Index Foundation

In June 2023, curators Maria Lind, Jan-Erik Lundström and Erik Sandberg met at Index to talk about curatorial practice in the Nordic countries, with special focus on the work done by Jan-Erik Lundström at Moderna Museet and its photographic department, at Bild Museet in Umeå and the Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Karasjok.

Periphery and center, curatorial ethics, cartography and how to observe artistic practice were key elements of this talk - now transformed into a podcast to become archival material for future history writing. The context for this conversation was the release of the book “Curating Beyond the Mainstream: The Practice of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström. A book published by Konstfack and Sternberg Press as a result of the research done at Curatorlab.

On 20 April, 2023, in the context of Index’s Focus on Feminisms, the artists Marianna Feher and Stacey de Voe presented DUAL ACT: a collaborative project built together with a number of  female protagonists, collecting narratives and reviving two historical anti-fascist women’s organizations: Antifašistički Front Žena in former Yugoslavia and Mujeres Libres in Spain.

Mixing historical facts with fiction, DUAL ACT aims to create what the artists refer to as a ‘second-hand’ archive while shedding light on two organizations that had a significant impact on both women's education and the fight against fascism. The talk ended with the distribution of a series of postcards; underlying the importance that corresponding has had within the project.

Listen to  Feher and de Voe as through DUAL ACT, they explore tools for solidarity, models for knowledge exchange and strategies for dissemination: connecting biographical aspects, fragmented chronologies, collective practices, memory, and friendship.

How do we know - Institutional listening and young agency in the arts is a publication co-produced by the teen advisory boards of Index, the Oslo based art catalyst Praksis and Helsinki based Publics.

The publication features texts, interviews and design proposals that the boards have developed in correspondence with each other and through collaborations with a number of artists. This publication (and the work made with Teen Advisory Boards) has been generously supported by the Erasmus+ Youth program.

In this podcast, Malin Issa, Sarika Ullah, Felix Krausz Sjögren, Luna Sackett and Vigo Roth - members of Index Teen Advisory Board - talk to Index’ curator of learning Isabella Tjäder about the work that went into putting the publication together.

In the exhibition THE TIDAL ZONE, at Index until the 12th of February 2023, the artist Kajsa Dahlberg offers a series of connections between the individual and the collective, between structures and bodies, reception, and perception. The show navigates through different approaches to the intricate relationship between images, objects and subjects. In the podcast you're about to hear, Dahlberg talks to Index director Marti Manen about decaying film strips, non linear story telling, and seaweed's historical role in the development of photography.

In November 2022, Index presented a ten-day exhibition, FILMS AGAINST CAPITALISM, which featured five video projects including sculptural video works, that all sprang from research conducted by the artist Melanie Gilligan during her PhD studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

In the conversation Melanie Gilligan teams up with Marti Manen, director at Index, and Petra Bauer, Head of Department of Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art. They talk about moving from fiction to documentary methods, of affective and associative knowledge, and about what the film medium can offer in the struggle against capitalism.

The 59th edition of the Venice Biennale presented in 2022, for the first time in its long history, a majority of women artists. The main exhibition, curated by the Italian and New York based Cecilia Alemani, offered continuous dialogues in time, a specific sensuality and many readings beyond traditional history writing. Anne Klontz and Marti Manen from Index team talk with Cecilia Alemani about the Biennale, the need to reconsider history, the many faces of the political and exhibitional language.

In June 2022 – the exhibition with Linnea Hansander installed and running – previous Index interns Melike Sökmen and Pilar Borrajo met with director Marti Manen in the archive-tool storage-photocopy room behind the exhibition space at Index to talk about exhibition practices, text production and critical positions. Melike Sökmen and Pilar Borrajo were active at Index during the exhibitions with Pauline Curnier Jardin and Fina Miralles. During their stay, they critically observed the history of the institution and how its language has been changing over the years. The conversation observes institutional behavior, the connection with visitors, text production and covers many thoughts on how to work from the exhibition space.

Aural Exhibitions, a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. 

The exhibition has traditionally been understood as a physical space, a place where objects are included. Over time, there has been an increase in desire to escape from these spaces and to jump directly to the immaterial; temporality and the subjective experience has defined its own historical timeline within contemporary art. Index is interested in redefining the language, presentation and distribution of art—questioning different formats around the exhibitional which has long been a part of Index’s history.

Listen to some seconds of 10 Aural exhibitions here!

The poem becomes the format for the Aural Exhibition The Darkness That Rests on Black Nothingness, curated by Mmabatho Thobejane who is inspired by the words of Dionne Brand and the images of David Hammons. Mmabatho Thobejane is a Stockholm-based curator dedicated among other things to creating spaces for music and sound, merging them together as a form of resistance.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

The Aural Exhibition titled “Seeing Through” by the writer, activist and sometime curator Lucy Lippard is a collage, weaving together visions and relationships from different times in her life that she experienced around her…. As Lucy describes “…collage has been an obsession and a medium for me. The Dada and surrealist idea of juxtaposition of unlikes as the source of a new reality probably underlies much of my work.” Amongst these various layers of unlikes which Lippard resurrects, the word ‘nostalgia’ comes to mind—encompassing the simultaneous pulse of emotion and memory; a sudden feeling felt in the present time —connecting—like an invisible ball of yarn—to the past.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

In this Aural Exhibition, artist Rosana Antolí creates a series of sound spaces with several moods, feelings and a continuous desire for connection while escaping. Bodies, movement, rituals, dance, fluids, mutation, skins, liquids, choreographies, language, art, poetry and music share this unlimited expanding universe.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. We would like to thank Institut Ramon Llull for their support with this exhibition.

A Sound Exhibition to Walk in Circles

Project by: Rosana Antolí

Sound composer: Caçacervols

Performing extra voice:  Sonja Teszler

In 1993, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist had a conversation with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier that led to the idea to offer instructions to  produce “do it yourself” exhibitions. For this Aural Exhibition, Hans Ulrich Obrist selects some instructions resulting in a continuum relating to ecology, artistic practices, poetic gestures, history,  the present and the future.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

In her Aural exhibition, curator Alexandra Laudo offers a series of encounters with invisibility. Museums closed due to the covid pandemic, stolen works of art leaving their aura behind, and performative artistic gestures become the material to be intertwined in this narrative constructed by bits and fragments.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation. We would like to thank Institut Ramon Llull for their support with this exhibition.

DENNA UTSTÄLLNING ÄR OSYNLIG / THIS EXHIBITION IS INVISIBLE / ESTA EXPOSICIÓN ES INVISIBLE / AQUESTA EXPOSICIÓ ÉS INVISIBLE

By Alexandra Laudo [Heroínas de la Cultura]

Sound editing: Ferran Fages

Music: from grey to blue, and almost there, by Ferran Fages

Poem: “i no vam parlar més”, by Silvie Rothkovic, from her book Als llacs (La Breu Edicions, 2021).

Voices: Alexandra Laudo (main voice); Andie Gracie, Simon Smith, Sasha Smith, Leo Smith, Katarina Stenkvist, Elmi Stenkvist Manen and Francis Stenkvist Manen.

Translations: William George and Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation

Exhibitions and artworks: All the lights we cannot see, by curators Anna Hugo and Sandino Scheidegger; La Gioconda, by Leonardo da Vinci; A Disappearance from Winschoten, by David Horvitz; Duplicating commands, by Luz Broto; “The end of a void is the beginning of another”, by Fermín Jiménez Landa; assignment by Robert Barry to his students in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Theoretical references: Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Joan Fontcuberta.

Curator Sara Rossling invited artist Natália Rebelo to work together with this Aural Exhibition. From locations to environments, the exhibition offers a performative experience beyond linguistic constructions. This exhibition includes a new work by Natália Rebelo that has been produced specifically for this project.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

curated by: Sara Rossling

performance written and directed by: Natália Rebelo

sound design:

Cal Fish

sound assistance:

Daniel Iinatti

voice performance: Kate Williams

Boxer: Ernie Indradat

music from:

Cal Fish

KABLAM

rip me

intro sound: Fanitza Ignea

In this Aural Exhibition, curator Tiago de Abreu Pinto takes a specific situation and visualizes a future, using the role of art to define what this future could be. The exhibition becomes a declaration of possibilities from collective practices between the artistic and the political, between life and culture–If there is a difference.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

The activists and artist collectives that are part of this project have been nationally and internationally the forces of the so-called ESTALLIDO GENERATION, during the massive demonstrations of 2019-2020 in Chile, marked by an intense and polyphonic artistic drive in public space, and its transformation to virtual space; they have used expanded tools of contemporary art to unveil the present by mobilizing collective engines; transferring art to the bodies and thoughts of passersby and communities faced with stories and experiences of oppression. Problematising thought and summoning the presence of the collective echo is evidenced in: Delight Lab by changing the public space with luminous words; colectivo LASTESIS by mobilizing the bodies of women and the LGBTQIA+ community from personal and social experience through sound and performance; Rangiñtulewfü by activating publically a collective political Mapuche movement from an ancestral common memory. The proposed installation arises from the impulse of each one of the participating activists and artist collectives to activate devices and generate a dialogue with the public space and respond to a social heartbeat in order to demonstrate the emergence of a body-territory. The installation also seeks to offer itself as a living historical piece since it interacts with the past, present and future of Chile. It is precisely about transmitting the pulse of a social heartbeat, of an iridescence of a vernacular landscape, transferring, in this way, the exhibition space to other psycho-topographic areas: to the minds of those who fight today and tomorrow from a common body-territory.

This Aural Exhibition titled “Leave a Message” by the collective Editorial Board, takes the Exquisite Corpse as a starting point, and activates the process through recorded phone messages that describes one single artwork.The final result of this game makes up the exhibition you are about to listen to.

The Editorial Board collective is inspired by the genre of the book-as-exhibition and utilizes editorial processes as a method to explore and challenge the parameters that exist between texts and exhibitions. An additional question of interest is how to engage and apply the collective voice to text and exhibition meaning and production while maintaining focus on process and sharing creatively. Editorial Board consists of nine artists and curators: Beatrice Alvestad Lopez, Tal Gilad, Lucija Grbic, Joanne Grüne-Yanoff, Emily Mennerdahl, Anne Klontz, Alina Rentsch, Ernesta Simkute, Isabella Tjäder.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

A Scenario is an exhibition inspired by the science fiction book “Mother of Invention” by the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. From this story, Swedish curator Susanne Ewerlöf positions the story’s main character, Anwuli, as the focal point from which the exhibition is built around. Anwuli, a young, soon-to-be mother is kept safe in a high-tech house prepared for her by her lover, but the narrative soon turns into a story of survival and loss as the end of the world draws closer. A Scenario includes works by Linda Lamignan, Fanny Ollas and composer Tomas Nordmark.

“The Aural Exhibitions” are a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.

A podcast made by Index Teen Advisory Board. In January of 2021, the members of ITAB joined an online conference with their sibling advisory board connected the Oslo based art institution PRAKSIS. During the conference, participants split up into smaller groups to discuss different questions relating to the theme of In Character.

The podcast you're about to hear contains snippets of those discussions, chosen by the board members, who pair the original recordings with succeeding meta reflections as they listen back.

With voices from Emil Pita, Jose Velasquez, Simon Sjöberg, Felix Krausz Sjögren and Adina Edfelt (ITAB), as well as Nellie Barazandeh and Mikkel Inchley (PTAB). Sound mixing and script writing guidance by Linda Kidane and Sofia Neves. 

It’s November 2021 and Kristian Vistrup Madsen is visiting Stockholm to meet some students at the Royal Institute of arts. One evening, Vistrup Madsen is at Index to present his book Doing Time: Essays on Using People.

In a conversation with the writer Mara Lee, Kristian Vistrup Madsen observes words and moments, people and stories, ways of writing and thinking.

While still in a pandemic world, the beginning of September 2021 was the month whenIndex openedPauline Curnier Jardin’s exhibitionWAITING FOR AGATHA, SEBASTIAN AND THE REST OF THE HOLY CHILDREN — UNFOLDING A FILMIC RESEARCH.

An opening in these times means an assumed performativity of social distancing and hand sanitzer, however a public talk with Pauline was also organized with a focus on her presented films and their production and possibilities —  all of which contributed to the desire to be together talking about art and artistic practices.

In early June 2021, against the backdrop of Hanni Kamaly’s exhibition THE MIGHT THEY HAVE, the Index team were the intimate audience for a conversation between Kamaly and researcher and writer Rebecka Katz Thor, whose research focuses on the aesthetics of commemoration, image production’s and contemporary art’s relation to historical, ethical and political claims.

The discussion centred around monuments, memory and time, unpacking acts of commemoration and of acknowledgement. This talk now unfolds and opens up for a wider audience through the Index podcast series.

In spring 2021, C-print first physical number was presented at Index. During a long evening we recorded some informal conversations and public presentations with Sara Kaaman and Emma Löfström, Edith Ekström, Olivia Ekelund and My Hasselgren, Shaon Chakraborty, Hannes Ferm and Emma Dominguez.

C-Print is a platform based in Stockholm observing and following artistic practices. With a desire for new voices, C-print has had an intense digital life and a curatorial approach with a specific sense for new artists. C-print team is composed by Ashik Zaman, Koshik Zaman, Corina Wahlin and Ella Saar. "C-pirnt, The Future Watch Issue" is edited and produced by C-print in collaboration with Konstfack’s BA2 in Graphic Design and Illustration course, led by Sara Kaaman and Emma Löfström.

This podcast is the third in a series of three recorded during publication releases at Index. With focus on specific publications, now we release them in another format.

The slow release of Silon took place at Index throughout an evening in late spring 2021, within Hanni Kamaly’s exhibition THE MIGHT THEY HAVE.

Silon volume one is a collection of readings by curators, artists and architects on decolonizing the white cube, exploring questions around education and land and a meditation that brings feminine awareness to the complex phenomena and philosophy of Frantz Fanon. Silon is a production of The Mirror Institution which seeks to mirror, reflect and expand ideas and programs of existing art institutions. The Mirror Institution is an initiative of curator Joanna Sandell, journalist Steuart Wright with architecture by Tor Lindstrand.

We recorded reflections and interviews with some of the contributors to Silon Issue 1. Conversations in space with Joanna Sandell, Tor Lindstrand, Rami Khoury, Mmabatho Thobejane, Amina Zoubir. Excerpts from the publication have been selected by and are read by Ella Saar and Martina Sara D’Alessio.

This podcast is the second in a series of three recorded during publication releases at Index. With focus on specific publications and editorial processes, now we release them in another format, and listen together.

As the exhibition Editorial Thinking came to its close during spring of 2021, Index hosted the release of Delta - an ocean call, a publication on water histories, narratives and practices published and co-edited by Pontus Pettersson and Izabella Borzecka of PAM Stockholm. The slow release of the publication took place at Index throughout an entire day, with workshops, conversations, performances, readings and other activations of the works in the new publication.

The artists and writers who contributed to the publication are Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson and Alice MacKenzie. The publication’s graphic designer is Sara Kaaman.

This podcast is the first in a series of three recorded during publication releases at Index. with focus on specific publications and editorial processes, now we release them in another format, and listen together.

In March 2021, while the exhibition Editorial Thinking was open with care for visitors to Index, artist Alex Reynolds met online with Magdalena Malm, founder of MAP – Mobile Art Production, to discuss their collaboration around Alex’s project But They Are Not You, which took place in Stockholm during the winter of 2011/12.

The project began with an email invitation, circulated by MAP. The individuals who replied to the email then received a number of questions about themselves. After an extensive process, the artist selected the 8 final participants who were to become the protagonists and also the very exclusive recipients of the work.

During spring 2021, Alex Reynolds’ publication But They Are Not You and the process behind the project is presented at Index as part of the exhibition Editorial Thinking. The publication, which contains the work’s final format – the exchange of letters, returned to their supposed senders through the postal system – was published by Biel Books with the support of Akademie Schloss Solitude, during Alex Reynolds’ artist residency there.

November 2019, and the exhibition "Ride Ride Ride" by Teresa Solar was on show at Index. Numerous objects defined the space, with colors everywhere, multiple languages and identities within a non-static constellation. The exhibition space at Index was packed with several interconnections and visual references.

Within this context, Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Daniel Birnbaum presented the book "Spacing Philosophy: Lyotard and the Idea of the Exhibition" observing the links between exhibition making and philosophy, ideas and curatorial practices, emptiness and cultural behavior. This podcast brings the first part of the talk between Wallenstein and Birnbaum to our ears and minds, opening up their conversation and offering questions regarding the art exhibition as a field for ideas. The talk starts with Birnbaum having the first words, then jumps to Wallenstein before back to Birnbaum.

In February 2021, Index opens the exhibition "Editorial Thinking”, observing ways of working with and in the fields of art, connected to the role of the editor – with a special interest in the need to find particular connection with those who work in closest contact with art – the artists. Daniel Birnbaum ends the talk by saying that a good book is not a book at all, it is an exhibition.

In February 2020 Index opened the exhibition “I am healthy, I cannot write this letter myself” by Ramesch Daha. The exhibition presented an immense project based on subjective and family approaches to history. In this case, the history of concentration camps and the remaining genealogical trauma. Right now -during corona times- at Kindl Art Center in Berlin this work by Ramesch Daha is presented as part of the exhibition “The Invented History”.

Now, ending 2020, This conversation between Ramesch Daha, Kathrin Becker -Artistic director at Kindl- and Marti Manen -Director of Index Foundation- goes around archives and documents, humans and art, emotions and politics, sensitive material and artistic positions, memory and places, exhibitions and publications.

This podcast with Ramesch Daha and Kathrin Becker is made with generous support by Goethe-Institut in Sweden.

Cold outside - warm inside. The exhibition Tracking Distribution that opened at Index in late November 2020 is a compilation of artworks, ideas and artistic productions related to the question of distribution. In times of coronavirus, we present this podcast as a special visit to the exhibition: Sònia López (thinker and producer working with digital formats and processes) visits Tracking Distribution and leads us along some of the paths and strands that configure this research-based exhibition.

The podcast of her visit also includes interviews with artists whose works are presented in the exhibition: Nina Sarnelle, Lili Huston-Herterich and Francesc Ruiz. Listen to their voices as they reflect on art and distribution.

November 2018. Index space was full of blue and pink colors, textiles hung with manifestos and an intense video program is on. It was the exhibition And Tomorrow And, a project and a platform for many voices regarding ecology, possible futures and the urgency to act. During that summer forests were burning in Sweden.

Within the frame of And Tomorrow And, Index organized a two day seminar around critical pedagogy to think-with –as Donna Haraway says– collectively. Two days dedicated to workshops, presentations, film screenings, shared meals and oversea interviews. For the seminar, curator Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris had a conversation with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, key figures within the combination of art, ecology, sexuality and love. They talked about ecology, relationships, politics and ways of doing. Two years later –now in the middle of a pandemic and just after the elections in the US– we present this conversation of shared thoughts and ideas as a podcast.

In August 2020, curator Sue Spaid and artist Ulrika Sparre met at Index to talk about stones and the coming exhibition project by Ulrika Sparre at Index. Sue Spaid is one of the writers at the book Ear to the Ground published by Art&Theory, a book observing the artistic production of Ulrika Sparre regarding her projects with minerals and stones.

Sue and Ulrika talk about rocks and memories, artists and the invisible, time schedules, tokens, sound, experiences and existential matters. The conversation fluctuates between ideas and physicality, artistic practices in nature, ecology and exhibition spaces.

In June 2020, Index Director Marti Manen and artist and Kybernein Institute Director Nathalie Gabrielsson met to record a conversation about The Campaign -the exhibition presented at Index with the research artistic project developed by Nathalie Gabrielsson.

Nathalie Gabrielsson uses artistic practice to share complex criticality: Art is understood as a field between subjectivity and objectivity, capable of simultaneously being a sphere for experimentation and for the definition of politics.

In their conversation, Gabrielsson and Manen talk about the use of information, the visual aspect of  veracity and reality, and how the collaboration between the two institutions -Index and Kybernein- created a new position for the slipperiness of the artistic voice.

During 2020 Index’ ongoing research process of looking into how artists
deal with and reinvent formats for distribution, has itself been
re-distributed - frozen - sped up - paused - and accelerated by the
global turn. The rollercoaster of stillness and intensity has put a new
lens on how we see the movement of information, the movements of our
bodies and the material realities of distribution.

As part of this, Tracking Distribution interns Mmabatho Thobejane and
Lili Huston-Herterich joined us as co-researchers, learning and sharing
within the summer course ‘Art and Distribution: Exhibition practitioners
and other ways to distribute’, organized by Index and Konstfack
University of the Arts. Now active at Index throughout the summer,
Mmabatho and Lili play an important part in the course unfolding,
tracking its distribution and formulating how artistic practices are
taking on other modalities in responding to a distributed world. 

The conversation shared in this podcast was recorded during the first
intense week of seminars and lectures at Index and is a moment of
getting to know the term distribution from their personal
perspective and how they use distribution as a concept within their own
practices.

In the 1970s and 80s Sweden, along with many other countries in the world, went through a shift in political narration. The stories that so far had shaped the idea of the Swedish national identity, the welfare state, the democratic workers movement started to leak in the face of crisis. Nathalie Gabrielsson’s exhibition The Campaign at Index investigates these ideological behaviors that came to effectively re-tell the story of the Swedish social model.

This podcast shares the audio from the video work titled The Whistelblower. A big vertical screen, similar to the ones carrying the stories of companies and campaigns in public space, here contains a man. He is well dressed in his mid 50s, standing comfortably talking to you through the leans. His name is Sven Grassman, he is the national economist who went public after spotting inconsistencies and false statistics produces through the network that in the exhibition is traced together as The Campaign.

In April 2019, artist Roxy Farhat and curator Gaby Cepeda met at Index to talk at Roxy Farhat’s exhibition WUH-PSHHH. In this conversation regarding the need to rethink, their discussion takes on productivity, carving spaces, art and systematic stress, loving and hating what you are doing, open letters to Kim Kardashian, being lazy, capitalism, collective practices, race, feminism and queer approaches.  Now, Index re-activates the conversation as a podcast. Listen again now to their reflections from a year ago, enduringly relevant today.  Carving Spaces is organised as a part of Spaces of Care, Disobedience and Desire: Tactics of Minority Space-Making, a collaborative research project initiated by Rado Ištok, Marie-Louise Richards and Natália Rebelo, supported by the artistic research and development funding of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.

February 22, 2020, Index Teen Advisory Board sat down to discuss the first part of the workshop Going to an exhibition in character. This workshop has been growing over the years, responding to both the imaginary and real barriers of going to an exhibition and feeling like you have to know something or be someone.

It’s a crowded Saturday, they just asked us to move from the cafe into the library to make room for paying customer. So we move our jackets, hats and bags. The participants in the board present for todays workshop are Leo Queiroz Gonzalez, Alva Mårsén, Alfred Nilsson, Lovisa Johansson and Leo Ramirez Iderström. We are all wearing clothes that feel a little bit uncomfortable. Preparing for todays session we’ve all dressed in the odd and slightly off pieces in our wardrobe. Clothes you might have bought on a trip once, when you tried surfing and had to get the seashell choker to match the look, but felt chokingly ridiculous when you got back. Or the shiny jacket that actually is more attention grabbing for its squeaky sound rather than its glamours shine. Aspects of ourselves we once thought we could be, or never got into.

We jump in as the counting, watching and sketching slowly turns into a discussion about age, elitism, speed dating in museums, who actually watches reality tv Paradise Hotel, the construction of smartness and feeling like an imposter.

——

Index Teen Advisory Board is going on its fourth year as a crucial part of Index organisation. As a voice within the institution the board offers paid positions for eight young people from across Stockholm and Uppsala. The Board actively supports decision making, evaluation and programming. The amin is to bring together a group of young people from different backgrounds and experiences to reflect on the role and potential of art and culture today.

The performance artist Andrea Fraser is one of the most important figures working in institutional critique. 

In April 2019, Fraser gave a talk at Index, sharing her views on power structures, the role of the artist, economy, hierarchies and mechanisms of control. Listen to the podcast here.

"Our relationship to institutions is not that we go into them, they go into us. We incorporate them, embody them and perform them, we enact them. Their languages, their discourses, their values, their practices, their modes of perception, their systems of qualification. What Bourdieu called habitus, the social made body, the social made mind. I started to think about what I was performing as habitus. Performing the internalized institution." - Andrea Fraser

“What is our identity if not a compilation of the people who have influenced us?
We become the people who have influenced us the most deeply” – Chris Kraus

In May Chris Kraus joined us for the opening of her exhibition FILMS BEFORE AND AFTER. Listen to the full conversation between Kraus and the Index team here.

A conversation with the artist Teresa Solar, recorded at the NKF (Nordic Art Association) in Stockholm the day before the opening.