@MEDELHAVSMUSEET

Bonniers Konsthall presents one of the most expansive exhibitions by Lawrence Abu Hamdan to date, which includes a new series of work alongside pieces by Abu Hamdan that allow for an interrogation of witnessing and testimony. The title »Dirty Evidence« comes from Abu Hamdan’s definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence’s figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth.
Abu Hamdan recognizes the space for art as a site wherein attention can be drawn to real socio-political conditions in order to challenge the structures behind those conditions. Three major discourses have emerged wherein the representation of violence is permissible—juridical, media and art. Abu Hamdan engages the aesthetic practice of art as an alternative vis-à-vis the aesthetic practices of the media and juridical to uncover and challenge their representational logics. The artist can therefore push at the boundaries of what constitutes testimony.

Testimony is integral to understanding violence, human rights violations and state abuse. Abu Hamdan’s work in this exhibition draws us not only towards questions of testimony’s presentational circumstances and conditions of use, but also towards questions of who can speak in which spaces, what kinds of talk can and cannot be heard, and what conditions establish the possibility to make claims. The exhibition creates space for listening to testimony that might otherwise not be heard. For example, that of Bassel Abi Chahine, whom Abu Hamdan interviews in the two-channel video Once Removed (2019) and whose testimony not only concerns a war-crime but as a reincarnated subject upends given assumptions about presence and witnessing. Or as in the piece Earwitness Inventory, (2018–2019) comprised of 96 custom designed and sourced objects all derived from legal cases in which sonic evidence is contested and acoustic memories need to be retrieved, which challenges what we know about memory and testimony.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Bonniers Konsthall and Lenz Press will publish the artist’s first major monograph. This richly illustrated publication will present a comprehensive overview of the artist’s practice accompanied by commissioned essays by Ruba Katrib, Andrea Lissoni, Ramona Naddaff and Yasmine Seale.

In 2019 Abu Hamdan received the esteemed Turner Prize alongside Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo, and Tai Shani. Abu Hamdan has exhibited extensively, amongst others at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern and the Hammer Museum. The artist’s audio investigations have also been used as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International together with fellow researchers from Forensic Architecture.

Image: Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Bassel Abi Chahine, Shot Twice (By the Same Bullet), 2021. Installation detail.

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

Diaspora Letters är ett visuellt samtal mellan fotograferna och konstnärerna Nicolás Wormull, baserad i Chile och Ricard Estay, baserad i Stockholm, Sverige. Samtalet inleddes i samband med protesterna i Chile 2019 helt utan ord, där bilderna som de skickade till varandra fick tala. I två parallella dagböcker som demokratiskt samlas i Diaspora Letters får åskådaren ta del av en feberdrömsliknande resa.

En intim mikro-makro dialog som troligen pågått längre än arbetet sträcker sig. Till synes längre än de två känt varandra. Kanske till och med i generationer. Från en diaspora till en annan. Denna utställning är en inblick i hur samtalet har gått under de två år som dessa individer hade en konversation. Vad pratade de om egentligen? Och vad säger samtalet om de två världarna under denna tid?

Accelerator presents Swedish artist Adèle Essle Zeiss as part of an Autumn exhibition programme focused on transformation and how we relate to the human body and our personal space. Essle Zeiss is presented in parallell with artist Jonathan Baldock. Two exhibitions characterised by sensuousness, presence and a cautious hopefulness.

Marabouparken konsthall continues this fall with a large-scale solo exhibition by Leif Holmstrand. The exhibition will include works from his entire time as an artist, from the 90s until present day. Leif Holmstrand is perhaps mostly known as a performance artist, and the performative is a clear red thread in the exhibition. Live performances will also be a part of the program during the course of the exhibition.

The exhibition highlights his comprehensive work as a visual artist. His many objects where the material is central – yarn, textile, black garbage bags, prams, tough nylon rope – have occasionally been actors in his performances, but are also independent works in their own right. They gather here on the stage that is the exhibition room – even though they have been created during a twenty five year period, they are all remarkably contemporary, sharing a distinct affinity among them.

A selection of costumes featured in performance situations are shown in the exhibition. One of them stems from the extensive project Asami Kannon, which manifests itself in both literature and performance. While the character gets its first name Asami from a Japanese horror film, Kannon is the Japanese name of an East-Asian deity, female at times, male at times, who is associated with compassion and charity. In the piece many recurrent themes of the artist congregate – the ritualistic, the violence, the vulnerability of the body and mind, the transboundary gender belonging, trash as culture and life’s ultimate consequence – but also a deep empathic understanding of mankind’s condition, warmth and compassion.

An interest in the mythological is consistent for Leif Holmstrand. In a series of photographic works from 2018, Holy Helpers, he presents “14 mutated saints” with the words: in a world of garbage bag plastic, make-up and new kinds of eyelashes; these saints can guide queer people through diseases and traps of the mind and dangerous surroundings”.
In another work we meet Aphrodite Anadyomene while she rises from the sea, an Aphrodite that drags the seas garbage with her from the depths – she too a goddess who far from Botticelli’s Venus, is connected to a darker history of rage and violence, born as she is from her fathers castrated genitals. The shapeless ocean, taking firm shape – an ideal image of creation and art – becomes an image of art as a place containing a versatile reality of raggedness, a place where experiences can be included and managed and where Anadyomene, partly risen, partly trapped in a wave of entangled nets and black plastic, claims her place in the world.

The, by format, largest work in the exhibition Breeder Covers (2017 – 18) takes up all of the gallery’s 25 metre long back wall. It consists of 24 objects, crocheted in black yarn. Shapeless, but precise, they reminisce of both body and garment. Alike, but all different, a kind of army, intimidating but pitiful. The yarn hangs and drapes, the crocheted forms seem waiting to be filled. The “breeder” from the title is gay-slang for heterosexual men. Each of the objects has also been given an individual title after a species of slime-mold, curious single-celled organisms who under certain conditions act as a mass, prepared to sacrifice its inefficient parts.

During the same period we are exhibiting Leif Holmstrand’s drawings in the project room on floor 1. They have a feeling of restlessness, the pencil seldom seems to leave the paper and the line’s long threads form nets, maps, figures reminiscent of the sculptures’ rope and yarn.

Leif Holmstrand’s extensive oeuvre also includes close to 40 published collections of poems, which we will emphasize in the public program of the exhibition.

For more than three decades, she has challenged, fascinated and confounded. Meet one of Sweden’s most prominent artists Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff, in the exhibition “Alternative Secrecy”, featuring photographic works from von Hausswolff’s entire career, and see her personal selection of works from the Moderna Museet collection.
In this exhibition, you will find roughly one hundred works from Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff’s entire career. In addition to photographs, she has created with sculptures, textiles and installations. See art from her debut in the early 1990s to the recent series in enamel and acrylic glass.

As a child, Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff was fascinated by Nordisk kriminalkrönika, a magazine that reported on Swedish crime in text and images. Since then, women’s vulnerability, violence and psychoanalytical theories have supplied much of the subject matter for her art.

But this multifaceted artist’s career has not only concerned the arts and visual art. In the late 1980s, von Hausswolff was also a singer in the third edition of the legendary punk rock group Cortex.

50 works selected from the Moderna Museet collection

For the exhibition, Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff has also selected some 50 works from the Moderna Museet collection.

“Every image I’ve selected has asked me a question or argued its case. I have answered by affirming its existence. Together the pictures constitute an incomplete map of my own work,” writes Annika Elisabeth von Hausswolff in the exhibition catalogue.

These works are shown as an independent part of the exhibition and in dialogue with von Hausswolff’s own works. Artists represented include Ivan Aguéli, Irving Penn, Ulla Wiggen and Francesca Woodman.

Welcome!

Members of Pussy Riot exhibiting

Övre Galleriet

Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm starts the new year with Homeing I, a comprehensive exhibition of works on paper by American artist Stanley Whitney. The exhibition coincides with a solo show of paintings by Whitney, Homeing II, in our Mexico City space, opening 8th February. The exhibition title refers to Butch Morris’ album Homeing, as well as an animal’s ability to return to a place after traveling a distance from it, like a homing pigeon.

CAPABLE OF RETURNING HOME is a two-week exhibition activated by the physical presence of artist Alva Willemark and choreographer Sybrig Dokter. Artist and choreographer share time and space at Index with one desire—to test the idea of home. What is a home? How do we feel at home? Who has the right to be at home? The current situation has rendered a world with closed borders, thus ‘home’—and ‘homing’—becomes a multilayered question. Willemark and Dokter write that they understand homing as “a symbol of rapprochement, homing as a method of affidamento (meaning entrustment), entrustment as relational basis for examining a material, a material of memory, home, walking and existing. Leading and following. Working next to, offering and receiving support, propelling each-other forward.”