Release conversation with Jakob Jakobsen and Ana Teixeira Pinto: what is to be done?

Part of Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary by Paletten Art Journal

What: Conversation with Jakob Jakobsen and Ana Teixeira Pinto, moderated by Frida Sandström (Paletten)

Art and culture are exposed to immense challenges due to various populistic agendas. This has an immediate effect on contemporary art and its complex habitat between the local, national and international. When publishing spaces are becoming more restricted in favour of ideological and market-driven communication – there is an urgency for expanding critical conversations, formats and languages. With the utmost integrity, we aspire to modify ways on how to relate to art and the world at large. Through the function of art, aesthetics and the artworld, can we further understand how the development of the democratic nation-state that emerged out of modernity – is deeply rooted in colonialism and capitalism?

2020 was a year dominated as much by uprisings, as the repression of these, a crisis of social reproduction and health, and various forms of nationalist, logistic-economic and quite some socio-physical reconsiderations. Since the early spring, Paletten Art Journal has gathered writers from various perspectives, under the headline “Editorial meeting.” The emphasis on the notion of the ‘editorial’ was first meant to physically gather people in open editorial meetings, to propose, discuss and determine and alternative methods for future work. While these meetings had to be cancelled due to the pandemic, the conversation between editors and invited contributors continued, fuelled by critical reflections on phenomena such as the distribution of resources, concepts of care, a rising wave of neo-fascism, populism and conspiracy theories, and the role of editorial work and writing, in relation to various forms of political organising.

While the initial plan was to use the editorial meeting as a means to extend the scope of a singular or a few editors, making space for unforeseen encounters to result in unforeseen contributions, the physical restrictions dominating the year cancelled this plan. In collaboration with co-editors Patrik Haggren, Matthew Rana and Frida Sandström, local and international writers were invited with an attempt to both broaden a Northern-European centred discussion, and to dive into locally complex cases in the format of a number of exhibitions reviews.

One of the planned editorial meetings was supposed to take place at Mint – whose critical strivings also has been a great source of motivation during the development process of this editorial project. It is, therefore, a joy to also close this chapter at Mint – hopefully not to only make full circle, but to emphasise on future alliances and trajectories. Celebrating the publication of this compilation of texts that the project has resulted in, Frida Sandström meets the contributing writers, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Jakob Jakobsen, to discuss matters of future work: what is to be done, and what are we preparing for?

The resulting texts, recorded conversations and multimedia montages form this year’s attempts to examine practical possibilities of art criticism today. They are available at paletten.net.

Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary was commissioned by, and funded by Regionsamverkan Sydsverige.

Join Johanna Hedva for a presentation and discussion on their new book, Minerva: The Miscarriage of the Brain. The event is organised as part of the exhibition A Careful Strike* at Mint. (Due to the current pandemic the exhibition has been postponed until fall 2021).

Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain collects a decade of work from artist, musician, and author of On Hell, Johanna Hedva. In plays, performances, an encyclopaedia, essays, autohagiography, hypnagogic, and hypnopompic poems – in texts whose bodies drift and delight in form – Minerva tunnels into mysticism, madness, motherhood, and magic. Minerva gets dirty with the mess of gender and genius. She does the labour of sleep and dreams. She odysseys through Los Angeles, shapeshifting in stygian night and waking up to wail in the light.

Please join us for a public walk with banners produced by Bella Rune and students from Konstfack University of Arts Craft and Design. We will walk from Konstfack to ABF Stockholm Sveavägen 41. During the walk scholar and researcher Margareta Ståhl will join us for a conversation about the project and the history and aesthetics for the workers movement.

Please respect social distancing measures, do not join the walk if you are sick or have any symptoms and walk with a two-meter distance.

Register: info@m-i-n-t.se.

Online event! Stream live on facebook or our website

Join artists Emma Dominguez, Macarena Dusant, Sonia Sagan and Sarasvati Shrestha for a discussion around their collective approach to addressing the lived detrimental effects of work and the inequality of access to care within the Swedish welfare system framed around their mother’s experience. The study session reflects on their current exhibition Mami: Ama: Mödrar at Botkryka Konsthall and artistic strategies that draw on resources within the art field to build infrastructures that seek to not only critique but work to transform the violent structures of work and the gendered and racialised work injuries they produce. We will consider how these methods also seek to refuse the unhealthy (re)production of culture to resonate beyond the confines of the art institution and its public.

The event will take place in English.

The event forms part of the Bodies of Care study sessions that explores practices that reflect and resist the current expansion of commercialized, individualized and outsourced care and is in collaboration with Botkyrka Konsthall.

This is the fifth in a series of conversations that precedes the exhibition A Careful Strike* at Mint opening on the 3rd of December.

*Precarias a la deriva, 2005

Follow the conversation at www.m-i-n-t.se/en-omsorgsfull-strejk/

During the past years, the Naples port has been affected by harsh labour conflicts. Employees have been fired on unclear grounds and the port businesses are unwilling to negotiate with the union. In Genova, dockworkers have gone on strikes to block ships with weapons cargo destined for Jemen. When the Black Lives Matter movement grew in the USA hundreds of dockworkers went on strike in Portland. In Sweden, the Swedish Dockworkers Union struggle has become significant in the rapid restructuring of the power relations on the Swedish labour market. What does the conjunction between political strikes and labour related strikes entail today?

This evening departs from a series of reports from different contemporary struggles that reflect the conditions to document and establish one’s public narrative. Based on this aspect, which historical continuities with earlier movements can we see in today’s struggles?

Reports by:

Papis Ndiaye, S.I. Cobas Italy

Martin Berg, chairman of the Swedish Dockworkers Union

Alessandra Mincone, journalist at Napoli Monitor

Mathias Wåg, activist and writer

Moderated by Julia Lindblom, journalist at Arbetaren and Benj Gerdes, artist and filmmaker.

The struggle over history is the struggle for life, recognition and reparation. The conditions for an independent historical narrative are a recurring issue within the history of different movements. Which narratives are given a voice, which are suppressed? How is the ongoing struggle over history expressed today in different contexts? Participants: Judith Kiros, Stefano Harney och Fred Moten.

Follow the conversation online via Mint’s facebook page

Welcome to a conversation about the condition for artistic production, solidarity and strike in the moment of the uprisings in Belarus with Problem Collective (Minsk) as part of the exhibition A Careful Strike*.

The discussion will happen online: link and on-site at Mint, ABF Stockholm.

Participants:

Olia Sosnovskaya (artist and researcher, member of the Problem Collective)

Anna Bredava (LGBTQ+ activist, organiser of DOTYK Queer festival)

Andrei Karpeka (activist, co-founder of Minsk Urban Platform)

Nicolai Spesivtsev (artist and computer scientist, member of eeefff group and Work Hard Play Hard working group)

Facebookevent

A public conversation on the possibility of struggle and resistance within health and care work. The corona pandemic has made the vulnerability of society even more evident as a consequence of decades of neoliberal reforms. How can care rather than economic principles become the primary organizing principle for societies? In collaboration with Feministiskt Forum. Participants: Roya Hakimnia, Pamela Otarola, Yolanda Aurora Bohm Ramirez and Mani Shutzberg.