Index Foundation

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.

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.

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.

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.