Index – October 2022

October 2022

ITAB in Helsinki

ITAB in Helsinki

This past weekend, members from Index Teen Advisory Board travelled to Helsinki to confer with the youth boards connected to Oslo-based art institution Praksis and Helsinki-based Publics. The respective advisory boards presented their ongoing work at Today is Our Tomorrow, a yearly gathering arranged and hosted by Publics. This year’s gathering focused on the recurrent thematic and evolving concept of the voice, and ITAB’s presentation centered around methods for incorporating a multiplicity of voices into the institutional work of a space like Index. They talked about agency and listening, about the importance of critical dialogue, and of challenging traditional institutional hierarchies.

Content from the presentation, as well as insights and ideas stemming from their yearlong exploration into art, accessibility and institutional frameworks will be gathered in a forthcoming publication produced in collaboration with Praksis and Publics, which will be released in the beginning of 2023. Stay tuned for more information!

Falling in Step

During the two years they have been collaborating, Alva Willemark and Sybrig Dokter incorporate scores into their practice as a method for knowing, working and creating together. The scores are poetic instructions often translated into actual performances the artists realize together such as Walking a Home, the two-channel film featured in the duo’s current exhibition at Index, CAPABLE OF RETURNING HOME.

With a little over one week left for the exhibition, Willemark and Dokter invite the public to participate in walking the score Falling in Step, on Sun, 23 Oct starting at 14:00 as a closing event for their exhibition. Falling in Step will begin and end at Index and take about one hour to perform. After the walk, refreshments will be served.

To participate in the score, please email booking@indexfoundation.se.

Ord&Bild on documenta fifteen

Together with Index, the journal Ord&Bild invites the public to a critical conversation about documenta fifteen which came to be associated with scandals. A month after documenta fifteen ends, a group of critics and curators will reflect on what happened. What role does art critique have when the debate shifts? Will this year’s documenta have consequences for future exhibitions?

Participants include Hans Carlsson, art critic for Ord&Bild and Expressen; Ulrika Stahre, art critic at Aftonbladet; and Ord&Bild editors Jonatan Habib Engvist and Ann Ighe.

The event is on 27 Oct from 18:00 – 20:00, pre-registration is not required.

Melanie Gilligan: FILMS AGAINST CAPITALISM

Welcome to the exhibition opening at Index on Thu, 3 Nov from 17:00 – 20:00. An artist talk with Melanie Gilligan will take place starting at 18:00 together with Index Director Marti Manen, and the Head of Department for Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art, Petra Bauer.

In FILMS AGAINST CAPITALISM, Melanie Gilligan presents six video projects including sculptural video works that comprise her doctoral research: T_he Common Sense, Parts-wholes, The Bay Area Protests, Crowds, Home Together_ and Health as Individual vs. Health as Social. In her video works, Gilligan brings attention to often neglected effects of capitalism on people who are marginalized such as labourers working on low-incomes and older people, as well as to political conditions such as police and state violence. Through the process of making the films, Gilligan maps how her practice changes over time, replacing a closed-set approach (The Common Sense) with mixing fiction and documentary to reflect everyday political settings (Crowds); this allows for a more direct focus on economic and social systems.

The exhibition continues to Sun, 13 Nov and more information is available on Index’s website.

Other Upcoming Events

Many events take place in November, including a two-day seminar organized by Annika Larsson at Index from 15–16 Nov. Her research, Non-Knowledge, Laughter & The Moving Image examines the moving image and the (human and non-human) laughing body’s potential to overturn our habitual course and change the dominant order of things. Follow the link to read more about Larsson’s research project.

Kajsa Dahlberg will present four works in the exhibition, THE TIDAL ZONE, which will open on 23 Nov. Dahlberg investigates film as an apparatus intertwined with non-human modes of life, specifically looking at the relationships between seaweed and the history of photography. More information about Dahlberg’s upcoming exhibition at Index can be found here.