The board of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation is seeking to appoint a new director to lead the organization.
Index has a history of presenting a diverse program with a contemporary perspective and presents solo exhibitions and thematic projects with newly commissioned work by contemporary artists alongside retrospective or archival presentations. Larger projects are accompanied by an extensive cross-disciplinary public program, often produced in collaboration with other organizations in Stockholm and abroad.
Index was registered as a foundation in 1998 and is one of the most important and longest-standing independent platforms at the forefront of contemporary art practice in Scandinavia. Index is a foundation with a board that holds ultimate financial responsibility. Funders include the Swedish Arts Council, the City of Stockholm and Region Stockholm. The director of Index is responsible for securing sustainable funding.
The new director will develop a program for Index and establish the direction of the organization. In close collaboration with a dedicated team, the director will conceive and execute the program and represent the institution to funders and audiences, nationally and internationally. The director will also contribute to the development of Index’ long-term strategic plan.
The position of the director is full time with a fixed-term contract that has typically been three years, with the possibility of extension.
Application deadline: December 21, 2025
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November 2025 
The board of Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation announces that Marti Manen will step down from his position as Director, effective February 2026, following the opening of the re-staging of the exhibition that Index presented 20 years ago with Harun Farocki.
Marti Manen has served as Director since 2018. Under his leadership, Index has reaffirmed its commitment to collaboration, experimentation, and public-facing programming. Based in Stockholm, the foundation remains rooted in a human-scale non-profit structure while expanding its global reach. During his tenure, Marti Manen has guided Index through an extremely interesting period of institutional experimentation, deepened its engagement with international contemporary art practices, and reinforced its role as a key platform for critical dialogue and artistic research in Stockholm and beyond. Marti Manen comments: “It has been eight fantastic years of working alongside artists, colleagues, and audiences. I believe now is a good moment for Index to embrace a new chapter and for me to embark on a different path. I remain deeply committed to the institution’s mission and look forward to a brilliant future for Index. Index is an example of how to work with complex matters while maintaining proximity — a platform for artists and diverse audiences alike. Many exhibitions and projects will remain vivid memories. Over these eight years, we have been able to offer a wide range of exhibition formats, emphasize learning, integrate artistic research into the institutional field, and share processes with many other institutions, platforms, and practitioners.” “Together with Isabella Tjäder, we have defined an exciting program for the whole of 2026, offering a soft landing for new members of the Index Team. I would like to thank Index board for their constant support, all the artists and cultural workers who have been part of Index during my time, and, of course, the amazing individuals who have formed the Index Team. It has been an honor to work with all of you.” More Program 
Index welcomes you to the release of BAPTISTRY TANKS IN USA, a photographic survey by Carl Johan Erikson.
In BAPTISTRY TANKS IN USA Carl Johan Erikson continues his long-term artistic investigation of artifacts and phenomena in Charismatic Christian environments – now focusing on so called baptistry tanks used for adult baptism in the American Bible Belt. In the book we can follow the production at Piedmont Composites & Tooling in Taylorsville in North Carolina, one of the world’s largest producers of fiberglass baptistry tanks. Another part showing how baptistry tanks are installed in various types of churches, from megachurches in Texas to small chapels Alabama. The book also includes a personal essay by curator and writer Natasha Marie Llorens, who grew up in the American Bible Belt. Together, Erikson’s images and Llorens’ text create a complex and multifaceted picture of faith, culture, and politics—from both a personal and global perspective. BAPTISTRY TANKS IN USA will be presented at Index through a conversation between Carl Johan Erikson and artist Karl Johan Stigmark, who also served as the book’s editor. Natasha Marie Llorens will participate by reading her essay Specific Objects. The presentation will be held in both Swedish and English. More 
Index presents, as a part of the public program for LIBERATION RADIO, Kreativa metoder för att påverka en befolkning (Creative methods to influence a population), a presentation by Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson.
During the period 7/11 2022 – 8/1 2023, Försvarmakten (the Swedish Armed Forces) carried out the advertising campaign Dina styrkor gör oss starkare in Sweden. The target group was young women and the campaign was very prominent in public space during the period. At Index the duo will do a performative reading and analysis of the pitch-material from the ad agency responsible for this campaign. The conceptual methods of the artists have been to document the campaign in public space and, using material requested through the Swedish Freedom of Information Act, try to understand and at the same time problematize a complex contemporary era. This presentation is part of Carl Johan Erikson and Björn Larsson’s long-standing joint project Vägra Döda, which explores existential issues linked to military service and the relationship between state and individual. More 
Index presents, as a part of the public program for LIBERATION RADIO, a screening of the 1969 feature film Deserter USA.
Deserter USA is a film directed and written by Olle Sjögren and Lars Lambert and tells the story of three root-less young ex-soldiers seeking refuge from the war in Vietnam in Sweden. They try to find their way in this new land, engaging in the anti-war movement, working to get political asylum from the Swedish state and being constantly hunted by the American authorities. During the duration of the film more deserters arrive to Sweden and Stockholm, and they organize to create the American Deserters Committee. The film is not a documentary but the filmmakers Sjögren and Lambert collaborated with the actual American Deserters Committee and reconstructed real events from their own lives. In the film the deserters in most cases play a version of themselves and it makes this a unique document and an opinion piece from the height of war in Vietnam. More Learning
Index Archive 
The first exhibition Marti Manen programmed at Index was Mette Edvardsen: TIME HAS FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE.
The exhibition opened 25 January 2019 and exhibited a project by Mette Edvardsen which explored the act of reading. Mette Edvardsen takes the idea of reading (and the memory of reading) from the dystopian situation presented by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451: the system has decided that books go against happiness and must be burned. In Bradbury’s society, happiness is the main goal and nothing can disturb it. Literature, philosophy, ideas or doubts written on paper must be incinerated to avoid a critical approach. However, as always happens, some people decide to keep the books the only way that they think is safe: by memorizing them, one by one, becoming living books to be kept and read. In the exhibition Mette Edvardsen made this conceptual proposition real by creating a collection of human books. The exhibition at Index Foundation Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine shared a selection of books to be memorized, the process of memorizing and the temporary presence of the living books themselves to be read by the visitors/readers. The project had over time also developed along parallel tracks. In addition to the ongoing process of learning by heart and reciting from memory, some of the books was written down from memory, back to paper. These printed books include now the details of the subjectivity coming from reading and memory with all the mistakes that make the books alive. More On view at Index 
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
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