A Letter from 2024

Time is out of joint. Not just time as the times we live in – violently disrupted as they are; saturated with war, genocide, and fascist advances – but time itself, the very progression of it. At Index, we’ve spent this year trying to understand these fluctuations: time vertiginously sped up as we’ve raced through algorithmic video feeds, guided by Index Teen Advisory Board in their search for clues on future institutional use of moving image, and time dislocated as we’ve trailed the meticulous movements of artistic research parsing structurally neglected material. In that research, we’ve seen history refuse linearity, mixing progress and regress, adding nuance to polarized notions. Artists have revisited historical narratives in pursuit of missed subtleties and utopian visions: Starting the year with Cassie Augusta Jørgensen shadowing trans pioneer Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl Dick (shown in the exhibition Bodies and Antibodies), ending it with Massinissa Selmani and Natasha Marie Llorens’s investigation of Algeria’s proposed 1000 socialist villages.

Throughout months of political instability, where predicting a future seems difficult at best, and occasionally almost unbearably bleak, we’ve kept very busy. More than once a week, Index has hosted events with guests from all types of locations. We understand the need of public arenas in difficult times, and we assume our responsibility in opening our doors (and machinery) to the wider artistic eco system. The cultural sector has been made acutely aware of our own fragility, and the year has propelled a pendular movement between a desire for a better future and a fear for the exact opposite.

Perhaps this is why our program has been so permeated by gallows humor, a mode appearing in many works we’ve exhibited. We see such absurdist tendencies in Josefin Arnell’s vampiric real estate developer, and Maja Malou Lyse’s animated sex toy interlocutor. It’s abundant in Vaginal Davis’s raucous gossip-columns-gone-modernist-prose-poems, and sneaks up on us in Massinissa Selmani’s drawn animation; a white dove flapping tirelessly to counterbalance the weight of a colonial bronze rump.

During this year we’ve changed our structure. If in past years this letter was written by Index director Marti Manen, this year it’s written by the two co-directors: Isabella Tjäder became co-director after some years at Index working as Curator of Learning. We understand this shift as something completely natural and part of Index DNA: Index’ voice includes the thoughts of many and having two co-directors shows it clearly.

Our aim is to continue working and sharing a way of doing, opening the institutional code, working from the exhibition and understanding Index as a multilayered structure full of moments and ideas, with a permanent desire for experimentation, connecting individuals and collectives, navigating through languages and offering conversations, artistic experiences and a place and time to share.

Thanks again,
Marti Manen
Isabella Tjäder
Co-Directors, Index Foundation

Read previous letters here:
A letter from 2023
A letter from 2022
A letter from 2021
A letter from 2020
A letter from 2019