Index Foundation

ITAB members talk with artist Josefin Arnell about sound and image, artistic production, silence in museums and what it means to listen to Wagner while doing your dishes.

The members of Index Teen Advisory Board met Josefin Arnell in front of an audience at Index to talk about their own experiences relating to art, sharing thoughts and ideas regarding film production and the importance of sound and music in a multilayered reality.

This podcast was made possible through the support of Erasmus+ aktiv Ungdom.

Over the past year, the Index Teen Advisory Board has been focusing on sound as a means of distribution, communication and understanding, relating to the institution. Through workshops with Emma Dominguez, Rut-Karin Zettergren, Moa Franzén, Lisen Pousette and Joe Rowley, along with a meeting with the teen advisory boards of Praksis and Publics, the 2023-24 advisory board has come to think about the power of sound and silence in shaping the public’s experience of spaces. The conversation in this podcast springs from a thought experiment and site visits transposing the space, and soundscape, of Moderna Museet and Mall of Scandinavia in Stockholm. These two notionally opposite, but realistically similar, environments prompt a conversation of two parts – part one being this podcast and part two coming during a live event at Index in April 2024. In this one you hear Emma Wrangsjö Öberg and Niko Enroth Henriksson, representatives from Index Teen Advisory Board 2023/24, in conversation with Isabella Tjäder, Curator of Learning at Index.
This podcast was made possible through the support of Erasmus+ Aktiv Ungdom

At Index, in February 2024, at the opening of Josefin Arnell’s exhibition CRYBABY, the artist was in conversation with the Index team, in a discussion about film and art practices, processes, and methodologies, how to work with reality and fiction. The exhibition at Index presents 8 films by Josefin Arnell to be watched at short distance.  
In this conversation, now presented here as a podcast, Josefin Arnell talks about her own experiences, communities, and social dynamics related to wanting to fit in, bullying, the ways which things unfold around the films and how to deal with emotions and events on both sides of the camera.

In February 2024 Index had a conversation with Sandi Hilal about heritage, refugee camps, society, war, Gaza and destruction.  Sandi Hilal runs - together with Alessandro Petti- DAAR, the research practice that received the Golden Lion at the architecture Venice Biennale in 2023. Part of their practice has been focused on the conditions in Palestine and the prolonged temporality represented by the refugee camps.

During the conversation, Sandi Hilal talked about knowledge, history, the life of people and its value at this moment when Palestine is being the place for a war with many casualties.  Sandi Hilal shares in this podcast thoughts about adaptability, agency, the future process of repair in Gaza and how life should remain stronger than death.

In September of 2023, Index opened the exhibition “Catti Brandelius: MISS UNIVERSUM". it presents an exhaustive approach to what Catti Brandelius' alter ego Miss Universum meant during the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s. The show creates a documentary setting and a platform to observe Brandelius' work from contemporary perspectives. Archive material, posters, objects, printed matter, media coverage and clothes share space with her films and a series of interviews with cultural practitioners reading Miss Universum from our current moment. In fact, the exhibition is to be understood almost as a series of components to be edited by the visitor - navigating multiple narratives and layers. Films by Catti Brandelius are projected on the walls of Index while the “talking heads” of the invited correspondents speak from monitors at the entrance of the exhibition.

In this podcast you will hear from Katarina Bonnevier, Maryam Fanni, Anna Kinbom, and Andria Nyberg Forshage as they observe the work of Catti Brandelius from several perspectives: Gender, class, feminism, urbanism, music and pop culture - interlaced with their subjective experiences related to the time and voice of Miss Universum.

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.