September Sessions

An initiative by Index and Mint including a specially curated program by anorak.

September Sessions – A Contemporary Art Festival in Stockholm is back with a prolific programme spread over various art spaces as well as public locations in the city. The four-day festival hosts exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings and social gatherings. September Sessions celebrates the diversity of the Stockholm art scene while also creating a platform for international curators, temporarily transforming the city through an infusion of international verve.

During the festival, a series of exhibitions and events will be organised by Accelerator, Beau Travail, Bonniers Konsthall, Filmform, IASPIS, Index, Konsthall C, Liljevalchs, MDT, as well as a specially curated program by Berlin-based curatorial collective anorak, run by Lukas Ludwig and Johanna Markert, at Antics, Cues and Mint.

Houred Time

The third edition of September Sessions presents Houred Time—a four-day programme curated by anorak (Johanna Markert and Lukas Ludwig), with newly conceived work by artists Annika Eriksson, Nour Ouayda, and Jules Reidy.

The invited artists share a language of estrangement that unsettles habitual ways of seeing and feeling. Working across time-based media, their distinct approaches include speculative narration, staged observation, and the deconstruction and spatialisation of sound. Houred Time unfolds through performance, installation, film, and conversation across various venues in Stockholm, including Antics, Cues, and Mint.

Houred Time is a mistranslation of the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1953 poetry collection Die gestundete Zeit, where ‘gestundet’ means deferred or delayed. In a financial context, it is a term used to describe an extension of due debt; its temporal application is more literal—time broken up into regular units. Bachmann’s poetry is characterised by fragmentation, repetition, and an acute awareness of mortality; the title poem is bookended by the phrase “Harder days are coming” invoking a temporality shaped by inevitability and return.

Her poetic rigour exploring interpersonal boundaries and the potential of language in a postwar landscape offers a perspective on memory, grief, and historical trauma that resonates with the festival’s contemporary premise: that living through horror demands new, situated forms of perception and imagination. Houred Time draws on the belief that art must show radically different ways of expressing its time, rather than repeat its dominant phrases. Bachmann’s voice—unblended, at once high and low-pitched—becomes a figure for a poetics that resists coherence, channelling the dissonant and the strange within the familiar. In a similar way, the practices brought together in Houred Time favour the speculative over the documentary, embracing a poetic urgency that seeks to imagine what could be, rather than merely recording what is.

More information on this year’s iteration of September Sessions here.