The artistic project: The factory girls – The wilful textile worker organize an exhibition and  conference at Mint Art Gallery in the ABF building in Stockholm. The conference wants to  highlight and discuss the conditions, knowledge and resistance of women in the textile and home  industry; their willingness and self-will, which is expressed in organization, professional pride and  strategies. During the week, parts of the play Fabriksflickorna – makten och härligheten [The  Factory Girls – The Power and Glory] are reactivated, in an exhibition by Åsa Norman (Sweden)  textile artist, and Frida Hållander (Sweden) PhD, craft artist. The play premiered in Skellefteå  under the direction of Suzanne Osten and Margareta Garpe in 1980.  

In the exhibition, Norman and Hållander show parts of the multi-year artistic project The Factory  girls – The Willful Textile Worker through material and crafts investigations – as well as archive  material and sound. Artists and researchers are invited to the conference. They will hold  workshops and presentations to create a Nordic context for an in-depth discussion on textile  production and the home industry.  

The project is carried out with support from the Nordic Culture Fund, The Swedish Arts Grants  Committee, the Helge Ax:son Johnssons stiftelse, Byggnads kulturstipendium, and in collaboration with Iaspis. The exhibition and conference is part of Stockholm Craft Week 2020.

Conference Week Program:  

Thursday October 1 Conference day 1, all lectures are in Katasalen at the first floor in ABF huset  

The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00  

10:00-11:30 Introductory presentation and lecture by Åsa Norman (Sweden) textile artist and  Frida Hållander (Sweden) PhD, craft artist, presents the ongoing artistic project Factory girls –  The Willful Textile Workers. Tjia Torpe (Sweden) educator and producer will tell about the play  Fabriksflickorna – makten och härligheten [The Factory Girls – The Power and Glory]. Language:  Swedish. 

13:00-14:30 Leena Enbom (Finland) doctoral researcher in Social and Economic History in the  University of Helsinki. The lecture will shed light on the variations of home industries that  appeared as part of the secondary labour market in the urbanizing Finland from the late 19^th century until the 1960s. Additionally, the lecture will discuss the disciplinary functions of the  workhouse and relief work institutions based on the obligation to perform crafts and sewing tasks.  Language: English.

15.00-16:30 Lecture with Malin Nilsson (Sweden) PhD Economic History, researcher at the  Department of Economic History at Lund University. She will present her dissertation Taking work  home: Labor dynamics of women industrial homeworkers in Sweden during the second industrial  revolution (2015). Nilsson’s talk will also focus on how women’s commercial home based textile  production became a highly politicized topic in Europe in the late 19^th century. Language:  Swedish.  

Friday October 2 Conference day 2, all lectures are in Katasalen at the first floor in ABF-huset The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00 

10:00-11:30 Sushmita Preetha (Bangladesh) journalist, writer and researcher, together with Karin  Elfving (Sweden) journalist and ethnologist. The lecture will be based on testimonies from textile  workers in Bangladesh were it is describe how their rights are constantly violated, also how  Covid-19 has pushed these workers into further difficulties. Preetha and Elfving will also include  the response from some of the Swedish brands. Language: English.  

13:00-14:30 Lecture with Franz Petter Schmidt (Norway) Associate Professor of Textile Art at  KhiO – Oslo School of Fine Arts, textile artist and artistic researcher. Schmidt will present his  artistic dissertation project Reflection, Weaving Fabrics for Suits (2018), which touches on the  textile factory Sjølingstad Woolen Mill in Norway, and textile industry production through feeling,  longing, belonging, memory, pride and being queer. He will also present an ongoing project on a  diary written from 1925 to 1942 by the weaver Malli Berge. Language: Norwegian.  

15:00-16:30 Emelie Röndahl (Sweden) PhD student at HDK – Gothenburg University in the Arts,  presents her ongoing artistic dissertation project “Crying Pixels: a practitioner’s narrative through  woven rya – aspects of time in hand made practice”. Language: Swedish. 

Saturday October 3 Conference day 3, all lectures are in Hjärtat at the entrance level at ABF huset  

The exhibition is open 12:00-18:00 

11:00-12:30 Munish Wadhia (Sweden) artist, will present his ongoing work on the match industry  Jönköping’s Match Factory AB. Wadhia will also present his work “Signs taken for wonders” in  which he returns to the images and objects that surrounded him during his childhood, but with a  decolonial gaze that questions their given meanings, here he refers to the experience from  different textile factories. Language: English.  

13:00-14:00 Marie Hållander (Sweden) freelance poet and lecturer at Södertörn University.  Hållander will present the literary project “Among the girls and machines of the textile dust”  where she starts from textile stories and archives from Sjuhärad in Västergötland. Language:  Swedish.  

14:00-14:30 Nino Mick (Sweden) poet and writer, they will read an adapted version of a novel in  progress that delas about Berta Bäckman (b. 1860) and other factory worker that works in a match  factory in Tidaholm. The historical novel moves on two times, 1875 – the time of the great fire in  the factory where 50 girls perished, 1909 – the Swedish general strike. Language: Swedish. 

15:00-17:00 Go-slow action, along Sveavägen, start outside the ABF-house, public performance  led by Frida Hållander & Åsa Norman.  

Sunday October 4 

The exhibition is open 12:00-16:00 

With generous support from Konstnärsnämnden, Nordisk kulturfond, Helge Ax:son Johnssons stiftelse and Byggnads kulturstipendium in collaboration with Iaspis.

Illustration: Hanna Stenman

When a work is exhibited, it becomes something in the world. It meets an observer, a room, an environment with sound, light, ceiling and walls. In the exhibition, the work is in some way given an unpredictable life. Its effects are tested through that situation. Does it grab us? Does it shake things up? Does it sow seeds in our memories? This is why the exhibition is a natural part of the artistic practise; it puts the implications of existing in the world – as an artist – to the test.

This year’s graduating class in the Master’s Programme in Fine Art gives us an impressive breadth of artistic works to enjoy. These works interpret reality and renegotiate it, distil it through research, actions and listening practices. They take shape through painting, film, sculptures and song. Through radicalism, care and poverty, gestural abstraction, sleeplessness and museology. They show clearly the scope and the thought-provoking potential of the art.

Alexandra Larsson Jacobson

Elise Leoni

Danae Valenza

This year, the class has formed a collaboration with the newly established Mint Art Gallery, located in the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF) premises in central Stockholm – a building that opened in the early 1960s and has since then functioned as a centre for self-organised education in the city. This is not a traditional exhibition hall with accommodating white walls and quiet spaces, but instead, an environment that encourages installation in responsive dialogue with existing environments and their own special peculiarities. The works are shown in dance halls, basements and stairwells, through reflections, dialogues and interventions. The exhibition as a practice is thus tested for yet another lap as it approaches the world and its chequered complexity.

Graphic design: Linda Hallstan

Konstfack in collaboration with ABF Stockholm

The crisis in the Swedish art world, as a consequence of the covid-19 pandemic and the forced or voluntary isolation experienced by us all, is a reminder that alone we do not feel particularly good. Therefore, five art organisations – Bonniers Konsthall, hangmenProjects, Index, Mint and Signal – are experimenting with a joint project and have produced the exhibition I Am Not One.

The pandemic is not the theme of this exhibition, but its origin. Through an associative chain of thought, a number of works and artists have been selected by the respective parties. Rather than a concordant curatorial argument, the exhibition can be considered a kind of montage. The works offer angles of approach to the situation we find ourselves in right now. Art is a place for collaborative thinking and it does not back away from what is difficult. Instead of presenting answers or solutions, art allows us to remain with the complicated and paradoxical that permeates our world: existentially, poetically and materially.

Cara Tolmie & Susanna Jablonski

Zhou Tao

This collaboration is one way of drawing attention to our various organisations’ practices and institutional conditions. The crisis currently unfolding in the Swedish cultural sector is probably the worst in modern times and we will need various kinds of help to cope. An evident need of solidarity and support has arisen, as well as a desire to show that art in everyday life must carry on.

Who knows when we may meet again, it will probably be a while yet. But when it is possible, we wish to gather you all for a conversation where everyone is welcome to discuss with us what we want to happen after the crisis. An occasion to examine new forms of collaboration and reflect on the future of art, artists and art institutions. Perhaps this exhibition can be seen as a first invitation.

With a language of symbols drawn from personal experiences, magical signs and material history the perspectives are twisted in strange and unexpected ways. Is it Surrealism?

Paintings and inscriptions by Thea Ekströms (1920–1988, Stockholm), video by Milena Bonilla (1975, Bogotá), sculpture by Thale Vangen (1974, Drammen), experimental film by Eivor Burbeck (1926–1965, Stockholm).

The physical world was still there but this exhibition turns its back on it. From a close perspective sound, video, painting and objects share the joy and fear of temporal ecstasy, rush, heat and mental confusion. When someone puts their hands on your body and your blood vessels merge, when the last drink of the sun blurs your mind, when time seems so thick, when the night is in motion.

Taking matters into your own hands is a polyphonic exhibition. It brings together stories, handicraft, making, places, illustrations and artworks which spring from workers’ self-organisation during hours of leisure. With Adriana Monti, Annika Elmqvist, Ben Cain, Benedetta Crippa, Christina Zetterlund, David Price, Edith Hammar, Gunilla Lundahl, Jenny Richards, Johanna Minde, Margareta Ståhl, Patrick Lacey and Sarah Browne.

Taking matters into your own hands
Curator Christina Zetterlund, with Annika Elmqvist and Benedetta Crippa.

This exhibition takes as its departure point the project I Glasriket – människan, miljön, framtiden (In the Kingdom of Crystal, the people, the environments, the future), which took place between 1978–83. The project was an initiative of ABF in Lessbo and Nybro, together with the local trade union (Svenska Fabriksarbetare-förbundets divisions 2, 44 and 122). The project’s objective was for workers to take matters into their own hands, and to tell their own stories. Inspired by Gunnar Sillén’s book Stiga vi mot ljuset (We rise to the light) (1977), and then, later in the project, Sven Lindqvist’s Gräv där du står (Dig where you stand) (1978), over 30 study circles were organised to gather stories about work and life in the many factory towns in Småland. The result was a variety of narratives regarding working life and leisure, conveyed through 21 content-rich books, several exhibitions and a bus tour arranged by Riksutställningar (Swedish Exhibition Agency). The report comprise depictions of everything from working conditions, life around the glassworks, the self-organisation of work, politics, leisure time and community to the position of women in the male-dominated factory towns. We are also made aware of the numerous and lengthy struggles for right and for the self-organisation of communities on their own terms.

Illustration is the central medium of this exhibition, a curatorial choice that stems from the study circles themselves where illustration became a tool for remembering. The 21 books are richly illustrated with the participants’ own drawings. On the left wall of the exhibition the illustrator Annika Elmqvist has interpreted photos from the books in the form of glass paintings. She has created an homage to those who wrote history, to those who’–despite difficult circumstances – came together to organise, to form associations, to build their own spaces, to study and to entertain themselves. The project I Glasriket wrote design history. It told of the conditions of glass making, but also of the important but little known practice of sölning (the making of friggers, also known as whimseys or ‘end of day’ objects). In fact, in the book series we find one of the few texts dealing with this important practice. On the right wall of the exhibition the graphic designer Benedetta Crippa expands this excerpt out into a decorative illustration which describes the many facets of the practice. Sölning is something that glass workers devoted themselves to in their own time, during their lunch break. It was a way to learn glass handicraft, to advance further in the hierarchical production process and to earn extra income. At the same time, for the skilled craftsman the lunch break was an hour of freedom in which to follow their curiosity, to test and experiment. Many glass innovations have their roots in this practice. Here, a material culture was formed which included both practical everyday objects and decorative items. In this exhibition we show some examples of this culture. However, this form of sölning is found in neither museums nor history books –only in the glassworkers’ own homes. They can therefore be thought of as a form of ghost within traditional Swedish design history.In the exhibition you can imagine them through Benedetta Crippa’s illustrations.

“More dust in our houses, less dust in our brains” – The 150 Hours
Organized by Jenny Richards and Sarah Browne, with Adriana Monti

Adriana Monti’s film Scuola Senza Fine [School Without End] is an exploration of a group of women who were part of the important Italian workers’ study movement, 150 Hours. The 150 Hours was the name of a contract that meant workers were entitled to 150 hours devoted to studying on ‘company time’. It was an agreement won by Italian car and steel workers in 1973. The 150 Hours model quickly moved to other industrial sectors, as well as farming, and was later extended to include housewives and the unemployed.

Central to the 150 Hours was that study should be non-vocational, meaning it was not intended to improve productivity at work: rather, it was intended to be paid time to discuss working conditions and feed personal and collective growth. The 150 Hours courses were influenced by the work of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Friere and so were focussed on the reflection of lived experience through oral history, discussion and writing. This was grounded in a critical enquiry into the question of whose knowledge, and what forms of knowledge, are valued in society. Traditionally not part of the factory unions, the significance of the 150 Hours coming to include unpaid women in the home was a radical recognition of cleaning, cooking and caring as work. These women, living outside of urban centres and previously pushed behind the figure of the male worker, like ghosts of the workers’ movement, materialised through 150 Hours and fed their experiences and voices into the growing feminist struggle.

Scuola Senza Fine produces a polyphonic expression of collective experience, where the individual is entwined within the collective, felt vividly during the shared intimacy of eating together during the study sessions. The chance to view this film today at Mint, ABF Huset, built for workers’ education and collectivity, offers a reflection on the history of workers’ struggle. The 150 hours sits in contrast to the image of the worker presented in the painting fixed on the wall in the same room. It also diverges from the contemporary workplace’s offer of individualised care of workers on the job, through discount gym memberships, for example, or a course in mindfulness to deal with stressful working conditions. Such contemporary approaches seek ‘not to change industrialized socio-political structures and environments, but to enable individuals to relate differently to these contexts.’ What strategies are there that build space and time to question what it means to define and refuse the alienating affects of work today?

As part of the ongoing film series Hands at work, organised by the artist Sarah Brown and the curator Jenny Richards, and Richards reseach project Outsourcing the Body.

Scuola Senza Fine is distributed by Cinenova. Cinenova is a volunteer-run charity preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers.

Training – Small Semi-Skilled Tasks: Units of Exchange, Labour of Trying, Useful and Non-Useful Goods, Caring for Cast-Offs
Organised by Patrick Lacey and David Price, with Ben Cain

In conjunction with the opening, a release of artist Ben Cain’s book Uses of Leisure will take place, in collaboration with artist and writer David Price and designer Patrick Lacey (Åbäke). The book is a loose aggregate of Ben Cain’s practice from the past ten years or so, with thirty projects distributed according to a subjective categorisation of work / leisure / rest. He has recurrently explored art’s ambiguous relationship to industry, commodification and immaterial labour, and is interested in how artworks might pose questions about what we think they are doing and, by implication, our role as viewers in their social and cultural production. The project also takes on a spatial form through a portable installation that on the opening day will spread out on the floor of the August gallery room. “Having been made in order to fit into a small suitcase that is then carried from London to Stockholm where the objects are laid out in the form of a street stall, it’s hard for me not to think of the travelling salesman, perhaps even Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (in part about the links between changing production methods and identity), and ideas about how material is managed and exchanged between people, about how material itself might mediate. The objects shown include products of creative labour and industrial labour, and products that seem to evidence no labour or physical work at all, miraculous objects. Some of the objects on display are actually discarded try-outs taken from wood and steel workshops. These discarded parts have been carefully selected, sand-blasted or polished, and then powder-coated or painted. The method of arrangement involves a type of framing that draws attention to the attempts made in the pursuit of getting something right, learning something, figuring out how to work with tools, materials, and colours. The work is comprised of exercises or sets of found and purpose-made objects – tests, models from an actual workplace and from a workspace in my head. Collectively they present a model of a studio or a nomadic workshop, one which is concerned with labour that isn’t very productive.” With support from Iaspis

Place for craft: Jokkmokk
With Edith Hammar and Johanna Minde

The exhibition also presents contemporary handicraft by Johanna Minde and Edith Hammar – 2019 stipendium recipients of Slöjd Stockholm’s residency ‘Plats för slöjd’ (Place for craft). Their work has taken shape during the autumn in dialogue with Jokkmokk’s local context and landscape, more specifically at the Sami educational centre. The school offers education in duodji/duodje, meaning traditional handicrafts, (leather, textiles, wood/horn); Sami languages: Northern-, Lule-, Ume- and Southern-Sami; reindeer herding and Sami food crafts.

Johanna Minde: “I work with traditional and experimental methods within duodji. Above all I explore the intersection between duodji, design and architecture. During the residency period in Jokkmokk, through various tanning methods I investigated the possibilities of using reindeer skins in design. By preparing skins with variations on the type of process and degree of tanning penetration I have tested the reindeer’s skin’s ability to transmit light.”

Edith Hammar: “The cabinet is built in pine, without screws or hinges, but built with glue and wooden dowels. The motif is quite spontaneous, autobiographical mixed with wishful thinking, just like my drawings in ink. When I was satisfied with a sketch, I used chisels of different sizes to cut out the images. While working in Jokkmokk, I was surrounded by waterways and forests, and I thought a lot about my grandfather, who often told me stories about when he emigrated to Canada for work. His best trick as a log-floater was to go down in the splits with each foot on a log, in the middle of the water.”

Mint’s second show is a composition in three parts. It is about going your own way morally, as an artist and as a human being. Where is the integrity in our thoughts and actions? This is what the works ask and answer, by examples of small engagements: in spheres, rolling globes and gathering circles.

Fernando Sanchez Castillo, Canicas, 2002

Fernando Sanchez Castillo, Canicas, 2002

Fernando Sanchez Castillo, Arquitectura para el Caballo, 2002.

Inger Ekdahl, Utan titel, olja på duk

Inger Ekdahl, Utan titel, olja på duk

Inger Ekdahl (1922–2014, Ystad)

Untitled, 1970s, 80×80 cm, oil on canvas
Untitled, 1985, 60×60 cm, oil on canvas
Untitled, year unknown, 60×60 cm, oil on canvas
Untitled, 1974, 44×44 cm, oil on canvas
Untitled, 1970s, 58×58 cm, oil on canvas

Inger Ekdahl is one of the pioneers of Swedish modernism. In 1963 she was part of Sveagalleriets exhibition ’11 Swedish Artists’. The show was curated by art critic Eugen Wretholm who wanted to highlight ”the bold outsiders” in the Swedish art-scene. The eleven participants, among them Oskar Reutersvärd, Lizzie Olsson and Folke Treudsson, were described as a diverse group of practitioners who had chosen to deviate from the staked out paths of commercial success. In the curatorial statement at the time Ekdahl is described as “a meditative spontaneist”, framing her methodical duality of controlled composition and spontaneous elements which became the hallmark of her practice. After the World War II, Ekdal moved to Paris where she got in contact with Jean Arp (1886-1966), Victor Vasarely (1906-97) and representatives from the art collective De Stiljl, among others. These connections became formative for her artistic development and she remained plugged into the international modernist art-scene throughout her life. In Ekdahls works from the 60s she often used a modified vacuum cleaner which she used to blow paint on the canvases, resulting in multilayered paintings in muffled tones. At Mint, paintings from the 1970s and 1980s are shown. Here, the expressionism of the 1960s has made way for a period of strict geometrical experiments with light, Ekdahl referred to these paintings as systematical compositions. The depictions of fan-like patterns and circles are unique, which create optical illusions and resemble glowing points in motion.

Following Ekdahls passing in 2014 her artistic estate was donated to Ystad konstmuseum.

Thanks to Ystad konstmuseum and Galerie Nordenhake.

Fernando Sánchez Castillo (b. 1970, Madrid)

Arquitectura para el caballo (Architecture for Horses), 2002, video, 5’30” Canicas, 2002, glass beads

A man mounted on a white Iberian horse trots (or dances) through the corridors of Universidad Autonoma in Madrid. The architecture of the school has a special history. The new university is strategically located on the outskirts of Madrid, which made it easy to isolate, and also close to the headquarters of the army. The school’s construction began shortly after the student uprising of 1968, during which students and unionized workers protested against the fascist regime of Franco. The university was inaugurated by Franco himself. The building was created in a grid, and was planned to contain no venues for social interactions, with easy access for police interventions by horse. At later uprisings horses rode through these halls and corridors, and were trained to be to be able to sprint stairs. In the 2002 video Arquitectura para el caballo Fernando Sánchez Castillo takes an interest in the relation between the building and the body of the animal. Its an easy demonstration of the architecture of power. In the installation Canicas (2002) thousands of glass beads are presented. This is also part of the history of the building, during the 1970s the students spread marbles through the corridors of the faculties, thus temporarily preventing police from riding in on their horses.

David Väyrynen (b. 1983, Gällivare)

Ni är guld värd, 2019, poem
Readers: Mathias Väyrynen, Lena Sjötoft, Berndt Wäyrynen, Miriam Vikman, Karl-Erik Taivalsaari

Med andra ord, 2019, poem
Readers: David Väyrynen, Pernilla Fagerlönn

Konferenstal, 2019, poem
Reader: David Väyrynen

In the Moa-gallery at Mint there is a listening station with new commissioned poetry by David Väyrynen. Med andra ord [In other words], Ni är guld värd [You are worth your weight in gold] revolves around the example of the good deed, but also around the frustration that can arise as fewer and fewer people engage in nonprofit organisations. The first poem consists of an enumeration of thank yous, big and small, conveyed in the seemingly banal form of submissions to the “Praise of the Day”- a section of a newspaper, where life in all its fragility can be presented. The other puts forward a polemic, stressing the importance and unbearable vulnerability of Sweden’s associations and study circles. Konferenstal [Conference speech] is performed during the opening of the exhibition. David Väyrynen (b. 1983) comes from Hakkas in Gällivare and is a laborer, local politician and poet. In 2017 he published the noted poetry collection Marken, which through prose, songs, sermons and lists, depicts the region of Malmfälten, and two major popular movements fundamentally influencing its culture and mentality: the in-church Laestadian revival and the Socialist Workers Movement.

This year, the Degree Exhibition has been curated by Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari whose method is to dig where they stand and, through dialogue with the surrounding context, understand the site’s specific relationships, historical connections, conflicts and opportunities.

The exhibition is taking place in every imaginable nook and cranny of the school – in the basement, library and Mandelgren lecture hall, in corridors and studios. As a visitor, we want you to be able to move freely between the different spaces. The school’s various disciplines are separated in order to provide some clarity over the diversity of expressions that is Konstfack.

In the works by 179 students, it is of course difficult to trace a common theme, but they include an interest in translation as an artistic practice, the language of emotions, the slow processes of craft and the role of design in the age of climate change. At the same time, we have actively chosen to look for where in the school the critical discourses take place, in which spaces and from which perspectives they occur. One such example is the POC student collective Brown Island. The cross-disciplinary group arranges exhibitions and has recently published a handbook with lessons on decolonising processes in educational environments, Brown Island in the White Sea: A Handbook for a Collective Practice. As part of the Degree Exhibition, we have, in dialogue with the group, allowed texts from the book to sneak into the exhibition’s infrastructure. With this intervention, we as curators wish to highlight a greater issue about a school’s historiography and how initiatives such as these can rub off on an institution’s existing structure. What stories are hidden in the school’s architecture, systems and inhabitants?

Mint’s first exhibition looks at a subject fundamental to our lives – both as critical beings, and for our recuperation: time after work. The different works relate to the theme in direct and indirect ways, through both documentary and abstract expressions. They are about transformation, hobbies, reading and resting. They are about stretching, furnishing, educating oneself and remembering. Quiet reflections on the materials and settings of leisure but also the societal premises which enabled them in the first place. Pension, holidays and time off are the fruits of the struggles of the workers movement – the basis of rest was won by fighting. The exhibition could be seen as a situation of different ideas being started, a place which, like leisure itself, is allowed to chose its own strange roads – perhaps unclear, maybe meaningful, perhaps in time becoming crucial. Or in the words of Gregor Paulsson, initiator of a significant 1936 exhibition of ideas about leisure in southern Sweden: “Leisure is the premise of freedom, the air which the autonomy of the people breathe.”