ‘functional’ music further expands their previous vocal explorations into the repeated, fragmented and extreme voice set within the uncanny setting of fabrics, unreliable echos and curious small sounds found at Mint.

Stine Janvin is a vocalist, performer, and sound artist based in Stavanger, Norway. Janvin works with the extensive flexibility of her voice, and the ways in which it can be used to channel physicality of sound. Often drawing from electronic music, folk music, and contemporary media, she creates audio visual works for variable spaces from theaters, to clubs and galleries, and more recently websites and digital platforms. Recent presentations include Performa Telethon, New York; Munch Live and CADS, Munchmuseet, Oslo; Deutschlandradio Kultur, Daadgalerie, and CTM Festival, Berlin; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger; Rokolective, Bucharest; Wiener Festwochen, Vienna; ISSUE Project Room, New York; and INA GRM, Paris.

Affective Infrastructures: Chronic Film and Decolonial Image Artefacts
Lecture performance and meeting with artist Alexandra Anikina

Alexandra (Sasha) Anikina is an artist and media theorist whose work focuses on image politics, algorithmic imaginaries and myth-making, feminist STS, and technological conditions of governance, labour, and affect. She is a Senior Lecturer in Media Practices at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). Anikina works with moving image, computer simulation and lecture-performances, investigating affect, image politics, labour and temporalities in digital culture. The persistent themes in her practice involve procedural animism, algorithmic imaginaries, digital folklore and post-socialism.

During the meeting Alexandra will talk about her practice and present the lecture performance Chronic Film. Chronic Film (2019) is a generative algorithm that plays all possible images or all combinations of pixels that can be generated on a screen of a certain resolution. With the current resolution, the film will last for billions of years.

The lecture performance takes the mythology and the history of the colonial archaeology of the museum island of Delos, Greece, as a starting point, engaging in parallel thinking of images as archaeological and as technical artefacts. Sprawled between screensavers, game landscapes and documentary footage, it approaches the issue of commodification of images caught in the loop of attention economy and draws connections to the intent and distracted modes of seeing. Finally, using the algorithm of Chronic Film, the lecture performance breaks the consumerist model of spectator-screen relationship, entering, instead, a hallucinatory state of mental imagery and image-word sensing.

The exchange program was initiated by Mint and after_red in 2021. As a continuation of the project, six artists and one curator from Russia are invited to residencies in Stockholm during the period of October 2022–November 2023. This residency aims to support individual artistic practices, encourage collegial conversations in two different art contexts, and discuss the condition for contemporary art and thought today within dramatically shifting cultural and civil environments.

Welcome to a conversation and listening session between Tentative Transmits and Meira Ahmemulic.

The platform Tentative Transmits will introduce their work and research about politics of memory, archives and storytelling, as well as post-socialist transitions.

Saturday’s program includes a conversation and listening session with the artist Meira Ahmemulic, featuring the premiere of her newly commissioned sound work När moster gav SKF fingret (translation, “When aunt gave SKF the finger”). 

När moster gav SKF fingret is about the haunting power of words and cursing as resistance. Ahmemulic is inspired by curses from the villages Gusinje and Plav in Montenegro, situated in the shadow of Prokletije – the Accursed Mountains.

The conversation and listening session will be in Swedish.