Index Teen Advisory Board 23/24

What does it mean to be a visitor? What differentiates a visitor from a customer? From a participant? How does a participant compare to a user? In what ways is a visitor set apart from a guest; a guest from a patron? In the Open Call for Index Teen Advisory Board of 2023, applicants were asked to reflect on these definitions – these characters if you will: How they relate and interplay. What connotations they carry and what they tell us about the relationship between the person they are assigned to, and the setting that person is in.

Through these questions, we initiated a collective consideration on how terminology might not only indicate, but dictate how we conduct ourselves in a space. How language can preempt and influence behavior.

These are the types of inquiries and contemplations that we tend to examine within Index Teen Advisory Board; letting the insights, analyses and associations in the board meetings inform the way Index structures and carries its institutional role. In addition to the ever-present focus on language and power dynamics, this year has found us paying particular attention to sound and audio. The board has met with artists whose practices are somehow aural, or challenge normative understandings of what sound does.

With artist Rut Karin Zettergren, the board members engaged in a dystopian game of chance, an oral storytelling propelled by dice throwing; mixing the history of military technology with feminist theory and critical fabulation. By ways of growling, choreographer Lisen Pousette guided the board through gendered perceptions of noise, via historical taboos, the fluctuation of babies’ vocal cords, and on to heavy metal lead singing. With artist Moa Franzén, they explored oral range, echo and the trajectory of scales. Mar Reykjavik familiarized them with Valencian human towers, choreographic grammar, and abbreviation of scores. Mirrorings and unexpected overlap in public spaces were investigated in collaboration with curator Joe Rowley, resulting in an audio guide to the Moderna Museet collection on the grounds of Mall of Scandinavia.

As is its tradition, the board has branched out to support and collaborate with other institutions and projects. Yul Cho and Ifra Shariq, students at Stockholm University’s international master’s programme Curating Art, invited the members to join a workshop conducted by artist Emma Dominguez, producing material for the duo’s publication How to Navigate Art Institutions, which was later launched at Index.

In October, ITAB met up with the young advisory boards of Praksis and Publics, contemporary art institutions based in Oslo and Helsinki respectively. The three sibling structures convened to exchange strategies and present their ongoing work to Norwegian art professionals in the symposium Sounding Out – Voicing the new institution.

Index Teen Advisory Board members of 2023 are Anahita Mishra, Anton Pettersson, Anyang Li, Emma Wrangsjö, Jagana Khasdorj, Mirabel Hallander, Niko Enroth Henriksson, Sara Freds and Tora Hallberg. They approach the new year looking to continue asking questions, rethinking institutional modes, and challenging predetermined notions.