The director(s) of Index conclude every year with a letter reflecting on the past year’s exhibitions, public programs, educational projects and other moments of the institution.
This is our letter for 2025. Observing the letters from previous years, we can easily find a thread: uncertainty has been following us for a while now, and multiple crises have become the new normal. 2025 has not been a surprise in terms of wars, violence, political and economic problems, and a shared feeling of despair.
But at Index we decided that the best thing we could do in this complicated situation is to continue working hard to produce and offer artistic content, vocabulary, and grammar that allow us to move beyond a polarized description of reality. In fact, we truly believe in art and culture as times and spaces for gathering around ideas and complex feelings. This is why our program has offered a myriad of moments and activities aimed at reaching a wide variety of people: we have increased our tempo (already a high one) to offer temporary platforms for ideas around structures and content, understanding the need to critically connect and analyze both what is said and how it is presented. We understand the importance of reaching people with different ages and backgrounds, we want all of them feeling at home at Index. We talk every now and then about “warm institutionalism”.
Read the full letter here. More
Holiday closing dates
Index will be closed from Saturday 20 December – Wednesday 8 January inclusive.
LIBERATION RADIO will reopen on Thursday 9 January and run until 25 January 2025
The public program of LIBERATION RADIO continues in January:
17 January: Don’t Bring an Instrument – Sonic Commons
16:00-18:00
Workshop with Stella Deiden Richter and Aron Fogelström, which will translate the ambient noise of the city into a speculative collective body – in order to reach new ways of relating to urban space together with others.
24 January: Before Your Eyes: Harun Farocki
16:00-19:00
A double-bill screening of Harun Farocki’s essay film Before Your Eyes – Vietnam (1982) preluded by Inextinguishable Fire (1969). Both films critiques the war in Vietnam, its image production and depiction of war in mass media. More
This year, Index Teen Advisory Board (ITAB) has moved through a constellation of encounters, workshops, conversations, and experiments as they have contributed to a publication in collaboration with PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Board and PUBLICS Youth Advisory Board. What began as a question about how young people might claim space within art institutions grew into an inquiry into how we act together, speak together, and practice agency within shared structures.
Throughout the year, ITAB has worked with graphic designers and artists falk and Sara Kaaman, artist and dramaturg Ruby Nilsson, editor Gerrie van Noord, and graphic designer Tuukka Kaila. They have visited initiatives such as Munnen, a culture and community space in the suburbs of Stockholm, as well as Trans Library and the Library of the Labour Movement during a conference together with the other Teen Advisory Boards in Helsinki. More
|
Sunday Read is a monthly gathering for anyone aged 16–21 who wants to read, think, and talk about contemporary art together.
For the next session, David Wojnarowicz’s ”Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12–Inch–Tall Politician” (1990) from the book ”Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration” (1991) will be read and discussed.
The previous sessions have been a close reading of Johnny Chang & Louise Nassiri, “Floating in the White Sea: A Foray Into the Contemporary Art Institution” (2018), Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), Susan Sontag, “On Plato’s Cave”, Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2011), Kathy Acker, “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body” (1993), and Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” (1977) and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1978).
Sunday Read is a place for shared exploration. Each time, different types of texts related to art are introduced; poems, short stories, texts written by artists, exhibition texts or art theory. Do you know someone who you think would be interested? Invite them! More
|
Five years ago Index presented the exhibition TRACKING DISTIRIBUTION with Lili Huston-Herterich, Francesc Ruiz, Nina Sarnelle, Art & Distribution, Leaking Container, Index magazine, Index video archive, Falke Pisano, Sònia López, Palle Torsson, Mmabatho Thobejane, Frida Sandström, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Lisa Trogen Devgun, coyote, DIS, Filmform, AV-arkki, LIMA, Video Data Bank, Clara Amaral, Incitament, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Anna Barham, The Parrot, David Maroto, MMS, Paul O’Neill, Klara Utke Acs, Sara Kaaman, Index Teen Advisory Board, Ponton, Måns Wrange, You Don’t Love Me Yet, Olav Fumarola Unsgaard, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Motto, Coda Press, Publication Studio, Council, Mousse Publishing, Nordic Art Press.
Tracking Distribution was an exhibition that presented a proposal to think together around the invisible structures organizing the world. The exhibition selected and reflected on the distributional strands that had continued to arise throughout that year at Index through the summer course, international festival and continue to structure and feed into the institution’s future programming. Mapping our references, acknowledging the lineage of Index’ conceptual and artistic history and narrative.
Tracking Distribution gathered together these intertwined and disparate threads, unknotting and rebraiding them to create entry points, with artworks, theory, archives, performativity, publishing, mapping and tracing a lineage of referents. More
LIBERATION RADIO by Nhung Nguyen, Esther Johnson and Matthew Sweet is now open, the exhibition is on view until 25 January 2026.
In 1968, a group of American military deserters from the war in Vietnam went to the North Vietnamese consulate in Stockholm with the sole purpose of joining the army they had been drafted to fight against. Instead, they were recruited for the so-called propaganda war and started recording Second Front Radio, a radio program where they blended pop music and political rhetoric to persuade other American soldiers to desert. Their recordings were then transported from Sweden to Vietnam by diplomats, and broadcast on the English language radio station Liberation Radio (Đài phát thanh Giải phóng) from transmitters on the rooftops of Hanoi, and other revolutionary bases in the Vietnamese countryside. The exhibition at Index centers around a new video work which revives that circuit of communication, and with contributions from some of the surviving American deserters, Swedish anti-war activists and Vietnamese journalists of the period, the voice of Liberation Radio speaks again. More
Exhibition
|
|