Bookshop Situation Series: Curating Beyond the Mainstream. Focus on Jan-Erik Lundström

Welcome to the focus release on Jan-Erik Lundström and the book Curating Beyond the Mainstream: The Practice of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström.

Release conversation at Index with:
-Jan-Erik Lundström
-Maria Lind
-Erik Sandberg

How can the museum be a verb? Or, in other words, how can institutions become a place of constant inquiry and action, rather than a repository of objects? How can a university museum bring global contemporary art to its core? How can one build an institution dedicated to contemporary indigenous artists and what are some of the challenges of this endeavor? These are the questions that Jan-Erik Lundström has been grappling with throughout his professional life.

In a chapter dedicated to his curatorial practice and philosophy in the newly published book Curating Beyond the Mainstream: The Practice of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström we get to follow Lundströms thoughts and ideas from his early days as a photographer at the Visual Studies Workshop in New York to Moderna Museet, Bildmuseet in Umeå and the Sami Center for Contemporary art in Karasjok, Norway. Constantly challenging the mainstream perception of contemporary art and reforming and building up institutions from the ground.

Curating Beyond the Mainstream: The Practice of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström is a result of Konstfack’s CuratorLab course 2020-2021. The chapter about Jan-Erik Lundströms curatorial practice is put together by Edy Fung, Simina Neagu and Erik Sandberg. Through a series of profound conversations with Jan-Erik Lundström they have mapped out contact areas and connections in Lundströms many projects.
Curating Beyond the Mainstream: The Practice of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström is published by Konstfack and Sternberg Press.

The Bookshop Situation Series at Index is based on events to present books, magazines, records and other artistic formats. The bookshop situation is a way to test content, to share it, to distribute it, offering situations to be part of a community of experimental producers and users.