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).

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.

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

There was something uncanny about Thea Ekström’s studio on Brunnsgatan in Stockholm: one day a crack opened in the wall, causing the artist anxiety. But she found a solution to the problem by painting a crack of her own on a hardboard and hanging it in front of the actual one. Ekström’s own crack opened towards a blue sky – a painting created by the imagination worked as an antidote to reality, concealing it from view.

Ekström’s crack sets the tone for this group exhibition, in which the common factor is that the works make up a kind of stage design, exhibited in rooms where they both relate to and directly influence their surroundings. As physical objects or empty space, art can be situated under the sea, as a backdrop to the sky, in-between walls, and in the occupation of an abandoned shopping mall. To a certain extent, these artistic invasions change the character of the given environment. But the illusion is never complete, and the transformation never total; the meeting between two worlds always generates gaps.

installation shot

installation shot

installation shot

Cecilia Edefalk, Ultramarina (still), 1984

Gordon Matta Clark, Day's End (still), 1975

Iris Smeds, The Zombie Function, 2021

Ksenia Pedan, Meditations on living in the present, 2022

The exhibition in front at below features artists from different generations and backgrounds, born between 1920 and 1986. In their works, the physical and the poetic constitute two parts of the same whole, as do the spatial and the human. Here we present the newly produced installation Meditations on living in the present (2022) by Ksenia Pedan, in which a claustrophobic drama takes place between raised walls. Jörgen Gassilewskj has written Ball One Ball Two Ball Three (2022), a poetic work in three parts, created specifically for the exhibition rooms. Iris Smed’s combined stage design and performance The Zombie Function (2021) takes place within the framework of an abandoned food court that has been occupied by actors in search of alternative family constellations, and Cecilia Edefalk’s film Ultramarina (1984) lowers us to the bottom of the sea along with paintings and other objects. Thea Ekström carves a rift towards the sky (1962), Flaka Haliti’s photo series I See a Face. Do You See a Face. (2014) sketches ten faces in the sky, and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End cuts an opening towards the heavens, so that the sun shines in through the façade of a dilapidated warehouse.

For the first time in Sweden, Wael Shawky’s epic video trilogy Cabaret Crusades is presented, which includes The Horror Show Files (2010); The Path to Cairo (2012) and The Secrets of Karbala (2015). Using 200-year-old puppets and custom-made ceramic figures, a suggestive drama is created that recounts the history of The Crusades from an Arab perspective. The trilogy is inspired by the Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf’s Crusades Through Arab Eyes (1983). The exhibition takes place in a former shop in the centre of Skärholmen, at the invitation of the cultural association Folk.

Wael Shawky, Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015

Wael Shawky, Secrets of Karbala (still), 2015

Wael Shawky, The Horror Show File (still), 2010

Wael Shawky, The Horror Show File (still), 2010

Wael Shawky, The Path to Cairo (still), 2012

Thanks to Sfeir-Semler Gallery

A special thanks to Konsthall C for supporting the production

Address: Ateljé SKHLM in Skärholmens Galleria, Bredholmsgatan 4 (Next to Kjell & Company)

The exhibition was presented in conjunction with Emanuel Almborg’s defence of his PhD dissertation at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm with the artistic research project Toward a Pedagogy of the Utopian Image. The main part of the project are the three film works Acorn, The Nth Degree and Talking Hands, which are shown together for the first time at Mint.

Switchers, Acorn, 2021. Installation shot. Scenography by Ksenia Pedan.

Switchers, Acorn, 2021. Installation shot. Scenography by Ksenia Pedan.

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

Emanuel Almborg, The Nth Degree, 2018. Installation shot

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

Emanuel Almborg, Talking Hands, 2016

Almborg is interested in communist pedagogy, revolutionary psychology, fiction and theatre, to speculate on lost futures and potentials; subjects and methods that are treated in differently in the three works. If we assume that there is a need for new “utopian” political and collective visions, then what role can art play in sketching them? With the help of psychologist Lev Vygotsky, philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, revolutionary psychiatrist Franz Fanon and science fiction writer Octavia Butler, these works explore artist film’s potential for education, resistance and equality.

Curator: Karin Bähler Lavér.

Photos: Johan Österholm

Mint presents A Careful Strike*; a group show that departs from the monumental painting The History of the Workers Movement by the sheet metal worker, musician and artist Ruben Nilson (1893–1971), permanently installed at ABF Stockholm. Painted during a ten year period around 1940. Following a tradition of workers’ art, the collective struggle for emancipation is at the centre of Nilson’s painting.

The exhibition follows Nilson’s artwork both in its ambition and challenge: What does the reproduction of a movement’s history entail? What different roles can art play in social movements and through which expressions? How is art engaged in today’s movements? A dialogue with the specific struggles and the histories that inform Nilson’s composition of intertwined visual narratives, structured through visible conjoined cuts form the curatorial framework of the exhibition. The work’s historical connections to contemporary situations are put in relation to what is missing within the frame – the histories and experiences that are left out while establishing a prevalent worker’s history.

A Careful Strike* is an exhibition and a public program (that preceded the exhibition during the fall of 2020), where workers’ art is confronted with Swedish and international contemporary works. The form and history of social movements are reflected through situated experiences of migration, care, exploitation and struggle. Through songs, poetry, talks, and artworks historical events and issues are made visible in a conversation on our current condition. What do we need to remember and what is to be done to win back the future?

*The exhibition borrows its title from the militant feminist collective Precarias a la deriva (Precarious women adrift) 2004. The collective was formed in Madrid in 2002 in reaction to the male-dominated unions that were organising a general strike in reaction to labour law reforms in Spain. Precarias a la deriva wanted to highlight the challenges many face in participating in strikes, due to a reality of precarious employment and a higher burden of reproductive work. They wanted to create a collective situated narrative on the general tendency toward the precarization of life they were experiencing and the ways to revolt and resist in our everyday lives. – Precarias a la deriva, Una huelga de mucho cuidado (Cuatro hipótesis), 2004. 

Curator: Michele Masucci

The exhibition is produced with generous support from The Worker Movement’s Culture Fund, The Swedish Arts Council and The City of Stockholm.

Bella Rune

Behzad Khosravi Noori

Harun Farocki

Dora García

Ingela Johansson

Salad Hilowle

Hito Steyerl & Problem Collective

Minus Miele

Henrik Andersson

Henrik Andersson

Patrick Kretchek

Hanni Kamaly

Ingela Johansson & Gudrun Olsson

Katarina Pirak Sikku

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole

Iris Smeds

Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole & Iris Smeds

Behzad Khosravi Noori

In Scène d’Amour, Nadia Hebson presents a multidisciplinary work which continues her exploration of artistic recuperation through intuitive forms. Issuing from the desire to consider alternate Painting histories in the present, over the last decade Hebson has evolved a distinct and idiosyncratic mode of working that merges the role of artist, scholar and curator to realise constellations of objects, apparel, paintings, prints and text that think through the legacies of older peers, whilst making Hebson’s own subjective expression visible. 

In Scène d’Amour the work of Swedish painter, writer, radical anarcho-eco-feminist Monica Sjöö (b.1931 Härnösand d.2005 Bristol) is presented alongside Hebson’s own. In response to the conditions of this current moment and Hebson’s own circumstance as a new mother, the exhibition, rather than offering conclusions, seeks instead to initiate dialogue around Sjöö’s expanded legacy and the intimate relationship between her painting, graphic design, activism and matriarchal scholarship as well as her role as an early exponent of the Goddess movement. Scène d’Amour is intended as both an introduction and an opportunity to pay close attention: where Hebson’s private comprehension of Sjöö’s work can form.

Nadia Hebson, Joy, 2021 & Monica Sjö, God Giving Birth, 1968

Monica Sjö, God Giving Birth, 1968

Nadia Hebson, Autoritratto, 2019

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions (Yves Saint Laurent, 1976), 2019-20. & Joy, 2021

Nadia Hebson, Scène d'Amour, installation shot.

Nadia Hebson, The Conditions, 2019 & Monica Sjöö, Aspects of The Great Mother, 1971

Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021

Portrait, (Monica Sjöö), 1977, 12.06 min., dir. Jane Jackson & Nadia Hebson, Fertility Complex, 2021

Nadia Hebson, Joy, 2021

In parallel with the exhibition, Hebson has invited artists, art historians, curators and colleagues/friends to share in company their consideration and responses to Sjöö’s practice through public discussion and a screening. Over the course of the exhibition Hebson will realise new work and text in response to this concentrated period of exchange and contemplation, which will be installed sporadically throughout its duration. 

Nadia Hebson is a British artist and educator based in Sweden. She uses painting, objects, large scale prints, apparel and text, to explore the work and biographies of older colleagues, including: American painter Christina Ramberg, British painters Winifred Knights and Marion Adnams  and most recently, Dora Gordine as part of the Dorich House Museum Studio Residency, Kingston University, London. 

Thank you Museum Anna Nordlander and the Swedish Labour Movement’s Archives and Library

Programme