Skulpturprojekte Stockholm II, Beau Travail, Stockholm
This year I longed for art that was direct, raw, and smelled faintly of dead mouse. Luckily for me, a strong medieval wind swept through the contemporary art world. Ben Lallier’s wonderful diamond-studded potatoes hanging from an old apple tree on just-thick-enough steel wire at artist-run Beau Travail’s Skulpturprojekte Stockholm II, stayed with me all year. Featuring thirty-five local and international artists, the exhibition created a feeling of understanding and togetherness that cut right through. The whole experience was suffused with the positive effects of recession: art resurrecting itself in rags, with a new and honest energy.
Victor Bengtsson, Horse Droppings Are Not Figs, O-Overgaden, Copenhagen
O-Overgaden’s programme never ceases to impress me. From artist and dominatrix Reba Maybury’s paint-by-numbers Edgar Degas motifs made by her subs, to Karim Boumjimar’s opulent vases with erotic imagery. Victor Bengtsson’s show featuring twisted tapestries and broken-epic painting, which knocked time out of joint, was another favourite. A Trojan pig made of paper lay impotently on a plinth, crowning the ongoing bondage. It felt like trudging around in porridge, reflecting 2025 perfectly!
A Grin Without a Cat, Hägerstensåsens Community Center, Stockholm
Hägerstensåsens Community Center combines artistic, pedagogical, and social practices so that each one reinforces the another. It feels like a gentle and meaningful solution to the paralysis that causes other parts of the art field to lapse into finger-wagging and virtue signaling. An anti-colonial forum, a chess club, and a Karl Marx conference in a wonderful mix. The group show A Grin Without a Cat, which created a beautiful scenography out the seventy-one days of the Paris Commune, was a favourite. Another highlight was the self-organised Institute for Advanced Studies in Political Aesthetics (IAS), initiated by researchers Kim West and Gustaf Strandberg. Reading Silvia Federici, Friedrich Schiller, Herbert Marcuse, and Karl Marx together with schoolteachers, Brechtian actors, students, and pensioners lifted life to entirely new levels!
– Joanna Nordin is the Artistic Director of Bonniers Konsthall. She holds an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm) and has previously been director at Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum and worked at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. She recently curated the acclaimed group exhibition Playa! Art as Poetry in the Nordic Region at Bonniers Konsthall.
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
