Lucky Syndrome, StudyForArtPlatform, Stockholm. Curated by Nicole Walker
The almost absurdly small exhibition space StudyForArtPlatform managed to squeeze in four artistries – one on each wall and one on the floor – into a tiny, but well assembled narrative group exhibition that freed me from the burden of taking a position on right versus wrong. Instead, I was lured into a kind of dream state by Georg Nordmark’s hypnotic spirals on the wall facing the gallery’s entrance. The show took me straight down the rabbit hole, and I do enjoy places where reality is but an echo. In Jon Rafman’s hallucinogenic sleep-fantasies Egregores (2021), I was fed perfectly strange, distorted images, each providing a sense of recognition and imminent danger in the same moment.
Klara Zetterholm, Civilization and Its Discontents, Odenplan subway station, Konstväxlingar/Region Stockholm
I live near Odenplan, and at the beginning of the year life took on some extra mystery every time I passed the art display down in the subway station. As endless metro minutes passed by, I’d stand looking into Klara Zetterholm’s giant pseudo-archaeological vitrine where each object had my imagination unfold the story behind it. The green alien-like faux stone bust always made me think of Atlantis and “uncovering secrets of a lost civilisation” (read in dramatic male voice straight out of conspiracy Youtube). Placed nine metres underground, the exhibition became a kind of excavation of fantasy, with a reminder that history comprises the speculative tales of times passed.
Coyote’s art bar, September Sessions, Iaspis, Stockholm
During the September Sessions art festival, doors opened to a small room at Iaspis in which visitors became performers in a social spectacle by sipping beer from narrow thick-bottomed glasses in a fashionably stainless-steel, New York-ish bar setting. In nonchalantly elegant 2000s spirit, the work became a brilliant display of the immediate energy of relational aesthetics. Without representation or translation, it was all about the experience in itself. When I look back at the art year 2023, the Stockholm based art collective Coyote’s art bar stands out as a kind of artwork It girl, effortlessly cool and perfect in all her simplicity.
Nora Arrhenius Hagdahl is a critic, editor-in-chief of Nuda magazine, and contributor to Kunstkritikk.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
