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.