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.

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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?

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