Marabouparken launch a new series of research residencies this Spring in which a number of collectives, archives and organisations are offered space in the top-level gallery to develop their work and publicly present new strands of research.

To launch this new series we will collaborate with Filmform – the Art Film and Video Archive, based in Stockholm. For 3 months we will work together to build a specific collection of films made by and about women. During this time it will be possible to access and investigate parts of Filmform’s collection and learn more about the organisation’s history and evolvement. The residency offers a moment of reflection for Filmform who are currently undergoing shifts in how they deal with archiving their collection and ways to present it to the public in a new website. This moment of transformation allows questions to be asked about how an archive evolves? Particularly when film equipment, materials and processes have drastically changed? How do we categorise or collect films that deal with women’s experience and feminism with an intersectional perspective? And when categories of gender have been radically eroded? A series of public screenings with artists and other film archives will open up a discussion that seeks to inform these questions and Filmform’s ongoing development.

Click to see all upcoming film screenings

ACTS OF SELF RUIN
Read about the exhibition programme.

Pioneering Women Press Photographers

Alma Haag, Ellen Dahlberg and Ragnhild Haarstad

During the 20th century in Sweden, a few women at various newspapers defied the social mores and proved that it was possible to occupy a prominent position in the profession. With extreme presence and sensitivity, their images captured some of the crucial moments, people and events of the age and they were widely disseminated in newspapers. Pioneering Women Press Photographers presents three of these photographers: Alma Haag, Ellen Dahlberg and Ragnhild Haarstad. Together they span almost a hundred years of press photography.

Alma Haag

Ellen Dahlberg

Ragnhild Haarstad

Revolution Poetry presents Revolution Art

Revolution Poetry is a Stockholm based cultural/art movement and spoken word platform. Since the end of 2009 they have been creating a new stage for Spoken Word, that gives space to voices of people of colour (POC) which often shares and draws inspiration from experiences of living in Stockholm’s suburbs.  Over the past 7 years they have filled small rooms, culture houses and toured Sweden, building an important movement for artists and activists who use their voice to contribute to the picture of what Swedish life is like today; and what dreams we have to change society for the better.

Their work is built on a fundamental belief in justice, in giving public space to individuals who don’t feel they have space in everyday society. After the spread and success of their work Revolution Poetry are ready to embark on a new phase of working at Marabouparken. During their research residency here they will develop a new strand of working called Revolution Art. Revolution Art offers a new avenue for artists and performers to develop cross disciplinary work that does not need to be fixed to a live event.

Over the 3 months Revolution Poetry will used their residency space at Marabouparken as a studio to share their work, hold meetings with artists, and host public events and workshops. In the residency space you can also spend time and find documentation from previous performances and browse a library of books related to post colonial politics. During their residency you are welcome to come and use their working space at Marabouparken. On a number of Wednesday evenings a member of Revolution Art will be in the space to meet you and discuss your work. Please visit Facebook to check which dates Revolution Art will be there.

This is the second in Marabouparken’s new research residencies which offers space and resources for collectives and groups to develop new strands of their practice. The residency is part of the ongoing research project ‘Acts of Self Ruin’ which questions how to build solidarity and equality in an age of individualism. Their residency also ties to the current exhibition ‘Starting from the Self’, where personal experiences are used to question the society that structures and divides us.

Workshop – Justice Through Art

The key work in the exhibition is a film essay also titled Report to an Academy that explores an art school as a Kafkaesque, neoliberal workplace, where language is a tool of conflict. Report to an Academy is a reworking of the Kafka story of the same title. In the original story, an ape delivers an address to a gathering on his transition into human life. Within Report to an Academy the protagonist is an octopus who tells us of her motivation to escape her human form and transform herself into an octopus in the search for new forms of expression and physical agility.

Report to an Academy builds on Browne’s and her colleagues’ experience of working within a university. A series of workshops with staff and students at the Royal Institute of Art and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design explore different ways of responding to institutional language through activities such as constructing poetry from graffiti within the art school, and materialising spaces of non-complaint through basic mouth-casting techniques. Versions of the workshop are also happening in Glasgow School of Art & University College Dublin. The workshop and film hope to articulate, share and re-imagine bodily experiences of work within institutions of knowledge production. Elements from the workshops can be found within the exhibition guide.

This is Sarah Browne’s first solo exhibition in Sweden and begins a new series of solo exhibitions within Marabouparken’s BOX gallery.  Report to an Academy is the second exhibition within Acts of Self Ruin, Marabouparken Konsthall’s long term exhibition programme dedicated to exploring the struggle for collectivity and equality in an age of individualism. With this presentation Browne explores the alienation of the workplace and the physical stresses exerted on workers’ bodies. The workshops in particular offer a way to discuss, share and connect our experiences of work. Report to an Academy was originally commissioned by Manual Labours, a research project focused on the ‘complaining body’ in the contemporary workplace in 2016.

In spring 2017, Marabouparken Art Gallery will collaborate with Livstycket in Tensta. Together we will explore the perception of women’s work throughout history until today.
The project includes: an exhibition (5/6–28/5), a collaboration (workshops during February, March, and April), and an event (a fashion show 5/20).

Robel Temesgen will present his first solo exhibition in Sweden. Working in painting, installation and hand written newspapers and publications the exhibition presents work that mobilises different strategies to address the social, political and economic context in Ethiopia. Concerned in the construction of public space and the connection between gathering places of spiritual or cultural tradition and their potential as gathering places of political collectivity, Temesgen produces a series of new paintings reflecting on these significant yet overlooked locations. Whilst the painting might be perceived by the viewer as a pleasing composition of colour and form Robel feeds this seemingly uninhibiting medium with hidden meaning.

A series of hand written newspapers gather different stories and accounts from Ethiopian media forming a collage of voices and happenings. Ambivalent in their narrative the fragmented collection is painstakingly hand written onto each sheet. This old news provokes comment on the content our newspapers usually hold and what value can be placed there? Another series of small handmade publications mimic what one might find ina sacred spiritual amulet. Their tiny pages are printed with images of locations Robel has investigated in the paintings. Captured here for intimate reflection the images test whether their political potential can be captured on film or in print. At the back of the exhibition stairs invite the audience to sit down and read a paper left there. In Addis Ababa often newspapers are not for sale but are rented by the reader as they catch up on news or search for jobs and advertisements. Here too these newspapers are not tobe taken away but offer a moment for you to browse, sit a while and review what kind of gathering place has been created here?

Lilian Domec, Hackney Flashers, Helga Henschen, Lubaina Himid, Pia Sandström och Billie Zangewa

Starting from the Self is a group exhibition exploring practices that begin from the personal experiences of the artist(s) to understand how society is structured and organises us. The exhibition is particularly concerned with how gender, race and class play into questions of private and public boundaries and the different ways people have transgressed and renegotiated these  borders and the categorisation of space.

The exhibition includes work by local artist Helga Henschen, a resident of Sundbyberg who persistently and playfully inserted her words and work into the public sphere. Henschen is known for reformulating advertising space to publicly communicate her criticisms of society, and for building an art practice that could be tied to public political work through the Social Democrat Party, where she fought for the rights of political prisoners and children. Stockholm based artist Pia Sandström develops a new commission in the gallery, that explores the urban environment as seen through the eyes and experiences of the other female artists in the exhibition. Pia’s work forms a framework to navigate the works of Helga Henschen, Lilian Domec, Hackney Flashers, Lubaina Himid, and Billie Zangewa.

Notions of public and private space and the codes with which we behave in these spheres becomes sometimes painfully evident when entering an art space. Unwritten rules such as quietness, no running, or even where you are allowed to enter the gallery can produce anxiety. At Marabouparken Konsthall, Pia Sandström tries to play with, and breakdown those regulations. Another entrance way stands ajar, offering a backdoor for the audience to find their way into the space whilst a series of pillars replicating the original architecture, reshape the main gallery. With these pillars Pia provides a support structure for displaying Helga Henschen’s posters, simulating the cultural advertisements you would see outside the gallery strapped around lampposts. Other painted arrows and floor markings suggest connection and navigation for the audience between the other works.

For example, Henschen and Domec’s work and life shares many similarities. Both were active in the same period and used their work to stimulate political discussion and debate through drawing and commentary in the public sphere. They both were part of the women’s movement and spurred on the implementation of gender equality reforms in the 1970s. Women’s rights are discussed in the slideshow by Hackney Flashers, whose campaign around childcare and the isolation of women at home was happening simultaneously in the UK. Questions around how we might understand motherhood and female identity today can also be found in the work of Billie Zangewa and her depiction of the contemporary parent, single and empowered in her home.

But what happens when we move from the home into the public space? What controls and boundaries are in place there? Lubaina Himid’s piece What are monuments for: Paris / London Guidebooks considers what we see when we encounter a city – what people and names can be seen on city streets or historicised in monuments? And what invisible regulations do these entrench in the narrative of who makes a city and who a city is for? Her piece Jelly Mould Pavillions offers us an alternative sculptural walk through the Konsthall. There you can see a proposal for other monuments for the city of Liverpool, that we might see if it were indeed a place that recognised and represented the contribution of it’s communities to the place it is today.

Each of these distinct works raise discussions on separation and boundaries based on gender, race and class, which feel ever more relevant to raise today. These critiques have developed from a willingness of the contributors to start from the self, to build upon personal experiences and histories in order to understand how society segregates us. Yet these works also offer hope, proposals, a way forward in order to provoke debate, change and transgress these preset divides. The city can be seen as a place where these invisible boundaries are intensified yet they are also sites of continuous change and activity, activity that disregards these unwritten rules, and persistently erodes the invisible codes of conduct. As Lilian Domec once wrote in a postcard to her friend and collaborator, art must demonstrate, that everything is possible if you let go of habitual thought patterns.

In connection to the exhibition we open up the Konsthall and present Spring Clean – a weekend of events and performances investigating the different ways society structures us to perform in different spaces, from public to private, from home to work. For more information and to find out about our full public programme please visit www.marabouparken.se

Starting from the Self is the third exhibition within Acts of Self Ruin and connects to practices which challenge and question the normalised boundaries between self and society, the personal and political. Practices that can be described as putting themselves risk or ruin in questioning the control (and choreography) of different bodies and actions within public space.

New Enter Image

Miriam Bäckström’s exhibition New Enter Image, is a new body of work that negotiates the boundaries of photography, textile and architecture. The focus of the exhibition is a large-scale installation of suspended woven tapestries based upon photographs Miriam Bäckström has taken. Created in different sizes and formats, these tapestries redefine the architecture in the gallery. The original photographs are extremely high-resolution digital images of various banal manufactured surfaces including textile, plastic and cardboard. They capture the intricate details that only advanced technology is able to register. This information is then translated into digitally woven tapestries, a medium often associated as traditional and tangible: where the resolution of the photographic image ends, the yarns of the textile begin.

In Miriam Bäckström’s previous work, photographs of rooms and interiors reveal themselves to be staged or referred to reality to somehow be artificial. In Set Constructions (1996–2002) the works offer two perspectives of a film set within one image. One perspective documents the world that Bäckström is in when documenting the film set, whilst the other presents the illusion, the film set, which is a reality in it self. In these works fiction and reality are equally relevant and credible, yet visually distinguishable from each other. New Enter Image, builds on this work, where fiction and reality merge into one image, one perception.

Photography has, since its invention in the 1840s, placed the viewer in front of an image, to occupy the spot where the camera was positioned when the image was taken. Today, the mass and constant flow of images means there are multiple perspectives at play at anyone time. We can say that one no longer looks at an image from a singular perspective; but rather inhabits a situation from multiple viewpoints, or as Miriam Bäckström describes it, we are able to enter the image.

Artificial reality is characterised by the absence of rules and restrictions that determine its physical counterpart. Today, it could be said that photography is being forced to abandon the tasks it traditionally was born to perform – as a tool to represent and document reality. Photography no longer signals ‘truthful representation of the real’. Instead it refers to itself, imitates itself and often references its own history.

In New Enter Image Miriam Bäckström pushes photographic perception to a point where distinctions between medium and image, material and surface become so paradoxical that they can no longer be upheld. She seeks to push the medium to a point of collapse. As a photographic method she employs imitation and illusion, recognition and distortion. Whilst the works in New Enter Image appear to be two-dimensional objective representations of matter; they can in fact be said to render every depicted surface unidentifiable and offer the viewer hypothetical, theoretical and highly speculative scenes.

The exhibition New Enter Image also presents the film Som man brukar säga (As The Saying Goes), a staged play, that has been filmed in front of an audience. The work can be read as a competition in acting or as the art of making conversation. Every character in the play is distinguished by a particular character description. Six actors are given a character, without knowing which one they will play in advance. There is no opportunity for a read through of the script or a rehearsal. According to the rules of the game all interpretations of their characters are permitted: the actors are able to choose during the course of the game, what lines and directions they want to use to portray the character they believe themselves to be.

Reoccurring exclamations of speech and actions are the foundation upon which the characters are built. As the play develops these actions begin to expose their character’s possibilities and limitations. The audience is able to follow the desire of the characters, desires we often attempt to hide or conceal. In the re-occurring pattern of performance, it is possible for the audience to follow, not only the character that is in construction, but also chart the characters fate.

Miriam Bäckström’s significant practice works across photography, video, script writing, performance and installation. Her work employs the term ’character’ – meaning the roles that we play and that play us, as well as the qualities we perceive in people and things – as a tool for disassembling and reassembling image, language and behavior. Miriam Bäckström seeks to create new behaviours and a new understanding of language and images never seen before.

Seeing Through

This fall Marabouparken art centre will be presenting two solo shows with artists Anna Nordquist Andersson and David Claerbout, who in different ways use images as tools for seeing. Through their images we can revisit history, memory and even stay lingering in a fleeting moment. Both artists manipulate their material and create complex images that give the spectators a chance to contemplate a piece of time from new perspectives.

This fall Marabouparken art centre will be presenting two solo shows with artists Anna Nordquist Andersson and David Claerbout, who in different ways use images as tools for seeing. Through their images we can revisit history, memory and even stay lingering in a fleeting moment. Both artists manipulate their material and create complex images that give the spectators a chance to contemplate a piece of time from new perspectives.

Parallel Lines

Gittan Jönsson’s artistic career spans more than six decades. With the recurring themes of power structures and social relations her work is as wilful and strong as it is topical. She is an artist who affects us all; an artist who dares to be political and personal, an artist who gives the big events equal billing with the small. Nothing is too simple to be of importance. The first major retrospective presentation of Gittan Jönsson’s work, the exhibition culminates in the new film Parallella Linjer [Parallel Lines], in which the artist searches for traces of the feminist movement in Stockholm and Berlin, asking her self what became of all the rebellious efforts and actions?

The Unstraight Museum is having a small exhibition in the parkpavilion in Marabouparken this summer. Part of The Unstraight Museum collection is on display and there will be a joint program of guided tours and other events connected to the exhibition.

The Unstraight Museum is a non-profit organisation working to draw attention to LGBTQI related questions within the museum and exhibition context. The purpose is to make non-normative and unstraight stories and history visible through cultural projects. Individuals who are ”invisible” or ”do not” exist, cannot demand any rights and will never be seen if their lives and stories are not represented. That is why representation is a key.

This is the first time the collection is put on a regular display, where it normally is only shown at The Unstraight Museums website. The collection that exists of mostly ordinary everyday objects is connected with a personal story that gives us another perspective of the meaning or representation of this objects.

Guided tours in Swedish will be available 18th of June, 16th of July and 20th of August, all at 2 pm. No charge.

For further information visit:

www.unstraight.org

When the stork landed in Sundbyberg

This year Sweden’s largest chocolate manufacturer, Marabou, celebrates its 100th anniversary. Beginning in 1916 as a family business in the small market town of Sundbyberg, Marabou has grown into one of Sweden’s best-known brands. In addition to chocolate, Marabou has bequeathed a cultural-historical heritage comprising a progressive workplace designed by leading designers and architects in the shadow of the tall factory tower. The exhibition When the stork landed in Sundbyberg depicts the first six decades of the history of Marabou.

Early on and with an eye to the future, Marabou gave personnel welfare a central role in its corporate culture and quickly distinguished itself as one of the most modern industries of the era. Taking its Norwegian parent company A/S Freia as a model, Marabou was inspired by the idea that nature, architecture and art could serve as a counterweight to the negative effects of urbanisation and industrialisation. In keeping with the new values of the time, a progressive workplace was created in which social responsibility, art and an aesthetically designed environment were of great significance.

Hundred years have passed since the Marabou stork landed in Sundbyberg, and the stork has since flown away; the logo, featuring the eponymous bird, was revamped in the 1960s and in 1976 Marabou moved to Upplands Väsby. What remains is a small part of the sculpture collection, on view at the Marabou Park, and the stories of the people who worked in the factory, which in its heyday had almost 1,000 employees, many of whom were women, immigrants from neighbouring Finland and from rural areas in Sweden. They tell tales of an often exhausting, dangerous and monotonous work with a high turnover of staff. There are also accounts of a great community feeling and loyalty to both the company and to each other, of summer camps and staff parties. An exposé of Marabou’s history, the exhibition When the stork landed in Sundbyberg portrays the people behind the brand who worked at the factory, those who designed the facilities and their visions and the emergence of the confectionery industry in Swedish society.

Margareta Hallek is on view until December 18, 2016.

Participating artists: Maria Adlercreutz, Elsa Agélii, Zandra Ahl, Olle Baertling, Helene Billgren, Ann Böttcher, “Moki” Cherry, Shabnam Faraee, Johanna Friedman, Josefin Gäfvert, Margareta Hallek, Leif Holmstrand, Charlotte Johannesson, Anna Nordström, Paola Torres Núñez del Prado, Veronica Nygren, Kaisa Melanton, Claes Oldenburg, Lennart Rodhe, Hannah Ryggen, Pia Sandström, Rickard Sollman, Elin Strand & the New Beauty Council, Bella Rune, Jennie Sundén & Åsa Norberg.

The exhibition Textile Subtexts is part of a research project that takes an interest in divergent meanings of the textile, material culture and how it manifests itself in a work of art or in an artist’s practice. The project is curated by and a collaboration between Bella Rune, artist and Professor of Textiles at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm and Helena Selder, curator at Marabouparken Art Gallery.

Textile Subtexts takes its starting point in the “liberation” of textiles in the 1960s in Sweden. From here the investigation moves back and forward in time to pose questions on the role played by textiles in artistic practices and times. The moment of “liberation” is represented by, among others, Margareta Hallek, whose work is presented in a separate gallery, where we can follow the artist’s playful and experimental practice from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The exhibition brings together Swedish artists from several generations, including Hannah Ryggen (b. 1894) to Josefin Gäfvert (b. 1988), whose works activate various layers of the “textile subtext”. Some of these subtexts are visualised in the exhibition’s thematic “balls of yarn”, which are unravelled to create associations between artistic practices and works, presented in an exhibition architecture comprising walls constructed of safety and sports nets, dividing the space, exposing the reverse of the works, separating and connecting them.

Of particular relevance is “the history of women’s art ball of yarn”. It was largely female practitioners who, despite limited room for manoeuvre, not only renewed textile art in the 20th century, but also politicised and introduced textiles as an artistic material. Textiles’ connection to decorative art and everyday, domestic, “low” materials and techniques such as knitting, tapestry, embroidery and appliqué (a forerunner of collage and assemblage) was exploited as a component of feminist critique and politics.

The different themes of the exhibition overlap one another. The textile narrative in the form of abstractions and patterns gets tangled up with textiles as commodity, software and system builder. Textiles’ plasticity and need for support are exploited in new sculptural expressions and performances while also providing them with an emotional register – all of this becomes meaningful as an act of resistance in a more anti-hierarchical, playful and ambiguous art world from the 1960s until today.

Nisrine Boukhari, Santiago Mostyn, Johanna Steindorf

Curators: Elena Jarl & Iliane Kiefer

Rethinking Flânerie is a group exhibition at Marabouparken that presents artworks by the international artists Nisrine Boukhari, Santiago Mostyn and Johanna Steindorf, who challenge the well-known concept of the flâneur in the 21st century. The exhibition curated by Elena Jarl and Iliane Kiefer, will feature photography, films and installations, which raise questions about gender, migration, home and exile.

The figure of the flâneur which was revived in French literature in the 19th century, has until today been widely debated in various disciplines. In the 20th century, artists reused flânerie and created new strategies of walking in the city to problematize the effects of capitalism on a changing urban landscape. Even if certain historical legacies still shape the perception of the flâneur today, Nisrine Boukhari, Santiago Mostyn and Johanna Steindorf show how present manifestations may be a necessity. As contemporary wanderers, travellers and even as a flâneuse they show new strategies to process personal conflicts and social inequalities. The artworks offer different means to experience a variety of narratives, encouraging the audience to rethink flânerie today.

The exhibition at Marabouparken will be accompanied by Johanna Steindorf’s audio-walk The Strange Half-Absence of Wandering at Night starting at Marabouparken. In this audio-walk, participants accompany a female protagonist through the park and neighborhood at dusk. The walk reflects upon the female flâneur – the flâneuse – and the situation for women in public space. It mixes narrative, text excerpts, music and field recordings. The sun sets while the participant walks, bringing out other qualities of this environment.

Lear more about the audio-walk

Seeing Through

This fall Marabouparken art centre will be presenting two solo shows with artists Anna Nordquist Andersson and David Claerbout, who in different ways use images as tools for seeing. Through their images we can revisit history, memory and even stay lingering in a fleeting moment. Both artists manipulate their material and create complex images that give the spectators a chance to contemplate a piece of time from new perspectives.

This fall Marabouparken art centre will be presenting two solo shows with artists Anna Nordquist Andersson and David Claerbout, who in different ways use images as tools for seeing. Through their images we can revisit history, memory and even stay lingering in a fleeting moment. Both artists manipulate their material and create complex images that give the spectators a chance to contemplate a piece of time from new perspectives.

Nothin’ Shakin’ but the Leaves on the Trees

The first solo exhibition of Edward Clydesdale Thomson in Sweden brings together a series of works which exist on the margins of inside and outside, questioning the relation between landscape, ideology and identity. Here, one group of works presented indoors act as a precursor for a new work outdoors, five sculptures commissioned specially for Marabouparken. At Marabouparken konsthall the artist has transformed the gallery into a metaphorical space of everyday objects, images and forms that blur the boundaries between interior and exterior. Drawing from the topiary garden and his own childhood memories, Thomson presents garden as cultural construct, but also as an element of imagination and memory.

On the large grass lawn of Marabouparken five sculptures bear references of historical forest use and the industrial-scale growing of spruces. Edward Clydesdale Thomson’s sculptures speak of the different roles the trees in the forests have played in Swedish culture as timber, capital and cultural environment. This work, commissioned for Marabouparken, is also reflection on the nature of the park itself. Marabouparken was laid out to give the illusion of a naturally emerged oasis – a place for physical and spiritual recreation that would also create a strong sense of connection to the company and thus further loyalty and productivity. This is where the ideology about Marabouparken and the Swedish forest start to overlap – as models of belief and productivity.

The narrative of forestry use in Sweden can be read in spiritual, economic and moral terms that define the complex politics of our relation to land use. Notions of identity and the modernistic ideals of productivity produce a responsibility for ‘nature’ that pairs morality and capitalist ideals.

– Edward Clydesdale Thomson

Margaret Raspé and Anna Sjödahl at Marabouparken konsthall
Joanna Lombard at Konsthall C

Marabouparken konsthall and Konsthall C are delighted to present the first exhibition of Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Sweden and a joint exhibition and events programme entitled From Her House including the work of Anna Sjödahl, Margaret Raspé and Joanna Lombard and a weekly film programme with expanded artistic examinations of the home, domestic (maintenance) work and the gendered division of labour.

At Marabouparken the exhibition From Her House presents key works by Swedish artist Anna Sjödahl and German artist Margaret Raspé; contemporaries of Ukeles. This accompanying exhibition provides key coordinates for understanding how feminist art practices were cultivated during the 1960s and 70s.

Anna Sjödahl

Margaret Raspé

Film and events program

Beginning with a survey of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her significant examination of Maintenance Art Work between 1969–1980 the exhibitions and events programme delve into expanded artistic examinations of the home, domestic (maintenance) work and the gendered division of labour; asking how these radical practices can prove relevant today. The accompanying film programme will be shown at Marabouparken konsthall and offers weekly reflections on feminist struggles battled in the everyday. Two showreels of artists film and video work punctuate the programme which include a number of work from the Cinenova collection, dedicated to distributing films and videos made by women.

Learn more about the public programme

Maintenance Art Works 1969–1980

Marabouparken konsthall and Konsthall C are delighted to present the first exhibition of Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Sweden and a joint exhibition and events programme entitled From Her House including the work of Anna Sjödahl, Margaret Raspé and Joanna Lombard and a weekly film programme with expanded artistic examinations of the home, domestic (maintenance) work and the gendered division of labour.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles (born 1939 in Denver, USA) took a seminal position in early conceptual and feminist art. Her work looked to highlight otherwise overlooked aspects of social production and questions the hierarchies of different forms of work, especially of housework and low-wage labour. Her early work was experimental, and visually and symbolically conveyed her own personal expression and turmoil as well as the social unrest surrounding events, such as the women’s movement and the Vietnam War. Ukeles was trained in America in the 1960s, in an artistic climate which considered conceptual frameworks and the process of making art as important as the visual experience. Many works of Ukeles have originated in a performance, with the artist undertaking actions or tasks, which would then be documented through photography, text or film for presentation in a gallery setting. Other important influences for Ukeles were the political debates of civil rights activism and identity politics. In an atmosphere of departure, Ukeles and many other artists expanded their concerns towards the wider socio-political discussion, and engaged actively with real-world problems.

Ukeles early work displayed at Marabouparken konsthall show an array of projects that evolve from her own struggle at home. Born from the frustration that her responsibilities as a mother were seen as a distraction to her art work she sought to test the boundaries of art by seeing both these forms of work as the same. Here the value systems associated with domestic labour were brought into focus with the value systems attached to the white cube gallery. In both of these ‘spaces’ the labour of their maintenance, upkeep and care was to be invisible, cleaned away to leave only the smiling house wife or the art piece on the plinth. By challenging the socio-political landscape she herself was forced to negotiate, Ukeles found a way in which her personal struggle could find common ground with wider political battles.

The presentation of Ukeles’ work across Marabouparken konsthall and Konsthall C highlights her movement from the home to the realm of the public. Marabouparken konsthall will exhibit Ukeles’ early work reflecting on the seminal performances of cleaning actions within her home expanding a critique to the art institution. Konsthall C will present the later long-term project <em>Touch Sanitation</em> (1977–1980) a project involving Ukeles’ residency at the New York Department of Sanitation and a performance in which she dedicated herself to thank and shake hands with every Maintenance worker in New York City.

On Invasive Grounds
Katja Aglert
22 February–19 June

In the exhibition On Invasive Grounds, artist Katja Aglert explores some of the ideas related to the widespread notion of a lost natural, primordial state, characterised by harmony and balance, which we strive to re-establish. The exhibition traces the human hand in the proliferation of artificial light, explores the Arctic of male myths and the flora of the World Heritage site of Suomenlinna in neon-based work and video installations. Eventually a completely different idea about the earth’s original state emerges: a world that has always been, and continues to be, in perpetual flux, a world characterised by constant interaction between animals, nature and human beings, the latter of which may be regarded as the earth’s most invasive species.

CURRENT PROGRAM RELATED TO THE EXHIBITION

With the point of departure in Marabouparken’s own history and what it can tell us about the ideals and the time in which it was designed, we have chosen works from the collection of Malmö Art Museum in which nature, and that which is considered natural, are the elusive reference points of the beautiful and the normal, as well as of the threatening and the uncontrollable in our lives.

The exhibition Our Inner Nature gathers twelve prominent Nordic artists whose works span the 1880s to the present day. Via nature the works reflect and comment on our civilisation and cultural history in which the concept of nature often starts and ends in our own hands. In an act of circular reasoning we define what is natural, apply it to nature and then refer to our constructed image of nature as proof for, and argument against, the unnatural, the abnormal – that which does not belong.

Erik Bünger, Written On Tablets of Flesh 
The Great Learning Orchestra, a4 rum
Angelica Mesisti, Citizens Band

Under the heading No Sound is Innocent, three parallel exhibitions are brought together which in various ways relate to sound and listening, voice and music.

Erik Bünger
Written on Tablets of Flesh

The exhibition Written on Tablets of Flesh is a trilogy of essayistic works by artist and composer Erik Bünger, accompanied by his live performances and a display of artefacts that recur in the films. Centred on the human voice and employing humour, the exhibition chops and changes between history, philosophy, media and popular culture to explore the contradictory relationship between the voice, the body, music, language and technology. Here the voice and music are not the phenomena that primary give rise to a personal, human presence and interpersonal communication; rather they are a strange being that allows a non-human entity to enter the human body and take control over it.
www.erikbunger.com

The Great Learning Orchestra
a4 rum

a4 rum is a project that stretches the boundaries of visual art and music, initiated in 2004 by Leif Jordansson for the Great Learning Orchestra. What began as an open invitation to contribute a composition, which could be in the format of traditional musical notation, written instructions, graphic images or photographs, has now grown into a comprehensive archive of more than 140 compositions that each fits on an A4 sheet.

The exhibition a4 rum is a combination of an installation and a concert in which hundreds of compositions can be both viewed and heard. The presentation of a4 rum at Marabouparken konsthall is the most comprehensive presentation to date and comprises a large number of new compositions by well-known artists, musicians, etc.

The Great Learning Orchestra will perform several of the exhibited compositions in Marabouparken on October 1 and 22 and November 12 and 26.
www.thegreatlearningorchestra.se

Angelica Mesiti
Citizens Band

The exhibition Citizens Band comprises four films that document musicians who work outside the established music scene. The films were shot in ordinary public places, from a public swimming pool and the Metro in Paris to the streets of Australia, where both the music and the context in which it is performed depict a life in exile.
www.angelicamesiti.com

Summer programme in Marabouparken

Uppehåll is a summer programme held in Marabouparken with a mix of performances, concerts, theatre, sculptures and audio works. The summer program will be in parallel with the exhibitions Our Inner Nature and On Invasive Grounds through 19th of June when the art centre closes and focuses entirely on the park space.

Artists participating: Katja Aglert, Kerstin Bergendal, Bouillon Group (Natalia Vatsadze, Teimuraz Kartlelishvili, Vladimer Khartishvili, Konstantine Kitiashvili, Ekaterina Ketsbaia, Zurab Kikvadze), Freedom on Wheels, Hägerstens Botaniska Trädgård (Johan Eriksson, Sofia Hultin and Ingela Ihrman), Peter Geschwind, Theodor Klingberg Geschwind, Olof Olsson.

Let Everybody Come Out Today

By seemingly simple gestures, Ferhat Özgür connects the individual reality to larger issues of the human condition in a changing world, where the city of Ankara represents that which constructs, limits and enables our lives. Özgür’s art is characterised by a personal narrative voice, and the social and political issues that he raises are relevant far beyond the borders of Ankara and Turkey.

In 2002 Ferhat Özgür asked the neighbours in the street where he grew up to pose for a group photo outside their homes. Having moved from the Turkish countryside to Ankara, they built their homes on the outskirts of the city. Now, their part of town was due for bulldozing. In the diptych Let Everybody Come Out Today, the neighbours stare grimly at the camera, marked by life. It is a key work in the oeuvre of Özgür, who for years has been critically following the changes taking place in his home environment, where smaller villages and informal settlements are torn down and replaced by a growing number of skyscrapers and shopping malls.

A chronicler of his immediate surroundings, Özgür portrays with humour and warmth the challenges facing the individual in a country where the lines between Islam and Christianity, Turkish traditions and Western influences are blurred and constantly renegotiated.

The video I Can Sing shows how high-rise buildings are appearing between the minarets that have traditionally dominated the city of Ankara. A woman wearing a traditional headscarf stands against the backdrop of her reconstructed home, moving her lips to Jeff Buckley’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. This classic song, whose lyrics have been the subject of many interpretations, refers, in this double cover, to how the changing city has received both praise and resistance.

Well it goes like this / The fourth, the fifth / The minor fall and the major shift

Even the major key of the Western popular song seems to be an indicator of uprooting as it obliterates the minor tones characteristic of traditional Turkish music. Swaying to Hallelujah, spreading her arms to the sky, the woman becomes an embodiment of societal upheaval and change.

The video work Metamorphosis Chat (2010) and the more recent Women in Love (2013) both cite the narrative frame of Turkish soap operas. The actors in Özgür’s films are often acquaintances and relatives. Together they seek images and gestures to visually express the difficulties facing especially women living in a patriarchal society and in a present that is constantly producing new realities and questioning traditional ideas of a successful life.

In Metamorphosis Chat, Özgür’s mother, who wears a traditional headscarf, meets a neighbour, a teacher in modern dress, for tea. The women decide to switch roles and begin to exchange clothes. Özgür’s influence as director recedes as the women, allowing themselves to get carried away by the merriment of dressing up, become their own authors. Their hearty friendliness, their openness in dealing with what might otherwise be embarrassing, their laughing at each other and themselves – all poke fun at the fear and aggressive moralising found in debates on symbols with religious connotations.

In Özgür’s latest work, Women in Love, a group of middle-aged widows are reminiscing about their lives with their husbands. The conversation encompasses their vulnerability, fragility and isolation as child brides; identifies painful descriptions of domestic violence and alcohol abuse and heightens our awareness of the nature of matrimonial loyalty through stories of love and loss.

Mum 1954/2011 is a double portrait of Ferhat Özgür’s mother. More than 60 years have passed between the two images and we are reminded of how we age and our relationship with our parents who were once young men and women. This work also refers to the modernisation process in Turkey where Özgür’s mother represents the many women who, in the beginning of the 1950s, migrated from the countryside to the big city of Ankara. Instead of integrating themselves into the more liberal lifestyle of the capital city, many women chose to preserve the traditional values and clothes from their villages. These young rural women grew more conservative in the country’s urban centre. As a young woman in 1954, Özgür’s mother did not wear a headscarf, it only became part of her identity when she moved to Ankara.

A common theme for the majority of Özgür’s photographic works is the city of Ankara, which he has described as a being that infiltrates his bloodstream, lives with him, poisons him but also vitalises and energises him. In Our Neighbourhood, three young boys are gazing out over a changing urban landscape. A number of high-rise buildings are under construction, half-finished houses are sprouting up from the arid ground next to more informal, smaller houses in the nearby slum area. In The City’s Breath Inside Me, air-filled plastic bags are hovering over the poor area of the city, where Ferhat Özgür grew up. Having no money to buy kites, Özgür and his childhood friends made their own out of plastic bags, which, when filled with air, flew as well as the shop-bought ones.

In one of Ankara’s slum areas, the residents gather at a building site for a communal embrace. Özgür began working on Embrace just before the Iraq War started and draws a parallel between the changing city and the fragile peace in the region. The work also forms an association to the dream of a better life, in an area where many people live in houses with protruding iron bars, waiting for the day when they will be able to add another floor to their homes.

Manifesto

Anna Witt is a German artist (b. 1981) who often works in different local contexts with performative interventions in public space involving strangers, often passers-by. The works in the exhibition Manifesto are connected to a new site-specific work that the artist has been working on in Sundbyberg during the winter. A common theme of the new work and the works in the exhibition at Marabouparken art space is that they act as playfully staged situations where people can express their ideas about society – a characteristic feature of Anna Witt’s artistic practice.

Thinking seen as an action in itself is something that pervades Anna Witt’s artistic practice. For the work Radical Thinking (video installation, 2009), the artist spent two weeks in the shopping mall Lugner City in Vienna asking people to develop radical thoughts and if she could film them while they were thinking. “I feel that the action of thinking provides the person being portrayed with a certain power(scatch of an alternative realityattention ever connected to theirymtionding. n. You can observe somebody thinking but you can never catch up with their thoughts.” In this and other works the artist investigates ideas about who can be political and what the political means in everyday life. In Empower Me (video and cardboard signs, 2007), Anna Witt “kidnapped” random passers-by in the street and brought them into the exhibition space where she had built a small stage. Once in the room they were given the opportunity to define the demands for their release and act as hostages in a film. Anna Witt attempts, in different ways, to provoke confrontation between the individual and the surrounding world, whether in body language, text or via images. In The Eyewitness (video, 2012) we follow a group of children aged 8-10 who are discussing current news topics with each other in a room with blown-up images from the Reuters press archive. The children, reflecting the grown-up world with their mix of facts, misunderstandings, acquired opinions and their own ideas, allow us to take a closer look at how we actually handle these kinds of images.

Together with the residents of Hallonbergen Anna Witt has composed a manifesto that will be conveyed in a parade during the spring, the so-called Everything Can Happen Parade, where the participants, using sculptural letters, will form the text as the parade moves along. Manifestoes are historically connected to a certain cultural scene or to a political agenda whereas the Hallonbergen manifesto will voice a multitude of perspectives and levels. Concrete topics in Hallonbergen, private matters and global concerns face each other and create a private but at the same universal agenda for the future.

The Everything Can Happen Parade has been commissioned by Marabouparken Lab.. Under this heading we initiate local, collaborative projects that develop through interaction between artist, commissioner, residents and stakeholders. As the name suggests these project are allowed to be experimental, open-ended and explorative and can be presented both in and outside the gallery space in Marabouparken and around Sundbyberg.

Meriç Algün Ringborg, Magnus Bärtås, Kay Rosen and Mladen Stilinović

The exhibition ABCDEFGHI presents works by four artists who all share an interest in the linguistic. The first nine letters of the alphabet would not signify much were it not for the fact that the final two letters appear in a different colour and form the word HI. The title of the exhibition, which is a work by the American artist Kay Rosen, is a greeting as well as an invitation to look closer at language and the ability of words to assume various functions, meanings and behaviours, as conveyors, generators, signs and images.

Kay Rosen, Meriç Algün Ringborg, Magnus Bärtås and Mladen Stilinović work in different geographic contexts, have different native tongues but all use language as method, form and image in order to direct our attention to its impact on our way of speaking, thinking, reading, communicating and perceiving the world. With small additions, emphases and dislocations, their works open up our way of observing and comprehending things which we perhaps otherwise would not have noticed, and give equal prominence to misreadings and misunderstandings as to precision and exactitude.

Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan)

La vie en rose presents a selection of over 50 photographs taken in Mali’s capital Bamako, in the 1960s-1970s by the internationally acclaimed Malian photographer Malick Sidibé. The exhibition includes the iconic black-and-white photographs that have made Sidibé world famous: the parties in the 1960s, studio portraits and a selection of photographs from his archive. Presented is also a reconstruction of Sidibé’s legendary studio, which he set up in 1962 and continues to run with the help of his sons.

Recently, Mali has been wracked by a military coup and ethnic unrest, but in the 1960s, Mali was experiencing a burst of energy and optimism that followed upon its liberation from French colonialism. Malick Sidibé’s images unveil the magic and excitement of Bamako in those years when the desire to be together, of being part of history in its making seemed imperative. Positioned at the junction of Malian independence and a period of rapid modernisation, the works bear witness to the joy, insouciance, and confidence of Africa’s youth revolution.

The youths in Sidibé’s photographs are in contradiction not only with colonial-era studio photography, but also with the patterns of life that one would expect in a decolonised state. Many African independence leaders at the time criticised the youths for alienating themselves from the teachings of the national state, mimicking and assimilating the culture of the coloniser. What might not have been visible then is that through popular culture – by seizing upon their own individuality, looking like the modern black image detached from nation and tribe – important connections were made across national border with the black diaspora and international youth movements.

Although a small sampling of Sidibé’s oeuvre, La vie en rose captures the excitement of a generation who were free to deviate from social norms through a mixing of traditional and Western clothes and music.

Born in 1936 in Soloba, a village outside of Bamako, Malick Sidibé began his career as an apprentice to the French photographer Guillat-Guinard for whom he in 1957 started making his first reportages of parties, christenings and weddings. In 1962 he opened the Studio Malick, in the popular neighbourhood of Bagadadji, where he continued his activity as portraitist. At the same time Sidibé depicted the outdoor life of Bamako: people in nightclubs with exotic names that were opening everywhere in town and house parties spinning the latest James Brown album as wells as picnics on the banks of the river Niger. Sidibé was invited to all the big events: his fame was so great that if he could not participate, they would change the time or even the day of the event. In an interview with John Henley of the Guardian in 2010, Sidibé reflected on the burgeoning nightlife in Bamako:

“We were entering a new era, and people wanted to dance. Music freed us. Suddenly, young men could get close to young women, hold them in their hands. Before, it was not allowed. And everyone wanted to be photographed dancing up close. They had to see it!”

In Sidibé’s studio portraits his subjects are often dressed in their finest clothes and accessories, including jewellery, purses, hats and occasionally props as Vespas and motorcycles, exuding a cool, hip, macho or seductive attitude. His photographs at parties capture a similar ambience, although the snapshots are constructed more formally.

Although many of Sidibé’s iconic images were taken almost fifty years ago, it is only recently that he has achieved acclaim. Since 2000, he has been the recipient of the Hasselblad Award (2003), the International Center of Photography Award for Lifetime Achievement (2009), as well as the Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement (2007).

The exhibition La vie en rose is curated by Laura Serani and Laura Incardona and is made in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti, where it was first shown in 2010.

Marabouparken har glädjen att presentera en retrospektiv utställning med konst & designgruppen Uglycute. Gruppens fyra medlemmar; Markus Degerman (konstnär), Andreas Nobel (inredningsarkitekt), Jonas Nobel (konstnär) och Fredrik Stenberg (arkitekt), inledde sitt samarbete under namnet Uglycute 1999 som en direkt reaktion på det debattklimat som då var rådande inom svensk design. Gruppen blev en del av en generation av formgivare och konstnärer som använde design och konsthantverk för att diskutera smak, kvalitet, klass, genus och samhället i stort. Med tiden utvecklade sig Uglycutes praktik till en verkligt genreöverskridande hybrid. I kraft av sina medlemmars olika professioner kom gruppens verksamhet att innehålla lika delar teori, praktik och pedagogik och har vid det här laget förgrenat sig in i den svenska och internationella konst- och designvärlden genom objekt, utställningsarkitektur, inredningar och undervisning som etiketteras beroende på beställare.

Enligt Uglycute själva utspelar sig deras praktik mellan konst, design och arkitektur. Målsättningen är att expandera begreppet design genom att korsbefrukta det med gruppens olika professioner och genom att analysera dess inverkan på samhället inte bara genom att utöva utan också genom att skriva, undervisa och organisera workshops. I Uglycutes sökande efter nya förhållningssätt till material, skönhet, ekonomi och samarbete uppstod den speciella fulsnygga ”look” med möbler, objekt och inredningar tillverkade i spånskiva, nålfilt, frigolit och lera. Utställningen i Marabouparkens 500 m2 stora galleri kommer att presenteras i en labyrint av transparenta metallnätburar, lika mycket en skulptur som utställningsarkitektur. Publiken kommer att kunna vandra runt i denna labyrintskulptur som bildar ett tredimensionellt arkiv över Uglycutes metoder sedda genom objekt, möbler, inredningar, filmer och pedagogiska grepp.

Sin speciella särart och inflytande som grupp har Uglycute skaffat sig tack vare sin rörelse mellan design- och konstområdena. Positionsförflyttningar har skapat både missförstånd och belyst hemmablindhet och ömsesidig okunnighet i bägge läger. Även om målet varit en förnyelse av designen så har mycket av arbetet och diskussionen varit förlagd till konstvärlden. Varför det? Jo, därför att konstvärlden erbjuder platser och utrymme för kritik och självreflektion och är en av de mest sofistikerade kontexterna att diskutera form i. Genom att ge Uglycute sin största separatutställning, sedan debuten på galleri Agata i Stockholm 2000, aktualiserar vi den roll som konstrummet spelar för en så viktig politisk och samhällelig debatt som formdebatten.

Som exempel på de sammanhang som Uglycute figurerat i kan nämnas: inredning till Cheap Monday huvudkontor 2010, Härmapan, scenografi till koreografen Anna Källblad, Moderna Dansteatern, Stockholm 2008, Dreamlands Burn, Mücsarnok Budapest 2006 (utställningsarkitektur till samlingsutställning med svensk samtidskonst), Konceptdesign, designutställning Nationalmuseum, Stockholm 2005, Sonic House på samlingsutställningen Utopia Station, Venendigbiennalen 2003, Stilen förde oss hit, designutställning, Röhsska muséet, Göteborg 2002, inredning till Magasin 3 Projekt Djurgårdsbrunn, Stockholm 2002, lounge för Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2000.

Den 15 oktober 2011 deltog en tapper skara i en planteringsworkshop med konstnären Andreas Gedin. En 40 meter lång text planterades med pärlhyacintlökar på Marabouparkens stora gräsmatta. Det var titeln till den berömda folksången WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE?

Lördagen den 12 maj stod lökarna i full blom och Marabouparken bjöd in till vernissage med musik, barnaktiviteter och firande av våren! Som tilltugg serverades specialkomponerade smörgåsar med vallmofrön. Tanken var att dessa frön kunde resa genom matsmältningskanalen, ut i reningsverken och så småningom ge upphov till nya blommor!

Lotta Antonsson
Yngve Baum
Stina Brockman

Three Photographers. Three Trends is a historical exhibition and publication that spans several decades and reflects the shift within photography that began in the 1960s. From having been a predominantly documentary practice the medium developed towards a more autonomous artistic approach before cementing its place within the contemporary art scene. The exhibition is a presentation of three major Swedish photographers from different generations: Yngve Baum (b. 1945), Stina Brockman (b. 1951) and Lotta Antonsson (b. 1963), and aims at highlighting the overall trends in their individual work as well as their relationship to one another.

All three photographers are clearly marked by the contemporary context of the era in which they entered the scene, but that influence was mutual and their work also contributed to the formation of the larger movements that developed both in dialogue and confrontation with various parties. An important idea behind the exhibition is to allow for a juxtaposition between different perspectives and readings. What can, in one respect be described as a thematic group exhibition, can also be seen as individual presentations of three different artists. In each case, the work shown ranges from early breakthrough pieces to completely new images. Some of which are being shown here for the very first time. The selection reflects the changes that have taken place over time, as well as the continuity that characterises each artists’ work. This enables both direct comparison between the works, and the more general trends that these three photographers can be said to represent.

Pawel Althamer
Kerstin Bergendal
Catti Brandelius
Anna Högberg & Johan Tirén
Kateřina Šedá
Anna Witt

The word hembyggd (home made) can express initiative, creative joy and authenticity. Hembygd (homeland) on the other hand refers to the area that surrounds one’s home and the environment and the people we come from, identify ourselves with and are formed by. In the exhibition title the words are combined into Hembyg(g)d, in an attempt to pinpoint the element of home- madeness that a hembygd often is and our possibility to participate in and contribute to the physical and social environment in which we live and work. The exhibition Hembyg(g)d presents seven artists whose works create connections between human relations, the physical environment and society at large, by examining, discussing, documenting and forming the environments and contexts in which we live.

A central work in the exhibition is artist Kerstin Bergendal’s presentation of the Sundbyberg-based art project PARK LEK. For some eight months Bergendal has explored Hallonbergen and Ör on foot, equipped with her backpack and her video camera. By talking to residents, local actors, civil servants, building contractors and politicians, she has gradually built up a unique urban development project – PARK LEK. The discussions have resulted in approximately 45 short films that together constitute the artist’s portrait of both districts. The films will be screened in the exhibition in a specially – designed living room furnished with objects borrowed from the residents. The films will also be available on the project’s homepage www.parklek.com. In addition, a model with a proposal for the reorganisation of Hallonbergen and Ör that the 146 participants in PARK LEK have worked on will be displayed.

Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s work stems from a desire to make common cause with his neighbours in pursuit of the metaphysical side of life. In the project Common Task, Althamer and his neighbours from Bròdno outside Warsaw travel around in gold space suits in an attempt to observe their own and others’ lives through the eyes of aliens. Since 2010 the Czech artist Kateřina Šedá has collaborated with the residents of the small Czech village of Nošovice whose character and community has been destroyed by the gigantic Hyundai factory that opened in the middle of the village. In her installation That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles, which includes tables and tablecloths, she shows how she and the villagers paint and embroider a new identity around the perimeter of the factory that their village has been reduced to.

The German artist Anna Witt turns the so-called “privilege to formulate the problem” on its head in her Battle Rap. She invited a number of ethnologists from Munich who research “ghetto language” and “gangster rap” to present their reports in a “rap battle” with the rappers who were the subject of the research. The Stockholm housing estate Bredäng with its residential blocks, underground station, footpaths and football pitch is often the location in artist and musician Catti Brandelius’ films. It is also here that her most famous artist alias, “Miss Universe”, spends her days being waited on by her many slaves. In her latest film we encounter a woman, who, by reacting to her own fear, is transformed into Förortsindianen (the Estate Indian) – the protector of the female residents of Bredäng.

Sometimes artistic work occurs on an abstract level, as in the earlier work of Anna Högberg and Johan Tirén where they collaborated with civil servants at the office of Regional Growth, Environment and Planning in order to try to find new approaches for strategic and visionary planning for the development of the Stockholm region for the next 30 years. For the Hembyg(g)d exhibition they have created an outlook tower with the ambiguous title Point of View. As a sculpture it embodies an important aspect of several of the participating artists’ work; the ability of art to put into perspective peoples’ position in the social structure.

A suite of screenprints from 2006 are based on letters that a young Morrissey, himself an obsessive fan and at the time an aspiring music writer, wrote to the London music weeklies in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Collins brings back to light a selection of these passionate and sharp-tongued contributions, which only rarely made it into the reviews proper. These works expand on one of the central aspects of the world won’t listen, namely the issue of fandom and cultural fascination.

In the exhibition at Marabouparken, Phil Collins presents his acclaimed three-part video installation the world won’t listen. Filmed in Colombia, Turkey and Indonesia, the trilogy features fans of the influential indie-rock band The Smiths performing karaoke versions of tracks from their 1987 compilation album of the same name. Collins first began work on the world won’t listen in 2004 in Bogotá, where he re-recorded the album note for note with local musicians and created a fully functioning karaoke machine. The second part took place in Istanbul in 2005 and was included in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial. The final part was filmed in 2007 in Jakarta and Bandung, the hotbeds of a flowering Indonesian rock-scene. Out of hundreds of takes from each country, Collins re-assembled the world won’t listen in its original running order, thus creating a collection of ‘video-albums.’ A tender, humorous, and occasionally heartbreaking portrait of humanity, the work is a study on the mediation and strength of popular culture’s global reach. the world won’t listen is in many ways representative of the collaborative and participatory situations with which Collins’ art is frequently associated. At the same time, it exemplifies the central dichotomy that lies at the heart of his diverse practice, between the emotional core of lens-based media and their ultimate potential for manipulation.   

The photographic series britney comprises large-scale prints of defaced Britney Spears posters which Collins photographed in the New York subway in late 2001. Infusing these discarded and abject images, caught in an extreme close-up, with formal precision and a pseudo-monumental pathos, it is as if the artist is implying that the camera, the original agent of her spectacular degradation, might now be able to re-humanise the fallen star.

Ann Lislegaard has, since the beginning of the 1990s, developed an international artistic career centred on film, sound and light installations, whose mind-expanding characteristics are her special attributes. In the exhibition Haunted. Tapping of the Fox Sisters. at Marabouparken, we present a selection of her recent science fiction inspired works, which feel particularly urgent in a time when our political culture is characterised by fear and retrospection. The genre of science fiction is a broad current in popular culture whose power of attraction lies in its ability to make us break our habitual conceptions and reflect on our contemporary age with the help of imaginative alternative worlds, depictions of the future and spectacular “what if” scenarios. Few cultural expressions have, like science fiction, been able to make people ponder complex issues such as the relationship of dependence between past, present and future, sexuality and fear of the unknown. However, the science fiction aficionado is well aware that one does not visit the past with impunity, that alien creatures are just a facet of ourselves and that our contemporary gender roles will have the future laughing at our lack of sophistication.

During her entire career, Ann Lislegaard has used her body of work to undermine and redefine our perception, identity and relationship to private as well as public spaces. For her, the connection to iconic works of science fiction-, such as the novels Crystal World by J. G. Ballard, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Female Man by Joanna Russ and films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg, is a way of extending references and making use of meaning carrying images and themes.

In the exhibition Haunted. Tapping of the Fox Sisters, sound, light and moving images lure us into a Lislegaardian universe in constant transformation in which our attitude to space, time, sexuality and the unknown is tested. 

1970 blev den amerikanska författaren, konstnären och aktivisten Kate Millett världskänd med boken ”Sexual Politics”, där begreppet ’patriarkat’ för första gången användes som ett analytiskt verktyg inom den feministiska debatten. Kate Millett skrev ytterligare sju böcker, om bl. a. prostitution, politisk tortyr och kvinnors rättigheter i Iran och kom att bli en av feminismens främsta företrädare.

Efter en längre tid av brevväxling och telefonsamtal med den nu 77-åriga Kate Millett mottog konstnärerna Mikaela och Moa Krestesen (Sisters of Jam) en inbjudan att komma till den legendariska Kate Millett Farm – an art colony for women, i Poughkeepsie, NY. Farmen grundades 1979 och var aktiv fram till för några år sedan. Kvinnliga konstnärer och författare inbjöds att bo och arbeta här, och Kate Millett hoppades på så sätt skapa forum för kreativa samarbeten och möjligheter att utforska en kollektiv samhällsordning helt på kvinnors villkor.

Idag lever Kate Millett ensam och kvar finns bara spår av kollektivet. Mikaela och Moa Krestesen tillbringade en tid på farmen i oktober 2010 och vistelsen dokumenterades med video, ljud och stillbilder. Materialet speglar Kate Milletts liv samtidigt som det reflekterar USA:s historia och berör frågor som historieskrivning och vem som tillåts få bli hjälte. Vad hände med 1960- och 70-talens politiska ideal och den tidens tankar kring gemenskap och solidaritet? Vilka förväntningar och föreställningar har vi kring upplevelsen av det kollektiva idag? Utställningen Kate Millett Farm visas parallellt med ett porträtt av en svensk 1900-tals kultur-personlighet, Hilding Linnqvist, och inbjuder därför kring diskussioner om 1900-talets olika idéströmningar, porträtterandets dynamik, och kanonbildning.

Kate Millett Farm är den första delen i ett pågående projekt där Sisters of Jam bjuder in olika aktörer och institutioner till att genom en kollektiv process bygga på porträttet av Kate Millett. Till Marabouparken har S.O.J bjudit in artisten Jenny Wilson och dokumentärmakaren Fredrik Redelius att tillsammans med konstnärerna skapa en rumslig gestaltning som innefattar rörlig bild, stillbilder, musik, ljud och objekt. Genom dessa och framtida samarbeten hoppas S.O.J kunna lösa upp gränser mellan olika genrer och även öppna upp för ett samtal mellan generationer, historier och samtider.

Artisten Jenny Wilson har skrivit fyra kokande apokalyptiska låtar som tematiskt springer ur Kate Milletts tankegångar. Titlarna för tankarna till demonstrationstågens plakat; “FREEDOM”, “POLITICS”, “EVOLUTION”, “BIOLOGY”. Musiken kommer att kunna köpas på kassettband i en mycket limiterad upplaga i Marabouparkens shop.

Dave Allen, Kerstin Bergendal, Martin Boyce, Nathan Coley, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Martin Karlsson, Matts Leiderstam, Margaret Morton, Paola Pivi, Ingo Vetter, Annette Weisser, Elisabeth Westerlund, Kohei Yoshiyuki, Christine Ödlund

Med invigningsutställningen Parkliv vill vi aktivera den parkkontext som Marabouparkens nya konsthall bokstavligt talat är försänkt i. Som utställningens titel antyder har vi bjudit in konstnärer som intresserar sig för vad som utspelar sig i parken och hur vi förhåller oss till den som natur, kultur och fysiskt rum. Dessa olika aspekter av parkrummet går in i varandra och återkommer i utställningen på olika plan: på molekylär växtnivå, i naturens och kulturens ständiga växelverkan och i parkens sätt att skapa plats i offentligheten för möten och lek – en slags grundläggande mänsklighet. I samband med utställningen publicerar vi en katalog med texter av idéhistorikern Ronny Ambjörnsson, arkitekten och forskaren Katja Grillner och utställningens två kuratorer Bettina Pehrsson och Helena Selder.

Som offentligt rum ger parken uttryck åt ett mänskligt behov att odla och forma naturen efter egna önskemål. Odla gör man inte bara för att överleva – odlandet är också ett uttryck för en social, vårdande instinkt med potential att förändra människor, platser och relationer. I konstnärens Nathan Coleys stora ljusskylt WE MUST CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN har det berömda slutet på Voltaires upplysningsroman Candide upphöjts till ett moraliskt imperativ där ett med versaler uppfordrande ”VI” betonar en gemensam ansträngning. Detta ”VI” har pensionerade ingenjören Lee Burns gjort till sin livsuppgift. I Ingo Vetters och Annette Weissers film I Am Farming Humanity får vi följa Burns berättelse om sin personliga resa från bomullsfältet i Mississippideltat till den gård på Detroits Lower East Side där han ”bygger mänsklighet” och skapar gemenskap genom sina odlingar som hela grannskapet ges fri tillgång till. Detta seglivade behov hos människan att skapa sig en egen oas gör sig påmint under de mest ogynnsamma förhållanden. Margaret Morton skildrar med sina fotografier tillfälliga trädgårdar skapade av hemlösa på övergivna tomter på Manhattan i New York. Trots eländet i de hemlösas situation finner fotografen uppfinningsrikedom, skönhet och lugn.

Kopplingen mellan museet – platsen där idéer om landskap förmedlas av konstnärer – och landskapet självt är ett viktigt tema för Matts Leiderstam. Med sitt för Parklivsutställningen specialtillverkade Periskop (Marabouparken), kan besökarna stå på golvet nere i den underjordiska konsthallen och kika ut bland trädkronorna. Matts Leiderstam fäster vår blick på kopplingen mellan utställningsrummet och parklandskapet utanför – ett samband med potential att prägla inte enbart invigningsutställningen utan institutionen som helhet. I naturen utanför konsthallen pågår kampen ständigt fastän vi varken ser eller hör det med våra trubbiga, mänskliga sinnen. Genom verket Växternas kemiska språk har Christine Ödlund under en längre tid följt en forskargrupp på KTH som genom att registrera växternas kemiska reaktioner på olika stimuli försöker knäcka källkoden till hur växter kommunicerar. Christine Ödlund gestaltar i sitt verk de uppmätta resultaten i ett mångbottnat verk bestående av en skulptural pilskottsinstallation och partituren till två ljudverk: Stress Call of The Stinging Nettle och Plant Drummer.

Marabouparken beskrivs ofta som en ”funkispark” där det funktionalistiska tänkandet är tydligast artikulerat i den stora gräsmattan som är avsedd som en social yta att disponeras fritt för promenad, lek, picknick och vila. Paola Pivis (Untitled) Slope är en konstruerad grässlänt med perfekt ”rull”. Denna gigantiska grässkulptur ger en mångbottnad och lekfull kommentar till trädgården och parkens främsta fetisch – gräsmattan. Som ett sätt att påminna oss om den roll barnens lek spelat i formandet av Marabouparken och andra parker har konstnären Kerstin Bergendal med sitt konstnärliga forskningsprojekt Park Lek lånat lekprincipen från Parkleken – en barnkulturell institution ungefär jämngammal med Marabouparken. I Marabouparkens lokaler har konstnären inrett ett eget fysiskt och mentalt rum där hon bjuder in olika personer till diskussion och lek med parkens idé utan förutbestämt mål. Rummet som under arbetets gång fyllts med teckningar, foton, och modeller flyttar tillfälligt in i Parklivsutställningen för att sedan flytta upp till ett av konsthallens projektrum där processen får sin fortsättning.

Ann Lislegaard has, since the beginning of the 1990s, developed an international artistic career centred on film, sound and light installations, whose mind-expanding characteristics are her special attributes. In the exhibition Haunted. Tapping of the Fox Sisters. at Marabouparken, we present a selection of her recent science fiction inspired works, which feel particularly urgent in a time when our political culture is characterised by fear and retrospection. The genre of science fiction is a broad current in popular culture whose power of attraction lies in its ability to make us break our habitual conceptions and reflect on our contemporary age with the help of imaginative alternative worlds, depictions of the future and spectacular “what if” scenarios. Few cultural expressions have, like science fiction, been able to make people ponder complex issues such as the relationship of dependence between past, present and future, sexuality and fear of the unknown. However, the science fiction aficionado is well aware that one does not visit the past with impunity, that alien creatures are just a facet of ourselves and that our contemporary gender roles will have the future laughing at our lack of sophistication.

During her entire career, Ann Lislegaard has used her body of work to undermine and redefine our perception, identity and relationship to private as well as public spaces. For her, the connection to iconic works of science fiction-, such as the novels Crystal World by J. G. Ballard, Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and The Female Man by Joanna Russ and films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick and Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg, is a way of extending references and making use of meaning carrying images and themes.

In the exhibition Haunted. Tapping of the Fox Sisters, sound, light and moving images lure us into a Lislegaardian universe in constant transformation in which our attitude to space, time, sexuality and the unknown is tested. 

Med anledning av att det har gått 20 år sedan Berlinmuren föll visar vi en ny teckning av Dan Perjovschi varje måndag under sju veckor mellan 9 november och 21 december. Perioden löper från den dag muren revs i Berlin av en upprörd folkmassa till den dag då Ceausescu misslyckades med att lugna den likaledes upprörda folkmassan som samlats framför partihögvarteret i centrala Bukarest. Det var början på Ceausescus snabba fall. (Obs! Förlängt till 21 februari)

Onlinepresentationen av Dan Perjovschis politiska och ofta satiriska teckningar ingår i utställningen Från det ena till det andra som pågår på Rumänska kulturinstitutet i Stockholm t o m 19 februari 2010. I ett samarbete mellan Rumänska kulturinstitutet, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation,Marabouparken, Bildmuseet, Gävle Konstcentrum, Malmö Konstmuseum, Signaloch Norrköpings Konstmuseum publiceras hans teckningar samtidigt på alla institutioners hemisdor. Medverkande konstnärer i Från det ena till det andra ärMarie-Louise Ekman (Stockholm), Harun Farocki/Andrei Ujică (Berlin), Anja Kirschner (Berlin/London), David Maljkovic (Berlin/Rijeka), Ciprian Mureşan(Cluj), Dan Perjovschi (Bukarest), Viktor Rosdahl (Malmö), Stealth(Belgrad/Rotterdam), Judi Werthein (Buenos Aires/New York), Åbäke(Stockholm/London). Curator: Maria Lind.
Läs mer om utställningen här.

Dan Perjovschi har en lång historia som tecknare med verk i massmedia. Sedan 1991 publicerar han regelbundet dagsaktuella teckningar i den Bukarestbaserade tidskriften 22. Under utställningen Manifesta 2 i Luxemburg 1998 följde han samma modell och publicerade nya teckningar i dagstidningen Tageblatt och veckotidningen d’Letzebuerger Land. Han hängde paralellt upp tidningsidorna med den färska teckningen i Casino Luxemburg, den lokala konsthallen. Med enkla medel gör han knivskarpa kommenterar till omfattande politiska, ekonomiska och konstrelaterade ämnen. På så sätt levererar han en bild baserad på den värld han bevittnar men också på hur den förmedlas via mediernas nyhetsflöde. Ibland återförs bilden till de media som förser honom med nyheter, andra gånger tecknar han på väggar i t ex konstmuseer. Han har också arbetat med animation, graffiti och art brut.

Det internationella symposiet Open Engagement genomförs 25, 26 och 28 september. I den kvarlämnade symposiescenografin Art in Public Space is Never a Total Success, but it is Never a Total Failure Either, signerad konstnären Thomas Elovsson, görs nu symposiet tillgängligt av en utställning bestående av filmer och material relaterade till de föreläsningar och konstverk som presenteras inom ramen för Open Engagement.

En av symposiets huvudfrågor handlar om beställarens och uppdragets påverkan på den konstnärliga processen. Hur formulerar man ett uppdrag så att konstnären har goda möjligheter att åstadkomma något intressant för sig själv, sina uppdragsgivare och sin publik? Och vad innebär det egentligen att arbeta situations- eller platsspecifikt? Som arrangörer av ett symposium om beställarrollen, har själva initierat tre beställningsprojekt. Studenterna på Konstfacks Art in the Public Realm har i dialog med landskapsarkitekterna NOD (Naturorienterad Design) kommit med idéer för ett industriområde i omvandling i Sundbyberg. En annan beställning är ett porträtt av platsen Sundbyberg av konstnären och Sundbybergsbon Olof Glemme. Det sk Open Engagement: Commissions, ett öppet formulerat uppdrag där konstnärerna Eva Arnqvist, Thomas Elovsson, Per Hasselberg och Maria Lindberg bjöds in att producera verk i relation till symposiets kontext och innehåll.

Under symposiet berättar konstnärerna Anna Högberg och Johan Tirén om sitt samarbete med planerare på Regionplanekontoret i Stockholm, Marysia Lewandowska presenterar material från samarbetsprojektet Social Cinema i London och Joanna Warsza visar performanceverk hon inititierat i Warszawa – material från dessa projekt och mycket annat kommer att presenteras i utställningen.

Här – inte här

Lokalen som Marabouparken för tillfället disponerar är en f d missionskyrka. Ebba Bohlin har nu i snart ett år haft ateljé i huset och gör nu en platsspecifik installation som både berör det faktiska rummet i utställningssalen och en annan kyrkobyggnad: Engelsbrektskyrkan.

I Ebba Bohlins konstnärliga verksamhet återkommer en fascination för materialitet och ett självbiografiskt utforskande av existentiella frågor. Utgångspunkten är ofta rumslighet både i natur och arkitektur, men tonvikten läggs på ett poetiskt, abstrakt plan.

Ebba Bohlin har under det senaste året ställt ut på Nordin Gallery (Vändningen), Bonniers Konsthall (Rumstering) samt i Norge och Litauen. Hon har nyligen tilldelats arbetsstipendium från Konstnärsnämnden och arbetar med ett projekt för Statens Konstråd inför 2011. 2008 tog hon magisterexamen från Konstfack.

Untitled (Projection)

I Jakob Simonsons Untitled (Projection) (2008) projiceras figurer på och genom en projektionsduk. Duken är uppspänd på en ram och står fritt i rummet så att betraktaren kan se “bakom” bildytan. Från ena hållet framstår det som om någon rör sig bakom ytan. Från en annan vinkel blir det tydligt att det är just en bild. Torrt och enkelt, med en avskalad mystik som bottnar i det upplevda mötet med en mänsklig gestalt, avtäcks den process genom vilken vi ständigt förhandlar med oss själva i mötet med en målning eller en bild: “Detta är en bild, detta är inte verklighet” samtidigt som vi tjusas av illusionen.

Jakob Simonsons arbete gestaltar sig ofta som installationer och skulpturer med tydliga inslag av måleri. Simonson intresserar sig för måleriet som fysisk yta/bildrum å ena sidan och som struktur i det fysiska rummet/landskapet å den andra.

Simonson har under det senaste året ställt ut på bl a Malmö Konsthall, Landskrona Konsthall, Galleri Arnstedt, 0047 i Oslo, Kunsthal Charlottenborg i Köpenhamn och Pavilhão 28 i Lissabon. 2008 tog han magisterexamen från Konsthögskolan i Malmö.

Med anledning av att det har gått 20 år sedan Berlinmuren föll visar vi en ny teckning av Dan Perjovschi varje måndag under sju veckor mellan 9 november och 21 december. Perioden löper från den dag muren revs i Berlin av en upprörd folkmassa till den dag då Ceausescu misslyckades med att lugna den likaledes upprörda folkmassan som samlats framför partihögvarteret i centrala Bukarest. Det var början på Ceausescus snabba fall. (Obs! Förlängt till 21 februari)

Onlinepresentationen av Dan Perjovschis politiska och ofta satiriska teckningar ingår i utställningen Från det ena till det andra som pågår på Rumänska kulturinstitutet i Stockholm t o m 19 februari 2010. I ett samarbete mellan Rumänska kulturinstitutet, Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation,Marabouparken, Bildmuseet, Gävle Konstcentrum, Malmö Konstmuseum, Signaloch Norrköpings Konstmuseum publiceras hans teckningar samtidigt på alla institutioners hemisdor. Medverkande konstnärer i Från det ena till det andra ärMarie-Louise Ekman (Stockholm), Harun Farocki/Andrei Ujică (Berlin), Anja Kirschner (Berlin/London), David Maljkovic (Berlin/Rijeka), Ciprian Mureşan(Cluj), Dan Perjovschi (Bukarest), Viktor Rosdahl (Malmö), Stealth(Belgrad/Rotterdam), Judi Werthein (Buenos Aires/New York), Åbäke(Stockholm/London). Curator: Maria Lind.
Läs mer om utställningen här.

Dan Perjovschi har en lång historia som tecknare med verk i massmedia. Sedan 1991 publicerar han regelbundet dagsaktuella teckningar i den Bukarestbaserade tidskriften 22. Under utställningen Manifesta 2 i Luxemburg 1998 följde han samma modell och publicerade nya teckningar i dagstidningen Tageblatt och veckotidningen d’Letzebuerger Land. Han hängde paralellt upp tidningsidorna med den färska teckningen i Casino Luxemburg, den lokala konsthallen. Med enkla medel gör han knivskarpa kommenterar till omfattande politiska, ekonomiska och konstrelaterade ämnen. På så sätt levererar han en bild baserad på den värld han bevittnar men också på hur den förmedlas via mediernas nyhetsflöde. Ibland återförs bilden till de media som förser honom med nyheter, andra gånger tecknar han på väggar i t ex konstmuseer. Han har också arbetat med animation, graffiti och art brut.

A beautiful young woman leans over the soup bowl of her neighbour and spits into it. She is performing the instruction work Spit in someone’s Soup, Instructions on how to be politically Incorrect (2003) by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm. The work is part of a series of instructions on how to be politically incorrect. Spit in Someone’s Soup is also the name of a travelling exhibition of Erwin Wurm’s work produced by Riksutställningar [Swedish Travelling Exhibitions] in collaboration with Marabou Park. This is the Swedish audience’s first opportunity to acquaint itself with the work of Erwin Wurm – one of todays most interesting sculptors.

Artist’s Talk with Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen September 25, 5 pm.
Opening September 25, 6-8 pm. The ladies choir The Sweaptaways inaugurates the exhibition at 6 pm.

About the Complaints Choirs…
From a conversation between the Finnish artists, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen, sprang the ingenious idea of literally creating a complaints choir. In Finnish the expression “valituskuoro” denotes a mass of people complaining simultaneously. The idea was to bring people together who feel the need to complain in a choir where they jointly can sing their complaints out aloud. Since the Complaints Choir project was first launched in Birmingham in 2005 approximately 20 complaints choirs have assembled all over the world – from Bodö, Norway to Melbourne Australia. The interest from prospective choirs has been so massive that the artists have had to put out a manual on their website www.complaintschoir.org in order to help people organise new choirs.

About The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg…
Marabou Park is joining the worldwide complaints choir movement by creating a local complaints choir – The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg. Do You feel the need for a more creative outlet of your everyday complaints? Join The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg! It’s free and no previous experience of singing is required. The rehearsals commence in October with choir leader Sophie Eklöf. The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg will premiere at the Marabou Park annex located in the former Church of Betlehem in Sundbyberg November 14th. For further information or to sign up for the complaints choir please contact us on ph: +468294590 or write to klaga@marabouparken.se

About the artists…
Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen (lives and works in Helsinki) and Tellervo Kalleinen (lives and works in Helsinki) have, along their individual practices, collaborated since 2003. Apart from the Complaints Choir project they’ve recently launched a project, “I Love My Job”, in Gothenburg where they invite people to make films about “nightmarish situations” that can occur in workplaces. Read more at www.mittjobb.org.

About the exhibition at Marabou Park annex…
At Marabou Park annex a video installation by Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen will be exhibited featuring complaints choirs from Birmingham (2005), Helsinki (2006), Hamburg (2006), St Petersburg (2006), Chicago (2007) and Singapore (2008). A uniting feature of the initiators of the choirs is the idea that they represent the whiniest nation of all and that people all over the world are united in the most common complaints; the weather and public transport. A general feeling of maltreatment surfaces in the recurrent chorus – “It’s not fair!” On top of that we can detect a unique local layer of what seems to be the collective unconscious of the different nations. Of course the Finnish are more annoyed with bad sauna etiquette than other people. Americans worry that their nation is beginning to resemble one big strip mall. Somebody in the Russian choir claims that he or she can paint the square of Malevitj while drunk! In terms of complaints the most dramatic mix of the severe and the banal are perhaps found in the Complaints Choir of Singapore. Whining about “bad hair days” due to humidity together with complaints about the repressive little city state “Where everything that isn’t expressively permitted is forbidden.” Consequently the Complaints Choir of Singapore was forbidden to perform the day before the concert.

Opening of the film with The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg Thursday December 4, 5pm-8pm

The short film with The Complaints Choir of Sundbyberg is the last part of Marabou Park’s autumn with artists’ Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinens Complaints Choirs project.

Vimeo
Youtube

About the Complaints Choirs…
From a conversation between the Finnish artists, Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen and Tellervo Kalleinen, sprang the ingenious idea of literally creating a complaints choir. In Finnish the expression “valituskuoro” denotes a mass of people complaining simultaneously. The idea was to bring people together who feel the need to complain in a choir where they jointly can sing their complaints out aloud. Since the Complaints Choir project was first launched in Birmingham in 2005 approximately 20 complaints choirs have assembled all over the world – from Bodö, Norway to Melbourne Australia. The interest from prospective choirs has been so massive that the artists have had to put out a manual on their website www.complaintschoir.org in order to help people organise new choirs. Marabou Park joins the worldwide movement and creates a local choir.

About the artists…
Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen (lives and works in Helsinki) and Tellervo Kalleinen (lives and works in Helsinki) have, along their individual practices, collaborated since 2003. Apart from the Complaints Choir project they’ve recently launched a project, “I Love My Job”, in Gothenburg where they invite people to make films about “nightmarish situations” that can occur in workplaces. Read more at www.mittjobb.org.

Åsa Norberg, Fredrik Norén, Jesper Nyrén, Jennie Sundén

The P.A.N.K. grant is part of a residency programme focusing on public art. At most five newly graduated artists per year are invited to reside in Sundbyberg and work with new works for public space in Sundbyberg. The programme is a collaboration between Marabou Park and Förvaltaren the local Housing Company.

Offentliga verk uppförda i Sundbyberg

In the lovingly crafted collages by Jakob Kolding, the artist mixes his trademark visual vocabulary of modernist art and architecture, sociology phrases and characters from electronic music, comics and football. All these things seem to have overlapped in Koldings own upbringing in a suburb of Copenhagen and now form the ingredients of an ongoing work in progress. Kolding approaches the question of what happens when we let architecture structure our lives from a multitude of different angles. An idiosyncratic “Koldingesque” cityscape arises out of the mix, where one senses the artist’s own fascination and scepticism with the modernist utopias. In this urban space, art and architecture are often invaded, by people and phenomena that weren’t at all planned to exist there. One such figure is the skater who takes liberties with for example a minimalist sculpture by using it as a skateboard ramp.

In his collages he uncovers underlying ideas and attitudes behind our built environments and makes unexpected connections between popular culture and architecture in an effortless fusion of aesthetics and politics. In spite of his misgivings about settled life in the suburbs as envisioned by city planners, the artist betrays a clear preference for the spare design ideals of 60’s and 70’s architecture. A taste that recurs in the artist’s interest in the formal analogies between the repetitious beats of electronic music, modernist architecture and the paired down aesthetics of minimalist sculpture

The title of the exhibition Pattern Recognition refers to the process by which machines can find patterns in unclassified or randomly arranged information. The expression serves as a loosely held frame both for the works in the show and for the working method of the artist. Pattern Recognition spans 10 years of Jakob Kolding’s work. Audiences will find examples of most aspects of his art practice. There will be drawings from 1996, old and new collages, a documentation of public art projects, an improvised sculpture and examples of the artists sleeve design for the pop group St Etienne. Parts of the exhibition will be presented at OVERGADEN – Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in the spring of 2007.

On February 8th a solo show with the Swedish artist Alexander Gutke opens at Marabouparken Annex. Significant for Alexander Gutke’s artistic practice is a material self-reflexivity, where the works, busy chasing their own tails, manages to create a larger, parallel story. Everyday objects, technology and abstract narratives are transformed into installations for reflection over their own inherent qualities.

The audience is led into the exhibition by the wall drawing Horizon (2001); a work that with simple means creates a “mental horizon” for our experience of time and space. A several metre long number comes to an end with a laconic “dagar” (“days”) through which it creates a comprehensible frame for the unfathomable. Similarly, the slide projection Lighthouse (2006) stretches our established way of perceiving the dimensions of a room by creating a picture plane that seems to extend beyond the surface of the wall. Alexander Gutke often repeats an event or a section of an event and lets it loop in a “time-space” of its own. In The White Light of the Void (2002) we follow, over and over again, an empty film that gets stuck in the projector and melts in the heat of the projector lamp. The melting film is a familiar way of communicating a feeling of nostalgia, loss or the end of an epoch in film. In 9 Ways to Say it’s Over (2006) the artist again shows us how our relationship to reality is shaped through images. A series of “The End” signs from films from the 1920’s and onwards in a number of languages speaks of the universal in the experience of a romance or a loss. The “The End” signage, however obvious it may seem today played a huge role in defining how our experience had come to an end. The film arrives at its final narrative destination while the psychological room created between the viewer, the characters and the story continues to live a life of its own. In Exploded View (2005) this self-reflexivity reaches a crescendo with a slide projector that seems to ponder its own interior and its own projection. This is the tautological artwork par excellence; a projector that shows its own insides in a slideshow, while at the same time managing to transform the images of its own components into a fantastic journey into the microscopic.

Fia Backström, born in Stockholm, was educated at University of Stockholm and Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design (Stockholm) and at Columbia University (New York). For over the past ten years Backstöm has lived and worked in New York. Backström has become known for a number of exhibitions and performances, which she has staged in her home, in public spaces and at commercial galleries. In May, she will be presenting her first solo exhibition in Stockholm, at Marabouparken annex.

Fia Backström’s work highlights the parameters of what defines an exhibition; such as an artwork, a collaboration, or an audience. The generative logic of the work unfurls across a stretch of situations, usually of her own design, encompassing activities and their documentation, environments, gatherings, performances, artworks by other artists, her own texts, prints, recordings, readings, and ephemera. Through a development of format and display methodology, Backström engages peers and visitors in her excavations of the shifting faces of ideology, politics, advertisement and propaganda.

Since the mid-nineties, Fia Backström has participated in a large number of international exhibitions. Her work is currently included in the exhibitions Happiness of Objects (Sculpture Center, New York, 2007) and The Price of Everything (Whitney ISP, Hunter Graduate Center, New York, 2007). She is also a participant in the United Nations Plaza recidency project in Berlin.

The exhibition title Mmmore... plays on the satisfaction and the addiction that both sugar and images create in us. In addition to a selection of new and old works, Fia Backström will set up an outdoor happening in Marabou Park on June 3rd. Eco Day corporate-friendly get-together with a touch of the green movement of the seventies, relates ideas on recycling, life-style and “good” ideologies from a marketing perspective.

In Blonde Revolution (a fia backström production, New York, 2004) Backström confronts the self-conscious goodness and fake fairness of the art world, as displayed in so-called “minority-exhibitions.” The work consists of a manifesto and an environment, into which works by exclusively blonde artists has been lifted.

In lesser new york (a fia backström production, New York, 2005) Backström continues her investigation of display and what an artwork can be. She emphasizes the activity space of collaborations, minor publications, posters, sound works, etc, which according to the artist constitutes a crucial part of an art scene. Just as the distinction between the underground and the establishment is blurred, the logic of the display method, which here transforms the material into a hyper-decorative, form-and-colour coordinated wall newspaper, fuses a strategy of communist propaganda with the seduction of commercialism and shopping.

A New Order for a New Economy – to Form and Content (A proposal to re-arrange the ads of Artforum, Andrew Kreps Gallery, White Columns, Whitney Curatorial Studies, New York, 2006–2007) investigates content displacement via formal qualities. Backström rearranges the ad pages of the world’s largest art magazine; Artforum, according to colour, form and theme. The commercial iconography of the art world, originally designed and arranged to give advertisers maximum visual impact through clashing contrast, is streamlined and redirected into categories such as “animals”, “crying and laughing men” and “collectivism.”

In Herd instinct 360° (New York, 2005-2006), the darker sides of human collective behaviour are investigated, in the art world as well as in society at large. During three Sunday afternoons, Backström staged a situation with sacred undertones, including lectures, performances and common meals. In Marabouparken annex, this environment will be partially re-created. On Sunday May 13th Backström will enact her performance Herd Instinct 360° followed by a screening of the talks included in the initial gatherings.

Events:
Eco Day
Herd Instinct 360°

With a motto adapted from BBC founder John Reith’s remit to “Inform, Educate, Entertain”, Marabouparken has the pleasure of opening this autumn’s exhibition of works by the British artist Olivia Plender.

Information, Education, Entertainment is a thematic solo exhibition which focuses on the TV medium and the art world portrayal of art and artists. The work Monitor (2006–2007) is a slide show essay with an accompanying soundtrack based on the screenplay from a TV programme Private View. The original episode was a part of the BBC’s first arts series Monitor, screened in 1960. The photographs in the slideshow are images of contemporary London based around the narrative of the soundtrack. Together, slide show and soundtrack, tell the story of the changing conditions of art and the gentrification of working class areas of London. The piece was originally presented as a performance at the Tate Triennial but is here shown as an installation.

The installation Ken Russell in Conversation with Olivia Plender (2005) includes the video documentation of an interview between Olivia Plender and the controversial filmmaker. The interview took place before an audience in a stage set reminiscent of TV studios from the 1970s. The topics covered include the experimental documentaries and artist’s portraits Ken Russell made for the BBC in the 60s, the Romantic idea of artistic genius, questions of taste and style and the controversies about him as a media celebrity and filmmaker. Russell’s media persona becomes an image of double-ness as he simultaneously tries to represent and live the role of the artistic genius. With the moralising narrative tone of a nineteenth century temperance movement pamphlet, the most recent episode of Olivia Plender’s ongoing comic book project The Masterpiece (2001-) follows the fate and adventures of the young artist Nick. At Marabouparken, the latest edition The Road to Ruin (for Öyvind Fahlström) (2006) will be presented both as a comic book and as an installation with the characters as life-size cut outs. This episode takes place in the 1980s and we follow Nick as he grapples with the sponsorship ideas of the mega-corporation Bucks, demonstrating how the Romantic notion of genius reinvents itself to adapt to a neo-liberal logic.

During the exhibition Information, Education, Entertainment a programme of film screenings and talks has been put together in cooperation with Filmklubben (the Film Club), a mobile platform for political film. The programme will focus on how the artist is portrayed by television and the art world and on public service media as an ideological tool. Dates and times will be available on Marabouparken homepage from October 11th.

Marabouparken Art Space is pleased to announce an exhibition with Swedish artist Johanna Billing, featuring four films shot in four different European cities. In the exhibition More Films About Songs, Cities and Circles, Marabouparken Art Space presents four films from Oslo (Where She is At, 2001), London (Look Out!, 2003), Amsterdam (Magic And Loss, 2005) and Zagreb (Magical World, 2005) and each city adding its own layer of meaning. Included in the exhibition is also the extensive documentation of the musical tour You Don’t Love Me Yet.

A feeling of melancholy and loss permeates Johanna Billing’s films and her representations of changing societies and the feelings that people suppress and loose touch with. The films portray people in staged, concentrated situations. Their emotional charge is derived from the tensions we keep within and from shifts of focus between the individuals portrayed and the societal backdrop against which their actions take place. The participants in Johanna Billing’s films all play themselves but also take part in a multilayered interpretation of a place and a situation that oscillates between documentary and fiction. Johanna Billing’s films alternate, in a unique way, between charged silence and a narrative borne by pop songs. There are many things that we are unable to speak about without ending up in commonplaces and clichés. The protagonists of Johanna Billing’s films remain silent – unless they sing.

Where She Is At was filmed at the Ingierstrand baths outside Oslo in 2001. In the film a woman’s quiet struggle with herself on the diving tower is brought together with the fate of a recreational facility threatened with closure. Will she dare to jump? Will the baths be closed? Will today’s Norway take the step and leave the old ideas of fresh air and recreation for all behind? The film is looped and we are forced to follow her painful hesitance over and over again.

Look Out, which was filmed in Shoreditch in East London in 2003, records the contrast between a run-down and poor neighbourhood and the housing development then taking place at old Gainsborough Film Studios. The camera follows a group of youths from the area on a tour of one of the luxury flats for prospective buyers. A strange atmosphere develops as they examine and test the sober furnishings and gaze out over their run-down and crime-riddled neighbourhood in this cross between a field trip and house-show.

In Magic and Loss, recorded in Amsterdam 2005, a group of people silently pack up what seems to be a pleasantly furnished single household. A slow methodical choreography develops in their filling cartons and hoisting down furniture into the street. In these strangers’ mechanical handling of someone’s personal belongings, a number of questions and associations about the absent occupier of the flat present themselves.

Magical World, recorded in Zagreb in 2005, shows a children’s orchestra rehearsing Rotary Connection’s Magical World from 1968. The camera moves between the music room and the worn surroundings of the culture centre outside Zagreb, in a Croatia whose hurry to adapt to the rest of “normal” European threatens its own culture. In forced and newly learned English, a young Croatian boy sings the enigmatic and defiant first lines; “Why do you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream?…Can’t you see that I am sleeping?… We live in a Magical World…”.

You Don’t Love Me Yet was both a film recorded in Stockholm in 2003 and a tour that was organised by Johanna Billing and Index (The Swedish Foundation for Contemporary Art) in Stockholm 2002–2005. Twenty artists were invited to perform a cover of Roky Erickson’s You Don’t Love Me Yet from 1984 during an evening at Index. Performing a cover means paying a tribute to another artists by creating your own interpretation of a song – a test of the artists ability to maintain his or her identity while performing somebody’s else song. The concert was repeated in 15 different cities with a resulting 150 versions of the song that will be available at Marabouparken annex for screening. The film You Don’t Love Me Yet depicts a group of artists performing the song together in a recording studio in Stockholm.

GÅVÄNTASTANNA

Marabouparken Annex has the great pleasure of announcing the exhibition GÅVÄNTASTANNA, a total installation by Karl Holmqvist.
Renowned both internationally and in Sweden, this exhibition high-lights Karl Holmqvist’s artistic practice in performance- and text based art since a fifteen year period. The term total installation was first coined by Danish architect and interior designer Verner Panton in the early seventies, from a desire to provide inspiration for people to make use of his textiles and furniture designs to create entire environments in their homes. Based on this idea, Karl Holmqvist has created his own total installation letting the black and white Panton ‘Geometry’ pattern provide background for a selection of texts from, amongst others, Gertrude Stein, Patti Smith, Kakuzo Okakura (The Book of Tea) and William Blake put together according to the cut-up method first invented by beat writer William Burroughs. The text excerpts that are taken from Karl Holmqvist’s most recent book I ON A LION IN ZION are also to be found in a reading on DVD rolling across a TV-screen in synch with the drawn-out pace of Holmqvist’s voice.

In Study Center 1991–2006, a specially commissioned new installation work, Karl Holmqvist has gathered a selection of his artist’s books, writings and graphic design posters published over the past 15 years, several of which have never previously been shown in Sweden. Finally, also included is a wide selection of films, such as the anti-pollution epic CARS KILL or the just recently finished Black Mountain College made in collaboration with French artist Loris Gréaud. This will be the first in-depth survey of Holmqvist’s deliberately eclectic artistic output and his first one-person exhibition in Stockholm since 8 years.

In Study Center 1991–2006, a specially commissioned new installation work, Karl Holmqvist has gathered a selection of his artist’s books, writings and graphic design posters published over the past 15 years, several of which have never previously been shown in Sweden. Finally, also included is a wide selection of films, such as the anti-pollution epic CARS KILL or the just recently finished Black Mountain College made in collaboration with French artist Loris Gréaud. This will be the first in-depth survey of Holmqvist’s deliberately eclectic artistic output and his first one-person exhibition in Stockholm since 8 years.

A conversation will be held on May 11 at 6.30 PM between Karl Holmqvist and art critic Mats B, that will provide further guidance and links to contemporary art practice.

Marabouparken proudly presents an exhibition with the Finnish artist Liisa Lounila (1976) who lives and works in Helsinki. Liisa Lounila works with film, photo and painting but regardless of the technique her works often situate themselves between the moving and still photographic image. The exhibition is a part of XPOSEPTEMBER – Stockholm photo festival.

Lounila gained international acclaim for the films Popcorn, Flirt and Play a series of lo-fi “film sculptures” with muffled soundscapes. These were made with a home-made 360° pin-hole camera that was created with the purpose of allowing Lounila to recreate three dimensional scenes. The films are made with the so-called time slice techique which gives the viewer the impression of movement round a series of frozen events. Bodies and objects seem to float freely in space. The scenes seem to get reconstructed and deconstructed simultaneously. Instead of a conventional, linear narrative, Lounila shows us gestures, memory flashes and details of vanished moments. These are the small parts of a bigger story that the artists let us glimpse but not fully comprehend. In her exhibition at Marabouparken Art Space the artist will be showing the films Flirt (2002), Play (2003), a series of light boxes entitled Roma (2003) and the text works Road Movie (1998) and Valour (2006).

In Play the viewer is given a three dimensional rendition of every gesture and glance of the audience of small and crowded basement club in Berlin. Dark Finnish pop contributes to the club atmosphere – both energetic and expectant. In Flirt a muffled, screechy soundtrack gives the film a threatening undercurrent in contrast to the slightly flirty and ballet like fight that is acted out by a group of people. In the series of light boxes, entitled Roma, black and white, three dimensional lenticular prints portrays interacting couples in intimate home settings. A voyeuristic feeling charcterizes this photoseries of images that becomes animated as the viewers move by. Road Movie is “text film” consisting of texts found on the internet that have been pieced together so that the original meaning becomes short-circuited.

In the lovingly crafted collages by Jakob Kolding, the artist mixes his trademark visual vocabulary of modernist art and architecture, sociology phrases and characters from electronic music, comics and football. All these things seem to have overlapped in Koldings own upbringing in a suburb of Copenhagen and now form the ingredients of an ongoing work in progress. Kolding approaches the question of what happens when we let architecture structure our lives from a multitude of different angles. An idiosyncratic “Koldingesque” cityscape arises out of the mix, where one senses the artist’s own fascination and scepticism with the modernist utopias. In this urban space, art and architecture are often invaded, by people and phenomena that weren’t at all planned to exist there. One such figure is the skater who takes liberties with for example a minimalist sculpture by using it as a skateboard ramp.

In his collages he uncovers underlying ideas and attitudes behind our built environments and makes unexpected connections between popular culture and architecture in an effortless fusion of aesthetics and politics. In spite of his misgivings about settled life in the suburbs as envisioned by city planners, the artist betrays a clear preference for the spare design ideals of 60’s and 70’s architecture. A taste that recurs in the artist’s interest in the formal analogies between the repetitious beats of electronic music, modernist architecture and the paired down aesthetics of minimalist sculpture

The title of the exhibition Pattern Recognition refers to the process by which machines can find patterns in unclassified or randomly arranged information. The expression serves as a loosely held frame both for the works in the show and for the working method of the artist. Pattern Recognition spans 10 years of Jakob Kolding’s work. Audiences will find examples of most aspects of his art practice. There will be drawings from 1996, old and new collages, a documentation of public art projects, an improvised sculpture and examples of the artists sleeve design for the pop group St Etienne. Parts of the exhibition will be presented at OVERGADEN – Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in the spring of 2007.

Katarina Löfström presents three new videos that were first shown in Berlin last summer. Like her previous work, these works move between reality and abstraction. All three are animations based on filmed material. This method is the artist’s way of concentrating the motif to come closer to what she perceives to be the essence of the picture.

Löfström avoids language, understanding and meaning to leave us room for associations and dreams. The films have no beginning or end and the only clues we are given are their titles. These are not to be seen as keys to interpreting the works but rather as the first link in a possible chain of associations- like a piece of music with a title but no lyrics.

An Island (DVD loop, 4,30 min,2004). A glittering Shangri-La appears like a vision in the night. The film footage behind this mirage is of a Stockholm amusement park, surrounded by boats with lanterns lit, filmed on a summer night in 2002. The soundtrack is a collage of sounds created by Katarina Löfström in collaboration with sound artist Sean Reynard. Tower (DVD loop, 9 min, 2004). The film is an animation of Berlin by night filmed during a thunderstorm the summer of 2004. The city is seen from the rotating restaurant at the top of Berlin’s tv-tower. During the rotation, Berlin’s principal boulevards; Kastanjen Allée, Schönhauser Allée, Karl Marx Allée, can be seen, like glittering snakes winding through the night. The music, by Bernhard Günther creates a muted soundscape, underscoring the slow majestic rotation of the tower. Score (DVD loop, 4,30 min,2004). This one of few works by Löfström that is without sound but gives the more reason for the term “visual music”. An animated score of black dots pours down the white picture-surface, changing size and creating rhythms in a pumping musical flow. If Löfström’s technique in An Island and Tower can be described as taking a step back from the motif, Score represents a leap into it. The animation is based on a photograph of the far reaches of the universe, taken through NASA’s Hubble telescope. Katarina Löfström has zoomed into this picture, which represents the limits of human knowledge, extremely closely and used the Benday dots that compose it for her animation.

Text: Helena Selder

Goodbye

With artist Peter Thörneby’s exhibition, Goodbye, Maraboupark continues its artprogram with the ambition to present exhibitions of younger artists’ work. The exhibition features works by Peter Thörneby from 2000 to his latest work, the first issue of the magazine  Goodbye.

A recurring element in Peter Thörneby’s work is a search for new places, mental and physical, where the possibility of having unexpected thoughts is enhanced. Thörneby uses prints and patterns to create backdrops against which artist and audience can dream themselves away. One such backdrop which appears in several works is a raindrop-pattern inspired by the symbolist painter Ivan Aguéli’s opium-clouded sensation of seeing a text turn to raindrops before his eyes. In Thörneby’s visual interpretation this becomes a silver rain, a metaphor for a deeper understanding of art. The silver rain then forms a backdrop against which he places texts about art’s function of finding and presenting new places and ideas.

In history, new patterns have often been ideological accompaniments and descriptions of a new political order. Patterns play a central role in Thörneby’s art from artist duo Gratis Design’s use of textile patterns as backgrounds for Walter Gropius’ manifesto, the poster series Gratis Design’s Bauhaus Manifesto and 10-gruppen Patterns (collaboration with Fredrik Holmqvist 2000) via the silver rain-pattern mentioned above to patterns for unknown rooms in the poster series How Can I Sleep With Your Voice in My Head (Vita Kuben, Norrlandsoperan, 2003).

In Thörneby’s latest work; the magazine Goodbye (2004) the artist leaves abstraction to examine day-dreaming from an everyday perspective. A small family is portrayed while doing the laundry, a situation easy enough to identify with and dream oneself away from. The magazine has the format of an LP-cover and folds out to reveal lyrics and photographs of the little family. The word Goodbye appears in a smoke-like typography, like a whisper from the dreamers’s lips before he or she disappears into another world.

Sculpturepark – cloud 7

In September we inaugurate a solo show with the Swedish artist Bella Rune who has become known for sculptural works with a performative dimension. The perfomativ aspect of her works can be traced back to a  longstanding interest in the objects of everyday life as carriers of different aspects of society; social codes, politics, aesthetics, economy, psychology and sexuality. In the new works she continues her playful investigations into our everyday-fetishisms and the anthropomorphic whishes we project upon the objects around us. In the upcoming exhibition at Marabouparken annex she creates her own sociopolitical and spatial world consisting of a mix of new and old works.

Swiss artist Luca Frei shows wallpaintings, prints and sculptures at Marabouparken Annex.