Index Foundation

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.