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.

With: Merima Dizdarević & Ivana Đida, Jörgen Gassilewski, Iris Smeds and Isak Sundström with L.M Klan.

Welcome to a stage event and performative study at Mint, where Iris Smeds presents her newly written performance Det tusenåriga riket, Merima Dizdarević and Ivana Đida perform the sound work The Bosnian Sigh 2, Jörgen Gassilewski reads from his upcoming book Leken, and Isak Sundström premieres Essay on Filicide accompanied by L.M. Klan!

The evening is organized by Andjeas Ejiksson, Emily Fahlén, and Iris Smeds as part of the ongoing project “The isolated bone,” about the state, the body, and their various enactments.

Saturday, March 25 at 14-18 we open the doors to the Mint Poetry Festival! It will be a day of readings and discussions where poetry’s relationship to the dramatic is highlighted from different angles. How is contemporary poetry portrayed on stage? How do playwrights work with poetry and how do poets work with drama?

The festival is put together by writers Donia Saleh and Hanna Johansson.

With: Shang Imam, Johan Jönson, Nachla Libre, Joel Mauricio Isabel Ortiz, Lizette Romero Niknami, Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Axel Winqvist

A warm welcome!

The Poetry Festival is supported by the Swedish Arts Council and ABF Stockholm

There is a feminist 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

Warmly welcome!

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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