LOVE TEST


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.

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

The Isolated Bone

Andjeas Ejiksson
Iris Smeds
Marion Scemama & David Wojnarowicz 

23.11 2023 – 24.2 2024

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


Opening hours:
Wednesday & Friday 13–17
Thursday 13–20
Saturday 12–16

On November 23, The Isolated Bone opens at Mint. Through installation, film and theatrical interventions, the exhibition touches on a collective concept of truth that is put out of play. With a disintegration of public and private, through the spectacle of the family and the rule of law, ideas of a shared reality versus testimony and a swaying sense of not being believed, are negotiated.

The exhibition consists of two new installations by Andjeas Ejiksson and Iris Smeds as well as a film work from 1989 by Marion Scemama & David Wojnarowicz.

The Isolated Bone is part of a larger project that takes shape through exhibitions, performance, and poetry. The first episode took place earlier this year in the form of a performance evening at Mint titled The Family is the First Spectacle.

Iris Smeds, Det Tusenåriga riket (Scen 5 och 7), 2023
Iris Smeds, Det Tusenåriga riket (Scen 5 och 7), 2023
Iris Smeds, Det Tusenåriga riket (Scen 5 och 7), 2023
Iris Smeds, Det Tusenåriga riket (Scen 5 och 7), 2023
Iris Smeds, Det Tusenåriga riket (Scen 5 och 7), 2023
David Wojnarowicz och Marion Schemama, Inside This Little House, 1989
David Wojnarowicz och Marion Schemama, Inside This Little House, 1989
Andjeas Ejiksson, OORDNING-ORDNING-OORDNING-ORDNING, 2023

Andjeas Ejiksson (b. 1978) is an artist and writer based in Stockholm, Sweden. His artistic practice explores how ideologies and cultural imaginaries are established through political transitions and processes of translation. Ejiksson works in editorial and textual formats, performance and moving image. The work is often research based, he has been the editor of several journals, researcher at HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht

Iris Smeds‘ work revolve around the individual’s marketability and examines our existence and society from a poetic and performative perspective. She has a background in theatre and her project often blurs the boundaries between installation, performance and moving image, with a theatrical and surreal imagery. Since 2013, she has also run the one-woman punk band Vaska Fimpen.

David Wojnarowicz (b. 1954 New Jersey d. 1992 New York) was an artist, writer, filmmaker, and AIDS activist prominent in the New York City art scene of the 1980s. Marion Scemama (b. 1950, Casablanca) is a photographer and filmmaker based in Paris. Wojnarowicz and Scemama met in New York 1983. Out of this encounter was born a special friendship, one marked by mutual support and numerous collaborations.

Many Ways to Now

During the autumn, Mint presents a new commission by the Austrian artist and composer Armin Lorenz Gerold. The artist invites visitors into an audio-visual system of ceramic sculptures, vibrating devices, sound and screens, transforming the exhibition space into a sensory acoustic landscape.
The artist draws inspiration from Anne Boyer’s work The Fallen Angel of the Senses, in which the author and poet maps the decay of the minor senses; touch, taste, and smell, in our “present arrangement of the world”, hyperextended or fractured from “capitalism’s distortions and pressures”. Working across a multitude of media, Gerold primarily focuses on voice and sound, making audio plays, live-performances, broadcasts, and installations. For the exhibition at Mint, Gerold has invited a range of artists and poets to contribute texts that negotiate questions about time and temporality through a variety of cultural, political and poetic angles that disrupt, alter or shape the present.

With contributions by: Lori E. Allen, Anne Boyer, Jay Bernard, Reece Cox, Andrew Yong Hoon Lee, Mara Lee, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Alex Turgeon and James Schuyler.

Armin Lorenz Gerold, Many ways to now , 2023, installation view

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.

The exhibition is supported by the Swedish Arts Council, BMKOES and the Austrian Embassy in Stockholm

Photos by Johan Österholm

Cascade Bend Chamber

Cara Tolmie

13.5 – 26.8 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


Cascade Bend Chamber is a major new commision at Mint, led by artist and musician Cara Tolmie. It takes shape through installation, music and performance and is made in dialogue with various collaborators including, amongst others, Julia Giertz, Susanna Jablonksi and live performances with Stine Janvin and Em Silén.

The project at large stems from a vocal method that Cara Tolmie has been developing over the past five years called Internal Singing. This is a practice that explores a sensitised voice- body bind by investigating the relationship between sounding on both the inhale and exhale, vocal imaginaries, slight movement, circular vocal sound, and self-administered touch that attunes her body in states of over-sensitivity.

The exhibition hosts a series of listening spaces expanding out from Internal Singing – These environments are constructed from textiles, sonic objects, sound and sculpture, inviting the audience into an enigmatic landscape built to hold and guide them through various states of listening and bodily attention. Across each of the three rooms the elements of listening, presence and sound weave together, presenting an experience of vocality in multiplicity, persistently in movement – coaxing, calming, amusing, disorientating and at times discomforting.

Throughout the exhibition there will be a series of performances that bring to the fore the particular qualities of the live singing voice. Using the various listening rooms as stages or sets for these musical gatherings, each performance will use elements of vocal improvisation explore co-produced landscapes of affect, vocal multiplicity and the curious territory of unknowns that exist in between.

Cara Tolmie, Cascade Bend Chamber, 2023, Installation view
Exhibition view
Exhibition view

Cara Tolmie (b. 1984, Glasgow) spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.

Her practice at large centres itself upon the voice, the body, and the complex ties between the two. All at once subjective as well as socially determined, she explores voice and body as two co-dependent entities able to confirm as well as contradict one another. Within this she often explores performative techniques that disorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of the defamiliarised, uncanny and sampled singing voice. Cara Tolmie is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.

Mejan Internationale: Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to

Neil Bhat, Kristján Breki, Dev Dhunsi, Vinicius Dos Santos, Ida Edin, Sol Emil Nørgaard Andersen, Gwen Gambet, Daniel Gardebrandt, Emil Kjærnli, Anna Lesiczka, Tilda Lundbohm, Johan Lundborg, Caio Marques De Oliveira, Lior Nønne Malue Hansen, Mio Nielsen, Breogán Xague

13.4 – 23.2 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


The conceptual point of departure for the exhibition is the notion of return. How does the decision to leave condition the idea of going back? For artists the decision to leave, to return, to leave again—to exist as a maker between Brazil, Norway, or France and Stockholm—also means opening one’s practice to distance, alienation, and complexity. It becomes necessary to multiply returns, to shuttle back and forth between an original place that is increasingly imagined and an elsewhere that develops undeniable solidity. The process of returning becomes endless, a fact that crucially undermines the notion of stable or consistent national artistic identity. 

The works presented reflect each artists’ practice, but as a collective endeavor Mejan Internationale: Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to Home to manifests the fact that the emerging art scene in Stockholm is plural, multilingual, riven with elsewhere. The choice to work together reflects a desire to interrogate what it means to live abroad post-pandemic and in the middle of a historic rise of the essentializing nationalism.  

 Curated by Natasha Marie Llorens as part of a Calling Card.  

Calling Card is a working group at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm committed to anti-racism on a structural level and to freedom from all forms of discrimination for students, staff, faculty, and guests. We borrow our name from an artwork by Adrian Piper, “My Calling Card” (1986-1990)

Image: Emil Kjaernli, King of Comedy, 2023. Silkscreen on canvas, 220 x 120 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Third Eye Butterfly

Storm de Hirsch
Nat Marcus
Luzie Meyer
Sofia Restorp
P Staff

1.12 2022–18.02 2023

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


The film Third Eye Butterfly (1968) which lends the exhibition its title, is a result of multiple visual experiments inspired by the diverse range of colorful and abstract butterfly wing patterns. Kaleidoscopic shots and superimpositions come and go in the image, in tune with the soundtrack’s repetitive scheme, it appears as an attempt to translate the multi-color effect of butterfly wings into an expanded film experience. Intended to be projected on a double screen using two synchronized projectors, the film creates the illusion of seeing two butterfly wings animated by the flicker of the projected images. An eye, “the great Eye,” appears several times in the center of an endless spiral framed by the words “Third Eye Butterfly.” On this matter, the American theorist Casey Chanress explains that “the 70mm like effect of Third Eye Butterfly encourages the mind to work as a third eye by fusing the two side-by-side screens into a third meaning, just as Eisenstein caused the meaning of two juxtaposed shots to result in a third implied meaning.”

Installation view
Installation view
Luzie Meyer, Period Piece, 2021
P Staff, Eat Clean Ass Only, 2021
Nat Marcus, The Velvet Sound (I) + (II), 2022
P Staff, Ancient & Celibate, 2021, installation view
P Staff, Ancient & Celibate, 2021
Sofia Restorp. Installation view
Sofia Restorp. Installation view
Sofia Restorp, Crater, 2022
Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 1968, installation view
Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 1968
Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 1968
Storm de Hirsch, Third Eye Butterfly, 1968

By using rhythmized imagery that incorporates colors, stenciled shapes, and sound into an audiovisual continuum, de Hirsch evokes an experience which relies on the interrelationship of sensory modalities. Following this idea of a multilayered perception of the world and tracing the interconnectedness of language, music and film young international artists Nat Marcus (lives and works in Berlin), Luzie Meyer (1990, lives and works in Berlin), Sofia Restorp (1986, lives and works in Berlin) and P Staff (1987, lives and work in Los Angeles and London) were invited.

The idea of being transported into other states of reality emphasized by the pieces present in the show continues in the design of the conventional exhibition space of Mint and is characterized by the work of lighting designer Ines Bartl. Together with the curator, she came up with a concept for the corridors and places of transition for the light situations inspired by the color spectrum from Third Eye Butterfly.

In the exhibition, not only light is used to mark the places of transition, but also the medium of language emerges through various works to describe transformative processes: the audio work Period Piece (2021) by Luzie Meyer for example playfully explores the manifold meaning of the word period that is used to describe how bodies, language and time are regulated. Similar to Meyer’s work, Nat Marcus who produced two new fabric pieces The Velvet Sound (I) and The Velvet Sound (II) (2022) which on their surface are layering graphics, paint and text as well as P. Staff’s poems displayed on hologram fans, engage the idea of multiple, fluid meanings of words to talk about bodies that encounter themselves in transitory states. Sofia Restorp’s newly created drawings, on the other hand, return to a purely visual world, but are thoroughly poetic due to the ambiguous surrealistic interiors that are depicted. Rather than dwelling on the surface her pieces can be characterized by the idea of a reflective looking inward.

Third Eye Butterfly can be seen as an attempt to reflect on Storm de Hirsch’s psychedelic view of the world and how surpassing common notions of what reality is, is more relevant than ever to artists working in the here and now.

Curator: Cathrin Mayer

Cathrin Mayer (b. 1988 Vienna) is currently the associate curator at HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark (Graz, AT). Until 2020, she was curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. In addition to her curatorial work, she teaches regularly and is holding a guest professorship for curatorial studies at The University of Art and Design Linz (AT).

Anything Happens Here

Beatrice Gibson
Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP)

9.9–8.10 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


In the room, two eggs are resting in a nest. In the same place, a drama unfolds. It is told through a dreamlike montage with a poodle, a beauty queen and two sisters who are not sisters in the roles. Here in this place, which is the exhibition, experiences and things are duplicated. Pregnant events without redemption. Anything could happen here. There is both anticipation and anxiety in the air.

The exhibition Anything happens here includes the acclaimed film Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs (Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters), 2019, by British artist Beatrice Gibson (b. 1978 London) and sculptures by Britt-Ingrid Persson BIP (b. 1938 Stensele).

Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Äggets och stråets minne (The Memory of the Egg and the Straw), 1991
Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Äggets och stråets minne (The Memory of the Egg and the Straw), 1991
Britt-Ingrid Persson (BIP), Den begränsade ljusskretsen (The Limited Circle of Light), 1991
Beatrice Gibson, Deux sœurs qui ne sont pas sœurs, 2019. Installation image
Anything Happens Here, installation view

Movement Patterns

Chiara Bugatti

9.6–18.6 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


Curator: Ingrid Svahn (International master’s program in Curating Art, Stockholm University)

The exhibition Movement Patterns explores the meeting between the body and the monument, the fragile and the eternal, movement and stillness, history and memory. 

Movement patterns can be something deeply personal, unique to each person. They can be seen from a distance – human activity as dots on a satellite image from above. They can be discerned throughout history – how the pendulum swings back and forth. They are found in materials – through sedimentation processes, marble can tell us what has slowly been created over time.

In her artistic practice, Chiara Bugatti examines materials that seems to have lost their main function. Through three works of sculpture, installation and video, she explores the memory of materials, their historical associations and narrative possibilities, such as allowing marble to break down to then re-emerge in perishable room installations, or possibly eternal forms. Sudden external influence, or slow decomposition processes, make visible the fragile and temporary in the constant and solid, when human movement is put in relation to a monumental stillness. One of the works in the exhibition is made in collaboration with artist Sebastian Moske and choreographer Alessandro Giaquinto.

Chiara Bugatti (Lecco, Italy) is a visual artist based in Stockholm. Bugatti holds a BFA from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (IT, 2014), an MFA from Umeå Academy of Fine Arts (SE, 2016) and a Postmaster from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (SE, 2021). She was recently a grant holder at IASPIS (SE) and fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart (DE). She is part of the current exhibition Släpljus at the Carl Eldh studio museum, as well as the 15th Trienniale Kleinplastik Fellbach in Germany and her work has been exhibited in institutions across Europe.

Sebastian Moske is an artist based in Berlin. After studying acting and working in the theatre, he studied art under Rosa Barba at HfK in Bremen and was part of IASPIS international residency program in Malmö (2021). Alessandro Giaquinto is a dancer and choreographer based in Stuttgart. In 2016 he joined the Stuttgart Ballet after completing his training at the John Cranko Schule.

Ingrid Svahn is a freelance curator and student in the international master’s program in Curating Art at Stockholm University. This exhibition is made as part of her graduation project and made possible with the support of Mint and Stockholm University. 

Lighting design by Seth Margolies, graphic design by Julian Redaelli.

Thank you to Studio Pica for the loan of installation material.

Photos by Johan Österholm.

Rymdrummet

Agnieszka Polska
Eddie Figge

21.4 – 18.6 2022

Mint, ABF Stockholm, Sveavägen 41, Stockholm


In Rymdrummet, two artists meet who get to grips with physics and the poetry of gravity. Through painting and animation, respectively, an aesthetic connected to the weightless state, movement and a transformative variability is examined.

Eddie Figge, Rymdsyner, 1972
Eddie Figge, Farväl Voyager II, 1989
Eddie Figge, Rymdsyner, 1972 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019
Eddie Figge, Rymden, 1980 & Agnieszka Polska, The Happiest Thought, 2019
Eddie Figge, Space Station, 2000
Eddie Figge, Space Station, 2000
Rymdrummet, installation shot
Eddie Figge, Intelligent Life in the Universe, 1983

Eddie Figge (1904–2003 Stockholm) was an artist and poet, an innovator in modern painting in Sweden. After working at the theater and ballet, she began her artistic career later in life. During the 1950s, she found her language through informal painting with a world of motifs that revolved around light, darkness and space. Her style was characterized by a strong sense of color, movement and rhythm. She found inspiration in space travel, quantum physics and the poetic dimensions of science. Eddie Figge had her breakthrough at Galerie Blanche in 1961, and during the 80s and 90s she had several large museum exhibitions in Sweden and abroad. In 1989, Figge participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale with a selection of her space paintings. The last major solo exhibition with Eddie Figge was shown at Liljevalch’s Art Gallery in Stockholm in 2003, curated by Olle Granath. Figge is represented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and the Museum of Sketches in Lund.

Agnieszka Polska (b. 1985 in Lublin, Poland) creates videos, animations and photographs, often using archival or stock material, combining it with animation. There is a certain state of emergency present in her works. It derives from the political and social environment of our time. But rather than moralistically referencing specific matters like ecological issues, or the rise of nationalistic sentiments, the artist focuses on creating an immersive experience for the audience. As a distant but diligent observer, the viewer becomes a prisoner of the video footage and events unfolding before his eyes. It’s the immersion that charges Polska’s videos with political potential. She has presented her works at international venues, among them, the New Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Polska also participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 19th Biennale of Sydney, and 13th Istanbul Biennial. 

The exhibition is supported by The Swedish Arts Council, the City of Stockholm and the Region of Stockholm