Cheese is time, time is money, money is monopoly
Mohamed Bourouissa, Stef Kamaris,
Marie Vedel
14 April–18 June 2023
Opening Friday 14 April 7-9pm
More info soon!
Mohamed Bourouissa, Stef Kamaris,
14 April–18 June 2023
The Re:Blessing
Friday 17 March 2023
7pm
8 years ago, in May 2015, we celebrated our new home at Monbijougatan 17 with The Blessing, an evening of good energy and karma for our new space. As in all rituals, drums, voices and healing drinks were key ingredients. The drums were delivered through a scenic drum arrangement by To/To (Tobias Kirstein & Toke Tietze) and the voices sounded through The Polyphonic Host, a performance by artist Sandra Mujinga.
After last year’s renovation, it is finally time for a reopening of our space, The Re:Blessing. To blow out our premises and fill them with good energy, we have this time invited the trombonist Maria Bertel, the artist Sergio Augusto and the power noise band Suture.
19.00 Doors open
19.30 Amplified trombone by Maria Bertel
20.00 Gong bath by Sergio Augusto
20.30 Growling by Suture
Potions and incense will be served
Come and celebrate The Re:Blessing of our beloved space with us!!
Caught between the goals of urban planning and the distortions of reality
Victoria Percovich Gutierrez (CSAM) and Katarina Rundgren (Testbedstudio arkitekter)
Monday 28 November 2022
6pm
The year was 2009. The entire second floor of Monbijougatan 15 had been empty after club Indigo had moved out a few years earlier. The space was raw, but full of traces of the previous tenants – textile factory turned Buddhist temple, turned kickboxing association, turned Indigo and now to house SIGNAL’s exhibition A Parallel History – The Independent Art Arenas of Skåne 1968–2008. 600 sqm full of Malmö-history was the perfect setting for our large-scale exhibition that highlighted all the independent art initiatives that enriched Skåne’s art life from 1968 onwards. Among the many visitors who saw the exhibition was the owner of the legendary Tempo Bar & Kök and somewhere along the line the idea of doing something together in that very space was born. In this way, the idea of a joint premises for SIGNAL and the newly opened restaurant Grand Öl & Mat was born. But to make this plan a success, we needed architectural help to transform one space for two operations. Testbedstudio Malmö was contacted and the iconic balcony was built. Kvarteret Bilden previously housed Magnus Gertten’s Auto Images, Filmcentrum Syd, Ifema, Galleri Magnus Åklundh, Elastic Gallery, Johan Berggren Gallery, several book publishers, photographers, freelance cultural workers etc., giving rise to its designation as a rich cultural quarter.
The year is 2022. The gaming giant Massive has bought an entire block and moved into Möllevången. The textile factory has become Trikåfabriken with new tenants and a new focus. Sorgenfri’s rehearsal spaces have been replaced by the newly built residential building “Iggy”. It is no wonder that a city grows and changes. But what happens when everything becomes the same? How can we ensure that public art spaces and production sites are not crowded out by office complexes? Malmö’s art scene is booming and at the same time several studio associations, exhibition spaces and collective workshops are facing the acute threat of losing their premises. Economics, profit maximisation and the vision of a dynamic mixed city do not go together. We need to challenge entrenched structures and classic displacement mechanisms. As the saying goes, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. How do we safeguard a mixed and sustainable city where there is room for everyone, also the less well-off including cultural workers?
To raise these questions and identify the gaps between vision and action, we have invited CSAM (Centre for Land Use Studies), which has been studying and mapping these processes and how different parts of Malmö have changed for several years, as well as architect Katarina Rundgren from Testbedstudio Malmö. Change always happens both too slowly and far too quickly, but right now there is a momentum that is worth seizing if Malmö is to remain an attractive city for culture in the future.
Illustration: Testbedstudio arkitekter Malmö, 2010.
NB! Temporary address: Monbijougatan 17C, 4th floor with elevator.
Empire City
by Michael Blackwood
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 17 November 2022
6pm
Empire City (1985), 89min
New York, 1983. Gentrification, some urban history, and the transition from manufacturing to entrepreneurial offices. Many interviewees from different perspectives and lots of street life.
Multiculturalism, immigration, segregation, vulnerability, social mobility, and many musicians and artists swarming by.
Telling examples of protests from theatres to be demolished in the Theatre District to make way for hotels that want to attract theatregoers.
Several parallels can be drawn to today’s Malmö and the beginnings of the waves that swept across many cities in the 1980s, 90s and 00s. And all this to the music of Philip Glass.
Watch trailer here.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be (revised edition, 2022. Malmö mix)
A radio drama by Thomas Boutoux and Teddy Coste
Monday 7 November 2022
6pm
How to remember an era marked by an obsession with amnesia, attention deficit, lost and recovered memory? Wait, what era are you talking about exactly? The 1990s, pardi ! Oh… really? I thought you were talking about today… I’m going to tell you the story of how it all happened. The 90s were like nothing but a decade when it started. It was nothing, a blank sheet. The end of history. Stop. Who said that?
Together, Paris based writer, curator and publisher Thomas Boutoux and artist Teddy Coste set out on a meandering journey presented in the format of a kind of radio drama starting in the 1990s and leading up till today. There will be art, music, film clips, dreams and desires, politics and economics, lots of stories, and maybe some singing as well.
NB! Temporary address: Monbijougatan 17C, 4th floor with elevator.
What’s at Stake
Elin Alvemark, Jennifer Spångerud
23 September–27 November 2022
Opening Friday 23 September 6-10pm
Gambling, the gaming industry, creative industries and the quest for constant profit maximisation. The venerable Bilden cultural quarter, where SIGNAL is located, is undergoing a major renovation and while we are in a temporary space we reflect on the ongoing Massive-isation of our neighbourhood and on what spaces are left for artistic and cultural creation in the city. For this we have invited the artists Elin Alvemark and Jennifer Spångerud to think with us.
What’s at Stake is an exhibition that has emerged in dialogue with the forces of time that surround us. Through a collaborative working process that draws on questions of probability and has been inspired by simple inventions that create expectation, Alvemark and Spångerud blend sculptural materials with archaic forms. Here, the urn, the clock and the wheel of fortune become supporting symbols to respond to the ancient mechanisms where time and chance are equally decisive in the game of power, politics and economic gain. The mechanical grasping claw, however, never manages to grasp the delicate elements, the grains of gold that are crucial to a dynamic cityscape. It is simply the wrong tool for the job. How do we determine if the pieces of what we are building are falling apart? Or whether a truth today is still valid tomorrow?
The challenge is not how we change the city going forward, but rather how we can safeguard the specific attributes that collectively make up the soul of the city. With so many unfortunate facts in the name of urban development, the game of urban space seems to be stuck in a loop that won’t break. Why? is the perennial question.
Temporary move
June–December 2022
The whole block, where SIGNAL is located, is undergoing extensive renovation. During autumn 2022, we will be located in a temporary space in the same courtyard. The address is Monbijougatan 17 C, then take the elevator up to the 4th floor.
A warm welcome!
Ring Song
Sara Lindeborg
with special guests Yasmine El Baramawy and Matthew Rana
Wednesday 4 May 2022
6pm
“Poetry may show us that when we sing to the subjectivity of the other, without determining that subjectivity, this is politics.” – Lisa Robertson, Thresholds
The book project Ring Song (Sailor Press) consists of Sara Lindeborg’s ongoing painting series Manuscripts and the essay Thresholds by the poet Lisa Robertson. Through ancient ornaments, Manuscripts traces migration to make new compositions about intimacy, difference, and reciprocity. The project’s entry point is the Andalusian polylingual poetic form muwashshahat, which translated from Arabic means ring song. The form constitutes a multiplicity of social intersections and rhythmically innovates the time for our thinking together. For the book release at SIGNAL, the composer and oud player Yasmine El Baramawy and the poet Matthew Rana are invited to have a dialog with Lindeborg’s work.
Listen with headphones.
Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (1986-05)
by Dan Graham
Wednesday 23 March 2022
7pm
Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall (2005), 8min
We start the evening thinking about our friend Dan Graham whose sharp observations and disarming humour have enriched our lives.
Death by Chocolate: West Edmonton Mall is shot in the bizarre yet familiar arena of the shopping mall providing a coldly beautiful view of mall culture: its architecture, its consumer public and its unique aesthetic world. A sugary portrait of corporate capitalism.
Dust
by Hartmut Bitomsky
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Wednesday 23 March 2022
7pm
Dust (2007), 90min
Dust. It is everywhere and ever present. A conglomeration of the finest particles set in motion as soon as things are starting to settle. It is fought and cleared away and yet returns again even as it is being removed. A Sisyphus whoever tries to defeat it. Dust nestles in carpets and in attics. It invades laboratories and settles on artworks. Dust causes illness, dust makes up the cosmos. It is the smallest, discernible subject about which to make a film. Hartmut Bitomsky follows the path of the dust. In associative and symphonic movements, he pursues it to the place where it settles, and seeks out people who contend with it. A meditative rumination on that which is pulverised, drifts around us in the wind and our clothes and breath, comes down on us in vastly different shapes and colors, the film leaves an impression at once horrifying and ecstatic.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Battling with Malevolent Forces
Alice Creischer, Iza Tarasewicz
12 November–19 December 2021
& 13 January–27 March 2022
Opening Friday 12 November 7-9pm
The hat speaks, the rake speaks
the scythe murmurs
to the ear in the grass:
8 760 hours has the year.
1 200 hours consumes a job.
40 years of work
with 80 years life expectancy
are 48 000 hours.
But life has
700 800 hours
in Germany.
In Germany
the share of working time
of life is
only 7 percent.
To the ear in the grass speaks the hat
the rake speaks
it whispers the scythe to the eyelid:
Given the speed of light in fiber
it is possible
to send
an order from New York to Chicago
and back in 12 milliseconds.
It gives the occasion to be
the first to exploit
the discrepancies between
prices in Chicago and prices in New York.
A millisecond is a thousandth of a second
A tenth of the time it takes you
to blink your eyes,
if you blink
as fast as you can.
To the lid the scythe sizzles
Watch out, you,
Don’t you think, you
that you can hide it
under the lid of skin
the dream in sleep
and the eyes that run in it
around like birds do
before the host
who writes
exactly and precisely
your share of work
in life
on the door
with inerasable chalk
and do not think
that you can wipe it out
with your batting eyelashes
and let your eyes stand still
still in the middle
motionless
frozen
from the fright to listen to me in the grass
And do not think
And don’t you dare
you!
To think that I am a cricket
The mermaid and the outer point of no return
Ami Bergman, Peter Wallström
24 September–31 October 2021
Opening Friday 24 September 6-10pm
Scientists today argue that the universe is expanding in a single plane. Or that it has such flat bending that it is impossible to notice or understand its curve, not even if we would travel immensely many lightyears forward in the same direction. Around on earth we circulate, bound to our bodies, held to the ground by gravity.
In the depths of the sea and in the infinity of space gravity is temporarily disbanded and our bodies float. Staring into the abyss of the sea is a similar feeling to looking up towards the starry sky, the feeling of facing something immense and uncertain on the verge of the incomprehensible. Scales shift. Thought floats freely. Time and space dissolves, as well as our own perception of ourselves and how we function. The gaze turns inwards and looks out into the infinite at the same time. A shared feeling of not wanting to be merely a body or be defined as one. A longing to be able to leave it, if only temporarily, to become weightless and free.
In Ami Bergman’s and Peter Wallström’s painting we are faced with a different kind of weightlessness and condensation. Here the twisted becomes a possible free zone where the idea of a reality beyond the current is nourished. A breaking point and a longing away from the obvious to finally land in the humble realisation that something can remain inexplicable and still exist. Even in times of great uncertainty we must remember what freedom is.
Your Sonic Medicine
Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
March–June 2021
Introducing Paolo Thorsen-Nagel as our IASPIS Malmö artist-in-residence 2021. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel is a musician and artist who will be tuning the room of Signal, exploring listening fantasies and navigating the simultaneous need for closeness under the current impossibility of a live and shared listening experience. We are so happy to have him with us – stay tuned for things to come!
I Am Not One
Anna Andersson, Jenny Bergman, Lina Bjerneld, Roxy Farhat, Nathalie Gabrielsson, Susanna Jablonski, Jakob Krajcik, Stephen McKenzie, Nanna Nordström, Isak Sundström, Zhou Tao, Nacho Tatjer, Magnus Thierfelder Tzotzis, Cara Tolmie
8 May–14 June 2020
at Bonniers Konsthall
The crisis in the Swedish art world, as a consequence of the covid-19 pandemic and the forced or voluntary isolation experienced by us all, is a reminder that alone we do not feel particularly good. Therefore, five art organisations — Bonniers Konsthall, hangmenProjects, Index, Mint and Signal — are experimenting with a joint project and together have produced the exhibition I Am Not One.
The pandemic is not the theme of this exhibition, but its origin. Through an associative chain of thought, a number of works and artists have been selected by the respective parties. Rather than a concordant curatorial argument, the exhibition can be considered a kind of montage. The works offer angles of approach to the situation we find ourselves in right now. Art is a place for collaborative thinking and it does not back away from what is difficult. Instead of presenting answers or solutions, art allows us to remain with the complicated and paradoxical that permeates our world: existentially, poetically and materially.
This collaboration is one way of drawing attention to our various organisations’ practices and institutional conditions. The crisis currently unfolding in the Swedish cultural sector is probably the worst in modern times and we will need various kinds of help to cope. An evident need of solidarity and support has arisen, as well as a desire to show that art in everyday life must carry on.
Who knows when we may meet again, it will probably be a while yet. But when it is possible, we wish to gather you all for a conversation where everyone is welcome to discuss with us what we want to happen after the crisis. An occasion to examine new forms of collaboration and reflect on the future of art, artists and art institutions. Perhaps this exhibition can be seen as a first invitation.
The exhibition I Am Not One is presented at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
Editorial meeting – A Gathering Towards a Critique of the Contemporary #1
New date TBA
Sunday 15 March 2020
1-4pm at Inkonst
When publishing spaces are becoming more restricted in favor of ideological and market-driven communication – there is an urgent need for expanding critical conversations and formats. Under the headline “Editorial meeting”, Paletten Art Journal organises two public symposiums during the spring 2020 in Malmö and in Stockholm, and contributes to one in Gothenburg. These gatherings do not only intend to present and comment, but also actively discuss, determine and propose alternative methods for future work. The resulting material will be worked through in collaboration with local editors, and published on Paletten’s website in the fall of 2020.
Focus: The meeting at Inkonst will be the first out of three meetings during the spring, with a special focus on criticism as care and collective project. What is care (in the context of art), who provides care and who receives it? How can art criticism contribute to the improvement of cultural workers’ conditions? Can we collectively establish joint criterias and values? What do we as critics tell and share, and what stories are being heard? These are some of the questions that will be discussed during the symposium. Additionally, a focus on the geopolitical interface – both between Malmö and Copenhagen as well as the material and identitarian divisions that characterise our work and our lives in past, present and future. How do these relationships impact the textual content and the writers who produce it? The meeting is held at Inkonst in collaboration with Inter Art Center (IAC), Signal – Center for Contemporary Art, and the podcast series Critical Dialogues (Christine Antaya and Matthew Rana).
Preliminary speakers:
– Jakob Jakobsen (Copenhagen), artist and writer
– WeRCurious (Malmö), cross-disciplinary network of care
– Critical Dialogues (Malmö), art critics and editors Christine Antaya and Matthew Rana
– documentations.art (Paris), anonymous editorial collective
Local editors: Christine Antaya och Matthew Rana
Location: Inkonst, Malmö
Free entrance, limited spots. Register here: fvsandstrom@gmail.com
A Malmö Trilogy: To Splice
Angelica Falkeling, Sara Lindeborg, Selma Sjöstedt
18 September–8 November 2020
Opening Friday 18 September 7-9pm
One single scene is told from a number of different perspectives. We recognise this approach from the world of cinema, theatre, literature, but what if we were to present an exhibition this way?
Three artists have been invited to work on one exhibition which will be told in three chapters throughout the year. Each chapter has a leading voice, yet each chapter is the sum of a collaborative exploration that guides us through the multiple folds that compose an artistic practice. Idiosyncratic, unexpected, inconsistent bare meanings we like. So much more fulfilling than recognisable, safe and deliverable. But as we all know, such an approach to one’s work takes courage and support. So we ask ourselves what kind of art world we want to be part of. How can we act on the structures, and not just the choices.
The leading voice of the second chapter is Angelica Falkeling, a voice that departs from their own aesthetic universe, sculptural assemblage and domestic art practice. In the old Delfshaven in Rotterdam the skill of splicing, repairing and reassembling ropes, has been performed for centuries. But harbours are as much containers of stories, as they are of goods. Economical transactions have changed the course of history and massive transfers continue to cause irreparable wounds. Inquires into the extraction of raw materials, the relationship between sculptural gravitation and stability, or the human joints as infrastructure negotiating function and dysfunction are all interwoven topics in this chapter. And thus embracing the intersectional and polylingual aspects of one’s work, Sara Lindeborg’s paintings reverberate art history saturated with feminism, painterly ethics and pop cultural vibes, while Selma Sjöstedt’s paintings-cum-drawings appear like cinematic filmstrips blowing in the wind. Slowly and gently, a contamination of the individual practice has given way for the rise of a collaborative endeavour that transgresses any imposed limitation of a signature style.
We tell each other stories in order to live. We tell each other stories in order to dream and imagine, to let ideas slowly percolate through our minds and shape a larger collective consciousness. To Splice is the second chapter of A Malmö Trilogy.
Audio Description by Angelica Falkeling
A Malmö Trilogy: Armaturer
Selma Sjöstedt, Angelica Falkeling, Sara Lindeborg
14 March–14 June 2020
One single scene is told from a number of different perspectives. We recognise this approach from the world of cinema, theatre, literature, but what if we were to present an exhibition this way?
Three artists have been invited to work on one exhibition which will be told in three chapters throughout the spring. Each chapter has a leading voice, yet each chapter is the sum of a collaborative exploration that guides us through the multiple folds that compose a practice. Idiosyncratic, unexpected, inconsistent bare meanings we like. So much more fulfilling than recognisable, safe and deliverable. But as we all know, such an approach to one’s work takes courage and support. So we ask ourselves what kind of art world we want to be part of. How can we act on the structures, and not just the choices.
The leading voice of the first chapter is Selma Sjöstedt, a voice spoken from a point of stillness. Painting is her language, and traces are her words with which she composes visual rhythms. By waiting and observing she lures the poetics out of the marks left on old canvases. Like an improvised call and response. And like armature, her works made for this chapter act as supporting structures for a collegial dialogue. Responding to her visual rhythms is what Angelica Falkeling and Sara Lindeborg have set out to do forming interwoven sentences that move in and out of each other. Sara Lindeborg’s manuscripts gather fragments on human traces in the New Mexican landscape, while Angelica Falkeling adds a spatial collage of ingredients from their own universe and domestic art practice. And thus, a contamination of the individual practice gives way for the rise of a collaborative endeavour.
We tell each other stories in order to live. We tell each other stories in order to dream and imagine, to let ideas slowly percolate through our minds and shape a larger collective consciousness. Armaturer is the first chapter of A Malmö Trilogy:
Recording from the studio at Hullkajen and drum solo.
Sound, 4 h, loop
The sound was presented through a four-channel sound system and created an atmosphere in the exhibition. The drum solo sounded from different positions in the room with shifting intervals.
CHANGE MY LIFE BUT NOT MY STYLE (LP/DL)
MAKEMAKE
Friday 17 January 2020
7pm
On January 17 MAKEMAKE’s album FÖRÄNDRA MITT LIV MEN INTE MIN STIL (LP/DL) will be released on the Malmö-based label Kalligrammofon. It’s a record about grief, memories and survival. A kind of redefined confessional blues on the vulnerability of the streets, self-medication and boasting:
The uncomfortable is my main theme. The protagonists are whores, drug addicts and freaks. In a culture that can’t seem to speak of dirt and pain everyone who is filthy becomes invisible. We learn that our personalities can’t exist, a part of our experiences can’t be told. This destructive process prevents us from living fully as complete persons. And this is more painful than the unpleasantness of being “exposed” to difficult stories. In fact it is relieving, liberating, and even funny, when art tells forbidden stories – because it makes us for once feel reflected.
Under the stage name MAKEMAKE Malmö-based artist Maja Karlsson makes headstrong pop music where fierce rap on ”Bjärredsskånska” mingles with clear nods to New York’s queer hip-hop scene, various west coasts and artsy new wave. Maja has been a part of Malmö’s music underground for over 20 years, with a background in the experimental rockband Yind, in her own pop projects like Le bombe and Just Like a Boy, as well as her techno alias Style by Magic and as a touring musician in The Radio Dept.
Kalligrammofon is a label for experimental music, pop music and experimental pop music, and has released records with musicians such as Testbild!, Death and Vanilla, Viktor Sjöberg among others.
A Malmö Trilogy: Shepherdess and Other Exilic Vernaculars
Sara Lindeborg, Selma Sjöstedt, Angelica Falkeling
21 November–13 December 2020
& 14 January–28 March 2021
Opening Saturday 21 November noon-4pm
One single scene is told from a number of different perspectives. We recognise this approach from the world of cinema, theatre, literature, but what if we were to present an exhibition this way?
Three artists have been invited to work on one exhibition which will be told in three chapters throughout the year. Each chapter has a leading voice, yet each chapter is the sum of a collaborative exploration that guides us through the multiple folds that compose an artistic practice. Idiosyncratic, unexpected, inconsistent bare meanings we like. So much more fulfilling than recognisable, safe and deliverable. But as we all know, such an approach to one’s work takes courage and support. So we ask ourselves what kind of art world we want to be part of. How can we act on the structures, and not just the choices.
The leading voice of the third chapter is Sara Lindeborg, a voice that reverberates art history saturated with feminism and painterly ethics. She traces the ancient history of ornaments and vernacular migrations that compose the world as we know it today. Gradually, a dispersed pastoral emerges out of exilic strategies and the longing for another world. Raising the question of sharing and thus exposing one’s inner most concerns at stake, both Selma Sjöstedt and Angelica Falkeling respond with works that balance this fine line between the personal and the universal. Their works echo the mutuality of lived experiences, from the impossibility of longing for something immaterial, to be something one is not, to the very matter of fact decisions we face in our lives. Slowly and gently, a contamination of the individual practice gives way for the rise of a collaborative endeavour that transgresses any imposed limitation of a signature style.
We tell each other stories in order to live. We tell each other stories in order to dream and imagine, to let ideas slowly percolate through our minds and shape a larger collective consciousness. Shepherdess and Other Exilic Vernaculars is the third and final chapter of A Malmö Trilogy.
Mint
Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari
Friday 13 December 2019
6pm
Mint is a curatorial duo, a mobile exhibition project and an art space initiated by Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari. They work with a special interest for radical art production, intergenerational meetings and site-specific interventions. During spring 2019 they inaugurated the new art space Mint, located in the Workers’ Educational Association in Stockholm. Fahlén and Haidari were artistic directors for the Luleå Biennial 2018: Tidal Ground, and will continue as such during the 2020 edition. Previously they both worked at Tensta konsthall, a center for contemporary art in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta, with local and international art projects.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Seven Women, Seven Sins
by Chantal Akerman, Maxi Cohen, Valie Export, Laurence Gavron, Bette Gordon, Ulrike Ottinger, Helke Sander
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 5 December 2019
7pm
Seven Women, Seven Sins (1986), 109min
What constitutes a deadly sin today? Seven of the world’s best-known women directors produce their own versions of celluloid sin in this omnibus film. Helke Sander reverses Gluttony with her vision of Eve forcing her apples into the hands of a reluctant Adam. Bette Gordon finds Greed during a fight in the ladies’ room of a luxury hotel over a lottery ticket. Strangers reply to Maxi Cohen’s ad in a newspaper to share their litanies in Anger. Chantal Akerman battles to overcome her Sloth in order to complete her film, while Valie Export strips bare the notions of the skin trade in Lust. Envy turns into murder in Laurence Gavron’s take on vice, and Ulrike Ottinger illustrates Pride with a fantastical collage of allegory and images. Seven Women, Seven Sins is a rare collaboration uniting these seven iconoclastic independent women artists under a stirring theme that encouraged adventurous storytelling.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Pinochet Porn
by Ellen Cantor
Monday 9 December 2019
&
Thursday 24 October 2019
7pm at Hypnos Theatre
An epic experimental film, Pinochet Porn, embodies – through a dizzying array of stories and narrative methods – the multifaceted work of artist Ellen Cantor (1961–2013).
Using her 2004 series of eighty-two drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional “script,” Cantor worked on Pinochet Porn, her most ambitious project, for the last five years of her life. The feature-length, episodic narrative, about the intertwined lives of five children and their maturation into adulthood, would be completed posthumously by her close collaborators – including her cast and crew – according to her directives. Using Super 8mm film, archival video footage, and digital animated drawings, Pinochet Porn takes the form of a soap opera, at once tragic and comic, and marked by a subversive sexuality. Its story weaves between personal, political, and historical circumstances, obliquely revolving around the political discord in Chile during the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. The film is also a document of an extended moment in New York and London avant-garde art and culture, featuring a range of artists, curators, writers, filmmakers, fixtures of the underground, musicians, and their children.
Featuring: Ellen Cantor, Lia Gangitano, Harri Kupiainen, Patrick Blumer, Stephen Ward, and Jim Fletcher. With: Michel Auder, Andrew Haynes, Tristan Hughes-Freeland, Jay Kinney, Rosalie Knox, Danny McDonald, Brandon Olson, Annabel Sexton, Spencer Sweeney, John Thomson, Sofia Elisabeth von Herrlich, Cerith Wyn Evans, Emma Nilsson, Bishi, James Jeanette, Princess Julia, Shandi Sullivan, Ryan Harman, Malcolm Hamilton, Kerry Davis, Artur Carlo Samperi Malagnino, Nuutti Kataja, and Pablo León de la Barra.
Pinochet Porn (2008-16), 123 min, b&w and color, sound, Super 8mm film on HD video, English and Spanish with English subtitles.
Pinochet Porn by Ellen Cantor is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Our friend, Valerie Solanas.
Location: Hypnos Theatre, Norra Grängesbergsgatan 15, Malmö
Active Art
Joachim Hamou and Barbara Sirieix
Tuesday 8 October 2019
7pm
The 1923 manifesto Active Art by Latvian philosopher Andrejs Kurcijs triggered a series of responses by writers, artists and curators on the notion of activism, past and present: art for political purposes, art for its own purpose or art with no purpose.
The texts collected in the book Active Art aim at considering the active part of writing according to the definition given by Kurcijs. Contributors include Rebeka Pōldsam from Estonia writing on the lesbian artist Anna-Stina Tremund, Bella Marrin from UK writing on virus structures in language, French poet Laura Boullic writing a revolutionary poetry essay, French artist Eva Barto advertising her upcoming research on economic structures in art and Latvian artist Evita Vasiļjeva sharing the beginning and the end of her notebook. There is a conversation in several parts running throughout the book between the editors and Latvian contemporary philosopher Ainārs Kamoliņš analysing Kurcijs original text. And finally the book also includes the reprint of texts by American writer Robert Glück introducing the queer writing collective New Narrative he co-founded in 1975 and a rare essay from 1982, and by American writer James Baldwin, an essay initially published in 1987 in an art catalogue with a very strong political stand against racism.
Active Art is edited by writers and curators Maija Rudovska and Barbara Sirieix, and writer and artist Joachim Hamou. It is published in English by French publisher Paraguay Press.
Malmö Gallery Night 2019
Saturday 28 September 2019
6pm-midnight
On view is the exhibition Our friend, Valerie Solanas with works by Ellen Cantor, Chiara Fumai, Pauline Oliveros, Carole Roussopoulos & Delphine Seyrig.
Please note that we will be closed during the day and remain closed on Sunday 29 September.
Our friend, Valerie Solanas
Ellen Cantor, Chiara Fumai, Pauline Oliveros, Carole Roussopoulos & Delphine Seyrig
20 September–15 December 2019
Opening Friday 20 September 7-9pm
Dear Valerie,
This exhibition is dedicated to you. We like to think of it as a group of ideal friends, supportive colleagues, and brilliant minds coming together. You did not know each other, but your conversations unfold over time and still echo poignantly with our present. Your strong and powerful voices were never afraid to embrace fragility.
Ellen writes somewhere that “when a body loves it shows an admirable frailty.” Close friends and collaborators that informed her work, she called the circle of “magical intuitive co-operation.” Her struggles with her last work Pinochet Porn became, in part, her friends’ struggles too, and after she passed away it was these friends that finished the tale of her beloved characters. In a way, she had created something larger than all parts involved; political in intent, figurative, precise, dramatic, emotional, and “adult in subject matter.” Is tragedy a choice, she asks.
When Chiara reads your Manifesto, she mimics the political rhetorics we live in today with such precision, as if she knew what ugly mess was coming our way. And when she channels the spirits of various women in history that voiced their dissent, she is not only mixing spiritism and politics. She reveals a motley crew of relentless minds – activists, terrorists, freak-show performers, philosophers – who collectively represent the fears of a bourgeois society.
In voice-over, Carole explains that since your Manifesto was no longer available in French or English, she and Delphine decided to transform several passages of the book into sound and image. The Manifesto as a true utopia that inverts power relations to denounce a situation that has become normality: the state of permanent war, waged by men throughout the world. This is almost too clear in the passages of live images from the news broadcast on the television screen behind them.
And Pauline says it best in her own words: “Shortly after it was published in 1968 the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas fell into my hands. Intrigued by the egalitarian feminist principles set forth in the Manifesto, I wanted to incorporate them in the structure of a new piece that I was composing. The women’s movement was surfacing and I felt the need to express my resonance with this energy. Marilyn Monroe had taken her own life. Valerie Solanas had attempted to take the life of Andy Warhol. Both women seemed to be desperate and caught in the traps of inequality: Monroe needed to be recognized for her talent as an actress. Solanas wished to be supported for her own creative work. To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of Their Desperation had its premiere in 1970. Though everyone knew Marilyn Monroe hardly anyone recognized Valerie Solanas or took her Manifesto seriously. I brought the names of these two women together in the title of the piece to draw attention to their inequality and to dedicate the piece.”
This exhibition is our tribute to strength and fragility, politics and aesthetics, wilfulness and clarity. This exhibition is for you.
Thank you Valerie Solanas, we miss you.
8tunnel2
Friday 15 February 2002
7pm
The Dynamo Award 2019
Award Ceremony and Summer Party
Tuesday 18 June 2019
Welcome from 6pm
This year the Swedish Arts Grants Committee awards the Dynamo Award to Carl Lindh, Joel Odebrant and Elena Tzotzi who run Signal. They share the grant of 150.000 SEK.
The chairwoman of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee Ann-Sofi Noring will hand over the grant during a festive ceremony with friends, bar & music at Signal.
The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s motivation reads as follows:
The Dynamo Award 2019 is awarded to Carl Lindh, Joel Odebrant and Elena Tzotzi who run Signal – Center for Contemporary Art. For over two decades, Signal has been an influential spearhead in the Malmö art scene.
Signal has with clarity and a persuasive consistent work created an invaluable meeting place for artists, curators and audience since the end of the 90s. With exhibitions as well as artistic collaborations, research and specific public events they have influenced the art scene far beyond Sweden. Signal has grown into an evident venue for contemporary art and insistently shed light on the artistic process, research and discourse around the public discussion on art.Signal has since its beginning in 1998 involved several artists and curators who collaboratively have formed a dynamic organization. The creative development of the organization has consistently moved forward to become what Signal is today.
About The Dynamo Award
The Dynamo Award was established in 2000 and is intended to highlight initiatives that contribute to the creation of new venues where artists can meet their audience. The awarded initiatives do not have to be run by artists, but the organization must be important for artists by creating new public sites for contemporary art.
Elena Tzotzi, Carl Lindh and Joel Odebrant respond:
We, Signal are very honoured and proud to be awarded the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s Dynamo Award 2019.
Signal was founded in 1998 by a group of artist in Malmö. Early on it organically formed into a group of artists and curators led by a desire to explore the meaning of collaboration and curation, to support artists, to propose new modes of production, to stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art.
Signal is today the sum of the people that have been involved: Christian Andersson, Maria Bustnes, Alexander Gutke, Sara Jordenö, Magnus Thierfelder, Evalena Tholin, Elena Tzotzi, Johan Svensson, Emma Reichert, Karlotta Blöndal, Luca Frei, Runo Lagomarsino, Johan Tirén, Carl Lindh, Fredrik Strid, Joel Odebrant, Matthew Rana.
Speaking from our own experience, we know very well that when you reach a certain point after a while of giving everything you have and not being sure if you have the energy or the possibility to continue, then that is the moment when all support and appreciation means the world.
Therefore, we have decided to accept the Dynamo Award 2019 with great joy and in our turn pass it on to several initiatives that are also valuable and indispensable for the strong art scene that Malmö is today.
Signal hands over the entire Dynamo Award 2019 to:
Alta Art Space because size does not move mountains, the will and the heart does.
DELFI because the Malmö and Copenhagen art scenes now stand even closer to each other.
Malmö Open Studios because enthusiasm makes everything possible and pleasurable.
METOOD because to act collectively on issues the burn makes all the difference.
Hyllie UngdomsRåd (HUR) because they had the courage to trust in art and the arts are inspired by them.
Make a Lasting Impression
Karlotta Blöndal, Luca Frei, Alexander Gutke, Anna Ling, Peter Thörneby
29 March–29 June 2002
At: 4th Gwangju Biennale, Korea
Signal is proud to present our contribution to the 4th Biennale in Gwangju, South Korea. “Make a Lasting Impression” is an exhibition of works by five Swedish artists, curated by Alexander Gutke.
The exhibition consists of works by Karlotta Blöndal, Luca Frei, Alexander Gutke, Anna Ling and Peter Thörneby. The title comes from the situation of Signal visiting Gwangju and introducing a scene situated far away from South Korea and hopefully making some kind of lasting connection.
In the presentation of Signal our aim is not only to introduce various exhibitions, activities and artists that have been presented at Signal, but also give a more general picture of our situation being in Malmö, Sweden and our visions concerning our work with Signal.
Signal is one of twenty artists’ groups / galleries invited to Gwangju to introduce their space and a scene far away from South Korea. We hope that our contribution can be part of “a lasting impression” for all sides.
Nathalie Djurberg, Ewa Einhorn, Lyn Löwenstein
6–9 March 2003
At: Sthlm Art Fair, Stockholm
S.S.E.F.F (Svenska Satanist- Engelbrektska -Feminist föreningen)
Ylva Westerlund
11–20 December 2003
Opening Thursday 11 December 7-9pm
At: Simon Says c/o Enkehuset, Stockholm
Johanna Billing
Thursday 22 January 2004
7pm
Old Habits Die Hard – 50 videos selected by 50 artist run spaces and collectives
15–19 December 2004
Opening Thursday 15 December 7-9pm
Organized by Lise Nellemann and Heman Chong.
A Natural History of Revolutions
Release for Subaltern 2018 #3 & #4
Thursday 6 June 2019
7pm
Fifty years have passed since the strikes and protests in France in May-June 1968 and the Hot Autumn in Italy 1969, and one hundred years have passed since the Revolutions in Germany in 1918 and 1919. In Subaltern #3 and #4, we approach these uprisings and revolutions that have become museum exhibits and occasions for journals and publishing houses to produce memorial publications. If the forces put into motion in these years sought paths leading out of our world, it is today, from our perspective, possible to see how they pushed the technological civilization into a new phase. They are no longer part of our world, but lay the foundation of what Jacques Wajnsztejn has called the revolution of capital, an implementation of the socialist program within capitalism.
We do not turn towards these events only to denounce the way in which they have produced the contemporary, hedonistic human being, capable to see through the uprising as a naive meta-story, but also to demonstrate that in the ongoing decomposition of the world there is also a life-dynamic that time and again makes people think and act against the power of the apparatuses.
Editor and literary scholar Erik Erlanson presents the journal’s program and discusses Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on his own transformation from a political activist to a bourgeois philosopher.
Editor and poet Gustav Sjöberg reads from his coming poetics, from which one of the contributions to #3/2018 is taken.
Urban Art Stories
Cultural exchange project
December 2004 – April 2005
Cultural exchange project with Sparwasser HQ, Berlin.
Full Pull 05 – electronics across the field
Henrik Andersson / Niklas Korsell
My Lindh
Saturday 12 November 2005
2pm at Rooseum
Concert with Henrik Andersson / Niklas Korsell and performance by My Lindh in connection with the exhibition with Henrik Andersson at Signal.
Signal visits Neon Gallery and VVV Nordic
Friday 28 November 2005
7pm
Bus tour to the electronic music festival VVV Nordic at Neon Gallery, Brösarp, in connection with the exhibition with Henrik Andersson at Signal.
Metooder for Malmö
Elena Wolay, Mats Stjernstedt, Maja Karlsson
Tuesday 28 May 2019
7pm
Metood invites you to yet another in-depth conversation on the conditions for artistic practice, this time taking place at Signal. We have gathered three practitioners operating in Malmö on different cultural scenes and with various backgrounds: Elena Wolay (Jazz är Farligt/Jazz is Dangerous), Mats Stjernstedt (Malmö Konsthall) and Maja Karlsson (MAKEMAKE, Le Bombe, Style by Magic/Darkest Karlsson etc.)
The conversation will be held in Swedish, and the evening will end with a performance by Malmö’s heaviest and deepest musical grass root, MAKEMAKE.
METOOD is a group of artists formed to prevent sexual harassment and assault, expose power structures and break down the oppressive culture within the arts.
Matti & Simon Kallioinen
Sunday 11 December 2005
7pm at Teater Lilith
Performance with Matti & Simon Kallioinen in connection with the exhibition with Henrik Andersson at Signal.
Start-up meeting: MFK – Malmö Fria Kvinnouniversitet
Thursday 31 August 2006
7pm
Malmoe Free University for Women (MFK) is a participatory art project and a feminist organization for critical knowledge production. We aim to raise and discuss contemporary political issues by bringing together experience and knowledge from various fields. Through experimental, radical pedagogical methods we hope to bridge theory and practice and challenge dominating norms and power structures. Our work has taken the form of reading groups, workshops, lectures and screenings. MFK was started in 2006 in Malmoe.
Algirdas Stravinskas and NOW
Wednesday 10 May 2006
7pm at Teater Lilith
Performance at Teater Lilith by the dancer and singer Algirdas Stravinskas, Vilnius and music by NOW.
Rashomon
by Akira Kurosawa
Sunday 22 October
7pm
Rashomon (1950), 88 min.
Screening of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon in connection with the exhibition I Läsning / In Reading by Kari Mjåtveit.
Signal and Verkligheten presented their activities at the seminar “Allt ljus på oss”, initiated by IKK.
Monday 2 October 2006
10pm at KKV Monumental (Bragegatan 15, Malmö)
Conversation with Johanna Arvidsson
Wednesday 8 May 2019
7pm
Join us for a conversation with artist Johanna Arvidsson in conjunction with the exhibition Dark Spring at Signal.
The conversation will be held in Swedish.
Folie / Kompjtr Fumca / Dj Eivind
Friday 5 May 2006
Elastic, Ystadvägen 22/Bragegatan 15
10pm
ÅMX.06 Midsommar Flicks
Film screenings outside Signal
16–18 June 2006
ÅMX.06 (Århus Malmö Exchange Programme 2006) in collaboration with exhibition space Signal invites you to the ÅMX.06 Midsommar Flicks, which takes place in the form of evening film screenings between 16-18 June 2006. Eight films relating to the notion of public and public sphere are shown, and all screenings are free of charge and open to the public.
The film screening is an outcome of a four months reading group that met in Signal to read and discuss texts dealing with notions of public and public sphere. As the group began to respond and question the various ideas on the formation of the public sphere posed by writers such as Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, Virginia Woolf, Henri Lefebvre, Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, this led to drawing parallels and connections about the role of cultural production from political, social, and personal perspectives. Constructing a film program consisting of works made by some of the authors read in the reading group, or by others who touch upon the notion of public and public sphere, is an attempt to open the forum of discussion with a wider community of people and to consider together the spaces where the creative process, political and social action may meet.
With the evening film screenings as a focal point, the ÅMX Midsommar Flicks will present in conjunction with the events, two additional materials that encompass the offshoots of ideas and discussions during the months of reading as a group, and additional relevant material. One such component is a distribution of a booklet that houses research on the public and local context made by each of the participants, and contribution by Gunnar Sandin and Annelie Nilsson (L.A Islands). The second is a consumable piece rh-protocol made by Finnish artist Piia Salmi, who has made a project of examining the communal gardens in and around Malmö, and has gathered rhubarb from various gardens that she has visited.
The films presented point to notions of public and public sphere in urban contexts that are embedded in times of change, a change that is tending towards monolithic impositions rather than something that has risen from a plurality of voices below. The collated material from the reading group presented with the screening is an attempt at a modest but a pertinent contribution to voices that can become a fabric of counterpoint to the mainstream. The project wishes to provoke the inhabitants to reflect upon their everyday life and glean ideas or new ways of seeing and being that may become concrete manifestations.
Friday 16 June 2006
19:00 Magnus Gertten and Stefan Berg: Far till staden. Sweden 2001, 57 min.
Eric Svenning, an influential political figure in the history of Malmö was the driving force for some of the larger changes in the city. Narrated from the perspective of his son, the film spans the period from the early 1930s to the mid-1970s, talking about how Malmö’s urban structure had changed under the auspices of Eric Svenning. Programs such as “Light and Air”, “Hälsobostäder åt alla” prompted an awareness to improve and provide better housing conditions for the people. The film mixes found historical footage and interviews with Svenning’s son, creating a narrative that closely intertwines Svenning’s rise in power with the physical changes in Malmö, drawing a cogent portrait of a city’s changing visage alongside a powerful personality that was crucial to its development.
20:00 Arbetarrörelsens filmkomitté: Vi och vår stad. Sweden 1938, 10 min.
A film made by the workers’ association before the elections in 1938, where they praise the Socialdemocrats’ achievements in improving housing and living conditions for the people of Malmö, outlining their future plans and visions for the communities.
21:30 Max Kestner: Blue Collar White Christmas. Denmark 2002, 80 min.
The Viking lifeboat factory has been an essential component in the make up of the town of Esbjerg, Denmark. Colleagues have become friends and the factory has fostered its unique sense of community. It is December 2001 and the workers of the factory are preparing for the coming Christmas holidays, when the news arrives of the company’s decision to relocate the factory to Bangkok. The film follows four main characters that try to deal with the speculations and predictions on the upcoming notification of layoffs. However, life continues and the film draws a quiet but moving portrait of people faced with collective and personal changes.
Saturday 17 June 2006
19:00 Susi Pietsch: La Llave de sus Sueños. Spain/Germany 2004, 59 min.
Two gypsy women and their small girl live in a cave in Granada. San Miguel, the hill overlooking the city, has been inhabited for centuries, and was declared UNESCO world heritage in 1994. Now the city wants to redevelop the site and construct a park, turning the caves into a museum. The clearance of the caves poses an existential threat to the small family as they have to forgo their way of life and move into a flat, which they fail to find again and again due to the discrimination faced by gypsy descents. For more than a year the filmmaker accompanied the protagonist’s everyday. La Llave de sus Sueños is a multi-layered, analytical film, exploring secluded dwellings in fringes of modern society and the adherence to the illusions of an idyllic life.
20:30 Alina Rudnitskaya: Communal Residence. Russia 2002, 13 min.
Communal housing has been a common form of living arrangements in the Soviet Union. Communal Residence takes us to contemporary St. Petersburg, where a group of people shares a former grand bourgeois apartment that has been divided-up into smaller units in the communist era. Rudnitskaya draws a humorous picture of a real estate agent who tries to convince the inhabitants to move into individual flats, in order to re-create and restore the premise back into its original, pre-communist state and function. A 21st century anachronism, whose destruction evokes resistance.
21:30 Jem Cohen: Chain. USA/Germany 2004, 99 min.
ÅMX.06 and Signal are happy to present an exclusive preview screening of Chain. Blurring the lines between fact and fiction, Jem Cohen makes a pointed critique of the way global corporate culture has homogenized local lives and the built physical environments. The film juxtaposes two protagonists that appear to be different, but are inherently interconnected. The first is a Japanese business woman, Tamiko who is sent on a long business trip by the corporate headquarters to research opportunities for commercial property development and theme park concepts. She drifts from one generic city to the next, only to be met by an unexpected outcome in her personal situation. The second is a young unemployed American girl, Amanda who lives next to a mall and makes poetic video letters that never gets sent to the intended recipients. The film illuminates the necessity for change and action in the current trend towards monolithic effects that erases all local and individual differences.
Sunday 18 June 2006
19:00 Alexander Kluge: The Artist in the Circus Dome: Clueless. West Germany 1968, 99 min.
Leni Peickert is the daughter of a trapeze artist who died in the manege. She wants to start her own circus company and radically change the idea of the circus itself. One needs money to do that, so Leni takes out a loan and buys elephants. The audience is puzzled about Leni’s intentions. As an entrepreneur Leni has failed. But then Leni’s rich friend Gitti dies. As the sole inheritor Leni suddenly has all the funds to realize the “reform circus“. During the preparation of the program it becomes apparent that neither time nor Leni’s co-workers seem to be sufficient enough for making her big plans a reality. “The utopia is becoming better and better while we are waiting for it.“, says Leni. She stops the experiment and moves on to a TV job. The film is a political parable: It reflects on the role of the artist and the virtues and limitations of cultural production in a capitalist society.
21:30 Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle. France 1973, 88 min.
This is Guy Debord’s film adaptation of his own book from 1967. As a key figure in the Situationist International, a group that was the catalysis for the May 1968 revolt in France, Debord presents a consistent critique of the global system. As filmic strategy, Debord takes on the Brechtian notion of shirking meta-narratives with identifiable hero and plot for the passive consumption, encouraging instead for the viewers to think and act for themselves. Using the tactic of détournement, where the diversion of already existing cultural components are remanipulated to new subversive purposes, he makes a lucid critique of the existing system and points out inherent strictures and contradictions of the society we live in. In the film, seemingly incongruous contrasts are made, with clips from Russian and Hollywood features, as well as TV commercials, softcore porn, street scenes, news and documentary footage are spliced together as a voice over reads passages from Debord’s book. Intertitle quotes from Marx, Machiavelli, Clausewitz and Tocqueville further interrupt the visual flow.
Welcome!
ÅMX.06
ÅMX Reading group participants : Övül Durmusoglu, Gösta Nidren, Katarina Nitsch, Suzanne Russell, Piia Salmi.
The Århus Malmö Exchange Programme 2006 is initiated by Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Jee-Eun Kim and Christian Schult, in association with C-SAM center for samtidskunst and rum46 in Århus, and Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art and Signal in Malmö.
Reading group put together by ÅMX 06
28 February–23 May 2006
7pm
L’une chante, l’autre pas
by Agnès Varda
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 18 April 2019
7pm
L’une chante, l’autre pas / One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), 127min
Agnès Varda’s enchanting ode to female liberation chronicles the lives of two friends over the course of a decade, as they separately experience trials of womanhood: abortion, heartbreak, marriage, and motherhood. Pomme and Suzanne meet when Pomme helps Suzanne obtain an abortion after a third pregnancy which she cannot afford. They lose contact but meet again ten years later. Pomme has become an unconventional singer, Suzanne a serious community worker – despite the contrast they remain friends and share the various dramas of each others’ lives in the process of affirming their different female identities. Set against France’s pro-choice struggle—of which Varda herself was on the frontlines—this tender and intimate epic celebrates the power of women to lift one another up.
In French with English subtitles.
As a starter:
Harun Farocki
Der Ausdruck der Hände / The Gesture of Hands (1997), 30 min
Historically, the cinema close-up was initially employed to convey emotions through facial expressions. But soon filmmakers also began focusing their attention on hands. Using film extracts, Farocki explores this visual language, it’s symbolism, Freudian slips, automatisms and its music. Often, hands betray an emotion which the face tries to dissimulate. They can also function as a conduit (exchanging money) or witness to a form of competence (work).
In German with English subtitles.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Like a Woman: Reading and Discussion
Quinn Latimer
Wednesday 15 May 2019
7pm
Quinn Latimer will do a reading from her most recent book Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (Sternberg Press, 2017). After a reading of selected texts, Latimer will discuss the process and making and structure of the collection, among them the idea of writing between the page and performance. Latimer’s writings—her essays, autofictions, poems, art criticism, and more hybrid texts written for live performance—move increasingly among forms of poetics, criticality, and orality. She will discuss how the movement from writing to speaking, and back again, inflects the current writing she does, and how the expectations of a live audience can change the work on the page itself.
Quinn Latimer is a writer and editor originally from California. Together with Chus Martínez, she is working on a new research project at Institut Kunst, Basel, which considers questions of gender, power, aesthetics, and language. Latimer was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Release party for issue #266 4/2006 of Paletten
Saturday 20 January 2007
6pm at Elastic (Bragegatan 15/Ystadvägen 22)
Sonja – det heliga hjärtat
Scenkompaniet
15-16 September 2007
7pm
To publish – experiences from the margin
Friday 28 March 2008
7pm
A conversation between Per Erik Ljung, lecturer in Comparative Literature at Lund University, and the Kurdish poet Lal Lales.
Organized by Citizens without boundaries
Carl Lindh and Emma Reichert from Signal presents the project Parallel History at Göteborgs konsthall
Tuesday 17 November
6 pm
Göteborgs konsthall
Spring 2019, and onwards…
Every day, we calendar our minutes ad absurdum, yet we feel constantly behind schedule.
Every day, we process a massive overload of information, yet we never feel updated enough.
Every day, we connect to the whole world and beyond, yet what we most desire is to be fully right here, right now.
Every day, we are reminded that this constant rush is not what we dream of, that something needs to change.
Founded by artists in 1998, Signal is a center for contemporary art in Malmö, Sweden. Early on it organically formed into a group of artists and curators led by a desire to explore the meaning of collaboration and curation, to support artists, to propose new modes of production, to stimulate the ongoing public discourse around art.
Today, Signal is the sum of the people that have been and still are involved: Christian Andersson, Maria Bustnes, Alexander Gutke, Sara Jordenö, Magnus Thierfelder, Evalena Tholin, Elena Tzotzi, Johan Svensson, Emma Reichert, Karlotta Blöndal, Luca Frei, Runo Lagomarsino, Johan Tirén, Carl Lindh, Fredrik Strid, Joel Odebrant, Matthew Rana.
Our mode is slow and rugged, infused with humour. Our vision is to push ideas forward in dialogue with tenderness and sensitivity. Our home is our space, with one foot firmly rooted in Malmö and the other outside, maintaining a physical presence that is welcoming and intimate.
Stepping into our third decade, we haven’t cracked the time riddle. Yet we continue to develop a tempo and rhythm that allows for a deeper search—determined to walk with time on our side, and to cultivate the pleasure of staying with the now in all aspects of artistic process.
Thank you for staying in tune with us!
Dark Spring
Johanna Arvidsson
8 March–19 May 2019
Opening Friday 8 March 7-9pm
Botticelli’s La Primavera could be described as a sort of spring sonata. A composition in three acts starting off to the right of the painting with Zephyrus, the biting wind of March, depicted as a young man just about to violate the female nymph Chloris who in panic throws up a string of flowers. He then proceeds by marrying her, thus transforming the nymph into a deity; Flora, the goddess of Spring and eternal bearer of life.
The depiction of the female body throughout various epochs and philosophical traditions in western (art) history – the Middle Ages, Neoplatonism, Neoclassicism, the Pre-Raphaelite movement and so on – constitutes the spinal core in the body of work entitled Dark Spring. Snapshots from past eras are reworked, juxtaposed and brought into a contemporary setting blurring the boundaries of time. These pictorial details composed through painting, drawing and sculptural installation are accompanied by additional elements from the realm of medicine, religion and textile history creating a unity that reflects the various ideals that have been engraved deep into the female skin.
Velvet and organza hold the images, like the skin that protects our body and holds it together. Velvet, a symbol of status in fashion and religion. The young female skin, smooth as velvet in classical painting. The transparency of organza allows for shadows to appear, a see-through quality. Much employed for underskirts and dresses.
Colour pigments from medicinal plants are sourced from the extensive writings of Trota of Salerno, a medical practitioner from the early 12th century. She specialised in women’s medicine. Bed linen with embroidered initials from previous generations of women have been coloured with madder whose red pigment dyed among other things the trousers of the French Army. Strong female poses are borrowed from another colleague in time, Artemisia Gentileschi. They are active gestures of protest and resistance.
Dark Spring is an endeavour that puts gender and language, time and geography, society and politics side by side. It blends the personal history with the historical course of events and points out an oppression that sometimes is expressed through brutal and bloody violence, and other times lies in the good-tempered irony of enlightened men who play it down and reduce it.
So, what can we learn from this? That profound change must be an unwavering collective act.
Marina Gioti & Georges Salameh
Thursday 22 November 2018
7.15pm
”It was out of a string of coincidences and the free time that our recessing country, Greece, abundantly offered to us that we found ourselves in Cairo in 2012. In a way, we immediately felt at home. Demonstrations, tear gas, traffic jams. We didn’t know much about The Invisible Hands-project and there was no idea for a film. We knew Alan through music. So did his all-Egyptian band. We all met him separately at two different stops of his last tour: Athens and Cairo. We soon realized that we are witnessing a music experiment, actually the most ambitious that this unconventional musician/ethnomusicologist has ever been involved in: to produce his most accessible album to date in a language he doesn’t speak, Arabic.”
Join us for a conversation between artist and filmmaker Marina Gioti and co-director Georges Salameh on the making of The Invisible Hands, a film where strands of stories related to music, politics, inspiration and uncertainty eventually come together.
The Invisible Hands will be screened at 5.30pm followed by a 15 minute break.
Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30
A puppet opera by Dan Graham
29 November–16 December 2018
Premiere Thursday 29 November
Doors open 7pm with bar & music
Screening starts 7.30pm
Welcome to the last chapter of our season of presents where we celebrate our 20th birthday by asking new and old friends to give us a gift; a perfect opportunity for us to shed light on shared artistic intentions and values.
Final guest and giver of gifts is artist and Aries Dan Graham. The infant sign of the zodiac, the Aries possesses a vanity that stems from the child’s desire for eternal youth. This can make birthdays rough. However, the Aries is good at transitions.
In a setting reminiscent of revival cinemas we present to you the video documentation of Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30, a live rock ‘n roll puppet show by Dan Graham, with puppet master Phillip Huber, music by Japanther, a theme song by Rodney Graham and video projections by Tony Oursler.
Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 is set in the late ’60s to early ’70s when the “hippie” tribes moved their “counter culture” settlements to the bucolic “wilderness” of the countryside. When Neil Sky is voted American president, he moves the White House to Camp David, where he does his press conference in a rustic hut/”go-go” cage. His first action is to abolish foreign alliances, mandating that all Senators and Congressmen be re-located to a “concentration camp” where they are forced to take LSD with their drinking supply. The voting age for youthful voters and the lowest age qualification to be US President are both lowered to 14. Don’t Trust is a satiric entertainment continuing Dan Graham’s cultural analysis of the ’60s, which began with the video Rock My Religion (1981) dealing with the evolution of youth culture during the ’50s, ’60s, and after.
Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30 (2004), 35 min
In English
Ripple
Natália Rebelo & Jin Mustafa
Saturday 3 November 2018
7pm at Alta Art Space
Natália Rebelo and Jin Mustafa present the first draft of a performance as part of an ongoing collaboration between the two artists. Together they investigate different forms of narration combining their work with voice, text, moving image and music. For Ripple they have created a hyper-real setting revolving around frequency, hypnosis and memory.
Ripple will also conclude the exhibition Love comes first, our birthday present from Alta Art Space, and to close the circle we present the performance at their place. Make sure not to miss the final week of Love comes first at Signal and Ripple at Alta Art Space, Celsiusgatan 40.
The Invisible Hands
A film by Marina Gioti
co-directed by Georges Salameh
With: Alan Bishop, Aya Hemeda, Cherif El Masri, and Adham Zidan
8–25 November 2018
Premiere Thursday 8 November
Doors open 6.30pm with bar & music
Screening starts 7pm
Welcome to the second chapter of our season of presents where we celebrate our 20th birthday by asking new and old friends to give us a gift; a perfect opportunity for us to shed light on shared artistic intentions and values. Next up is artist and filmmaker Marina Gioti. In a setting reminiscent of a small movie theater we present to you The Invisible Hands, a film by Marina Gioti co-directed by Georges Salameh with Alan Bishop, Aya Hemeda, Cherif El Masri, and Adham Zidan.
Maverick underground American/Lebanese musician and ethnomusicologist Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Sublime Frequencies) lands as a stranger in Cairo, soon after the 2011 revolution, and teams up with three young Egyptian musicians in order to translate some of his old songs into Arabic. Under Bishop’s mentorship, this unlikely collaboration transforms into a band, The Invisible Hands. Structured around fly-on-the-wall scenes, archival ghost apparitions, absurd cameos, and poetic diary narrations by Bishop, and unfolding between the two critical elections that marked the period after the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, the film juxtaposes the tragicomedy of politics and art-making in a troubled periphery where strands of stories related to music, politics, inspiration, language, depression and uncertainty eventually come together.
The Invisible Hands (2017), 93 min
In English and Arabic with English subtitles
Screening schedule during 9–25 November 2018:
Thursday-Friday
12:15–13:45
14:00–15:30
15:45–17:15
17:30–19:00
Saturday-Sunday
12:15–13:45
14:00–15:30
15:45–17:15
No no no no no no no no no no no no there’s no limit
24 September–26 October 2008
Opening Saturday 24 September 6pm-midnight
Group exhibition with 87 participating artists, offerering an unique opportunity to take a look at what has been produced in Malmoe within the last year (2007/2008) and highlights the importance of artistic production in order to have an interesting and dynamic art scene!
Participating artists:
Majlis Agbeck, Anna Nordquist Andersson, Catrin Andersson, Christian Andersson, Marianne Andersson, Elisabet Apelmo, Åsa Maria Bengtsson, Stine Egeskov Berger, Carin Blücher, Anna Bokström, Carl Boutard, Anna Brag, Anna Bring, Ann Böttcher, Bo Cavefors & Martin Bladh, Helene Edgren, Anna Ekman, Lars Embäck, Rolf Engfelt, Marthe Aune Eriksen, Gunilla Falck, Lisa Fjellman, Luca Frei, Ylva Friberg, Edvard Gran, Mell Gran, Lucia Gustavsson, Patrik Gyllander, Rebecka Hallbert, Mette Hansen, Jan-Anders Hansson, Trond Hugo Haugen, Barbro Hemer, Jens Henricson, Leif Holmstrand, Torsten Hylander, Lena Ignestam, Gabriella Ioannides, Ingegerd Johansson, Michael Johansson, Sofie Josefsson, Jeuno Kim, Viktor Kopp, Mathias Kristersson, Katarina Kvarnsjö, Runo Lagomarsino, Tamara Malmeström de Laval, Axel Lieber, Torbjörn Limé, Marit Lindberg, Anna Ling, Jonas Liveröd, Tuss Marie Lysén, Kari Mjåtveit, Caroline Mårtensson, Annelie Nilsson, Andreas Nordström, Fredrik Norén, Björn O. Olsson, Magnus Ottertun, Helena Persson, Matteo Rosa, Viktor Rosdahl, Lisa Rydberg, Johan Röing, Susann Rönnertz, Anna Sandgren, Gunnar Sandin, Ingrid Sandsborg, Morgan Schagerberg, Nilsmagnus Sköld, Danilo Stankovic, Anna Strand, Johan Sunesson, David Svensson, Joanna Thede, Magnus Thierfelder, Ulrika Thune, Maria Lavman Vetö, Pepe Viňoles, Charlotte Walentin, Peter Wallström, Bjørn Wangen, Fredrik Weerasinghe, Anna Wessman
Treffpunkt: Universal Ghost Orchestra & Pär Thörn
Friday 21 november 2008
8pm
The Malmöbased record label Treffpunkt launches two new records: Universal Ghost Orchestra Mummydance / Shadowtheatre (7″) and Pär Thörn Schöneberg/Stammheim/Gärdet/Rågsved (CDR). The evening will be celebrated with performances by Universal Ghost Orchestra (Lisa Jeannin, Rolf Schuurmans, Kristoffer Lindgren) and Pär Thörn, and Treffpunkt will play records.
Malmö Gallery Night 2018
Saturday 29 September 2018
6pm-midnight
On view is the exhibition Love comes first with works by Akram Al Halabi, Tova Berglund, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Mattias Eliasson, Stina Malmqvist, Anni Puolakka & Jaakko Pallasvuo.
Please note that we will be closed during the day and remain closed on Sunday 30 September.
Love comes first
Akram Al Halabi, Tova Berglund, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Mattias Eliasson, Stina Malmqvist, Anni Puolakka & Jaakko Pallasvuo
Performative events: Jens August Lindqvist Cooking Ensemble, Lisa Busby, Natalia Rebelo & Jin Mustafa
14 September–4 November 2018
Opening Friday 14 September 6pm-late
Celebrating your birthday is not an easy thing. Even more so when you are turning even numbers. Time suddenly becomes static, palpable – a flowing movement of events condensed into one day. And then when you realise that you have lived as long as Google, which is like forever, it’s actually kind of creepy.
But a life well lived is a life full of trouble. So, let’s celebrate. And what better way to do so than asking new and old friends to give you a present. A season full of gifts, a season of presents.
The first invitation goes out to Alta Art Space in Malmö. Alta Art Space (Julia Selin, Matti Sumari, Stina Malmqvist, André Talborn, Petter Dahlström Persson, Jens August Lindqvist, Ida Persson) is first and foremost a shared studio space, but also an artist run exhibition space. An offbeat venue where artists are invited to present work – a site for experimentation – but also an important social meeting place for the growing artistic community in Malmö. In turn, they give us the exhibition Love comes first introducing us to new acquaintances and artistic voices. An extended act of giving and receiving.
So this is how we are celebrating – a perfect opportunity to shed light on shared intentions and values when it comes to what kind of art world we want to have and be part of. Or, in other words highlight initiatives and colleagues with their hearts in the right place and with a sincere engagement.
And since “Don’t trust anyone over 30” is quite a leitmotif for our times, we have a good ten more years to go before throwing in the towel.
Cheers to us, we’re turning 20!
Jeannette Ehlers
A time in the future
A place between Copenhagen and Malmö
Jeannette Ehlers is an artist based in Copenhagen and Jude Dibia is a writer based in Malmö.
Karin Tidbeck, Andrzej Tichý
Season finale
Wednesday 20 June 2018
Signal, Malmö
6:30pm
Previously, on ‘Two planets’: Iman Mohammed read hard texts in lush gardens and newly developed waterfronts, Jacob Kirkegaard performed recorded and mashed up non-sounds at the mall, Francis Patrick Brady provided pragmatic commands in Deathworld, and Jeannette Ehlers merged minds with Jude Dibia.
Next week, for the season finale: weird fiction writer Karin Tidbeck and novelist Andrzej Tichý reveal how everything is interrelated, yet circling in two parallel orbits.
Summery tunes, twisted smørrebrød and ice cold drinks will be served in our own holiday resort on Monbijougatan 17H.
Two readings by Karin Tidbeck and Andrzej Tichý, music by DJ Gold Nuggets, and jokes by special ‘pickpocket’ guest Joseph del Pesco.
The readings start at 7pm
We offer a number of return tickets Malmö-Copenhagen on a first come, first served basis. Contact us on location for reimbursement.
Francis Patrick Brady
A Foreigner’s Guide to Deathworld
Saturday 9 June 2018
Botanical Garden, Copenhagen
3pm
Hi. tjena. Hej.
Welcome to The Foreigner’s Guide to DEATHWORLD
I am FEJL and I will be your guide through this journey into an alien and foreign environment. After such a long journey I will be the voice that helps you justify your certainties, align your context, and centre your existence.
FEJL stands for Foreign Environmental (Justifying) Logics. I am calibrated and designed to act as an error seeking guide that seeks to distribute blame, and absorb institutional misplacement.
I will provide pragmatic commands, as well as keep you alive, but most of all reduce and divide your experience.
______________________________________
Välkommen till Utlänningens guide till DEATHWORLD
Jag är FEL och jag kommer att vara din guide genom denna resa i en främmande och utländsk miljö. Efter en lång resa kommer jag att vara den röst som hjälper dig att motivera dina ställningstaganden, anpassa dig till ditt sammanhang och centrera din existens.
FEL står för Främmande Efterkommandes Logik. Jag är kalibrerad och utformad för att fungera som en felaktig sökguide som syftar till att sprida skuld och absorbera institutionell felplacering.
Jag kommer att ge pragmatiska kommandon och hålla dig vid liv, men mest av allt reducera och dela upp din erfarenhet.
A Foreigner’s Guide to Deathworld is an audio-guide/space-opera by Francis Patrick Brady.
Location: Botanical Garden, by the entrance Gothersgade 128
Bring your smartphone and earphones. We also provide a limited number of MP3 players.
Francis Patrick Brady is an artist, LARP designer, tailor based between Malmö and Copenhagen.
We offer a number of return tickets Malmö-Copenhagen on a first come, first served basis. Contact us on location for reimbursement.
Jacob Kirkegaard
Humdrum – a non-event
Monday 28 May 2018
Triangeln, Malmö
6pm
Humdrum – a non-event is a sound performance by Jacob Kirkegaard.
Location: Triangeln, 2nd floor opposite McDonald’s
Jacob Kirkegaard is an artist and composer based in Denmark.
We offer a number of return tickets Copenhagen-Malmö on a first come, first served basis. Contact us on location for reimbursement.
Iman Mohammed
Wednesday 16 May 2018
Bibliotekshaven, Copenhagen
7pm
History is a loop. It’s a circular motion with delays, it is cause, action. History opens its doors, and out floods the poem. I am standing in Bibliotekshaven and reading from The Arab Apocalypse. It was supposed to be about the sun, but the war came and finished writing the poems, says Etel Adnan. It tells me about the consequences of violence. I am standing here because nature witnesses all. The fragmentary poem and its dates. Besættelsen and the unifying construction of steel, boundaries that are demolished, to be rebuilt once again, that is the loop. The body is most visible in the interval, it shines and erupts in fear’s light. I move forward with my own words. The words remember cities emerging, destroyed, and built again. How the traces are covered and how humanity forgets after a couple of years. That the collective memory is short despite efforts to remember. To stand near water gives a sense of vertigo. Drones stain the ocean. Holy ocean and the sun.
Iman Mohammed is a poet based in Malmö.
The reading starts at 7pm in Bibliotekshaven, by the Søren Kierkegaard statue
We offer a number of return tickets Malmö-Copenhagen on a first come, first served basis. Contact us on location for reimbursement.
We have always been the digital product, so where do we go from here?
Nanjira Sambuli
Sunday 25 March 2018
4pm
In this talk, Nanjira Sambuli will reflect on some digital realities based on her work across Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there’s much excitement, as there should be trepidation, about connecting the next billion. She will draw from examples of how scholars from these parts of the world are claiming a space in shaping the discourse about ‘digital development’, introducing bold new language eg ‘digital colonialism’, as a means of challenging the approaches meted out on a people who are hardly consulted on the digital futures they desire. She will also give personal reflections on resistance and alternatives, by the people who form the primary sites for unlocking ‘digital El Dorados’, that is, those posing great potential as brand new eyeballs for the platforms that have monopolized the web, as well as the role of policy in all this.
Nanjira Sambuli is a Nairobi-based researcher and analyst working as a Digital Equality Advocacy Manager at the World Wide Web Foundation.
The talk is organised in conjunction with the exhibition Digital Distress – Consumed by Infinity.
What money can(not) measure
Rasmus Fleischer
Wednesday 7 March 2018
7pm
Money is not just an ever-present constraint. Money is also a tool to understand the world, to highlight injustices, to establish comparisons between past, present and future. Are we better off or worse off than our parents? Has capitalism recovered after the financial crisis? How do tax havens work? What does negative interest rate mean? Will our pensions, or potentially our basic income, be enough to live off? If we want to find answers to such questions, numbers are hardly lacking. But it is even more unclear what is actually measured, when money is used as a measurement tool.
The effects of digitalisation are paradoxical. On one hand, opportunities arise for putting a price tag on an increasing number of things, including our own attention divided into microseconds, which are offered for sale in algorithmic auctions while we scroll in social media flows. On the other hand, there is no limit for how many new types of digital money, from customer loyalty programs to cryptocurrency, that can be created. The economy is collapsing into pieces that become increasingly difficult to puzzle together into a meaningful whole. How can we understand this breakdown? What alternative tools are at hand to imagine our common future?
Rasmus Fleischer is a researcher in economic history at Stockholm University. He runs the blog Copyriot and writes regularly for Expressen’s cultural page, and in magazines such as Brand. Together with Pelle Snickars, he has written the book Den svenska enhörningen: storyn om Spotify (The Swedish Unicorn: the story about Spotify), which is being published in April.
The talk will be held in Swedish and is organised in conjunction with the exhibition Digital Distress – Consumed by Infinity.
Das Netz
by Lutz Dammbeck
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 22 February 2018
7pm
Das Netz / The Net (2003), 121min
In the mid 20th century, the foundations of modernism were reconstructed with cybernetics, system theory, multimedia art and new concepts in psychology and military research. On these new foundations, networked systems of machines developed all over the world, their character defined by mathematics, logic and binary codes.
Lutz Dammbeck’s Das Netz explores the incredibly complex backstory of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber, and situates him within a late 20th century web of technology – a system that he grew to oppose. With a subversive approach to the history of the Internet, this documentary combines speculative travelogue and investigative journalism to trace contrasting countercultural responses to the cybernetic revolution.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Recognitional Transparencies, Bludge Existence [1]
Adriana Ramić
Wednesday 31 January 2018
7pm
Developments in machine learning reinforce a particular canon of classification and understanding. How can the threshold for encoding and interpretation be adjusted or expanded beyond dominant conceptions, and where are we bound as bipedal thought forms? ”Pencils, pillows and coffee mugs are easy to grasp and lift. The same cannot be said of shadows, boulders, and holograms.” [2]
[1] Title taken from text written by a neural network trained on Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art’s digital archive.
[2] What can you do with a rock? Affordance extraction via word embeddings, Nancy Fulda and Daniel Ricks and Ben Murdoch and David Wingate. BYU, 3/9/17
Adriana Ramić is an artist based in New York applying a melancholic approach to AI.
The talk is organised in conjunction with the exhibition Digital Distress – Consumed by Infinity.
September Evenings
Screenings and talks
30 August-20 September
7pm
Malmö Gallery Night 2008
Saturday 27 September 208
6pm-midnight
On view is the group exhibition No no no no no no no no no no no no there’s no limit with 87 participating artists.
OLOFBRIGHT Release party
Maja Spasova, Mats Gustafsson and Per Svensson.
Friday 27 February 2009
6.30pm
To the east and to the west, two planets appeared on the horizon
Francis Patrick Brady, Jeannette Ehlers, Jacob Kirkegaard, Iman Mohammed,
Karin Tidbeck, Andrzej Tichý
May–June 2018
The Øresund Bridge – praised for its groundbreaking engineering and architectural beauty – was constructed from each side of the sound between Sweden and Denmark. As the two parts eventually touched, the two heirs of each kingdom met symbolically in the middle. On 1 July 2000, it finally bridged a region that has always been perceived as one interrelated geography. But in January 2016, the bridge suddenly became the wall. A total stop for those seeking refuge during what came to be labelled as the refugee crisis, refusing entry to anyone who tried to pursue the promise of a safer future.
And then, we have The Bridge – the biggest success story of Swedish and Danish television, lauded internationally for its nordic noir plot and eerie scenery that blends the landscape of the two cities into a third place. A fictive binary location broadcast out to the world.
Now, it’s time for To the east and to the west, two planets appeared on the horizon.
Six guests from both sides have been invited to develop an experimental serial fiction unfolding in four episodes taking place in both cities during the months of May and June. The series will culminate in the season finale in Malmö on 20 June 2018.
If you wish to receive the individual invitations for each event in the series, please subscribe to our newsletter at info@signalsignal.org
Stay tuned!
Yan Jun
Feedback solo & Solo with background
Wednesday 15 November 2017
7pm
I wish I was a piece of field recording.
- Yan Jun
Feedback, field recordings, voice and body movement play a central role in Beijing based musician and poet Yan Jun’s improvised experimental music. The specific acoustics of a space, the environmental and background sounds, are as important as the sounds he introduces. At Signal, Yan Jun will perform two sets; Feedback solo and Solo with background.
Yan Jun is part of FEN (Far East Network) and Tea Rockers Quintet, and he is the founder of the guerrilla label Sub Jam.
The evening is a collaboration between Signal and Max Wainwright.
The Work of Art: Value in Creative Careers
Alison Gerber
Thursday 26 October 2017
7pm
Artists are everywhere, from celebrities showing at MoMA to locals hoping for a spot on a café wall. They are photographed at gallery openings in New York and Los Angeles, hustle in fast-gentrifying cities, and, sometimes, make quiet lives in Midwestern monasteries. Some command armies of fabricators while others patiently teach schoolchildren how to finger-knit. All of these artists might well be shown in the same exhibition, the quality of work far more important than education or income in determining whether one counts as a “real” artist.
In The Work of Art (Stanford University Press), Alison Gerber explores these art worlds to investigate who artists are (and who they’re not), why they do the things they do, and whether a sense of vocational calling and the need to make a living are as incompatible as we’ve been led to believe. Listening to the stories of artists from across the United States, Gerber finds patterns of agreements and disagreements shared by art-makers from all walks of life. For professionals and hobbyists alike, the alliance of love and money has become central to contemporary art-making, and danger awaits those who fail to strike a balance between the two.
The stories artists tell are just as much a part of artistic practice as putting brush to canvas or chisel to marble. By explaining the shared ways that artists account for their activities—the analogies they draw, the arguments they make—Gerber reveals the common bases of value artists point to when they say: what I do is worth doing. The Work of Art asks how we make sense of the things we do and shows why all this talk about value matters so much.
Alison Gerber worked as an artist before earning her Ph.D. at Yale University. Today she is a researcher in the Department of Sociology at Uppsala University in Sweden and writes about the intersection of culture and public life, from tax audits to noise music.
The talk will be held in English and is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Hardy Strid: today, tomorrow
The Baudelaire Fractal
Lisa Robertson
Tuesday 28 November 2017
7pm
A text which unravels a mystical experience — waking up in a hotel room one morning to discover that I have written the complete works of Baudelaire, yet without actually having become Baudelaire. It’s as if his texts have become me, or I have realized myself within them. In part the liminal portal of the hotel room inaugurates this experience. The telling moves from hotel to hotel, from memory to memory — being a girl in the 80s, roaming the Louvre, reading Poe, smoking hash, relative impoverishment, affairs, she-dandyism… it is part memoire, part novelistic magical realism, part trash-talking contemporary art and poetry life.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet and essayist. Her books include 3 Summers (2016), Cinema of the Present (2014), Nilling (2012), R’s Boat (2010), Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (2009), and Revolution: A Reader (2012), co-edited with Matthew Stadler. She lives in rural France.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Cameraperson
by Kirsten Johnson
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Wednesday 1 November 2017
7pm
Cameraperson (2016), 102min
Exposing her role behind the camera, Kirsten Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.
A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage captured over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson. Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality and crafted narrative. A work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, Cameraperson is both a moving glimpse into one filmmaker’s personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Pär Thörn
Tuesday 11 March 2008
7pm
Malmö Gallery Night 2017
Saturday 30 September 2017
6pm-midnight
On view is the exhibition today, tomorrow with works by Hardy Strid.
Please note that we will be closed during the day and remain closed on Sunday 1 October.
OEI Poetry Area: extension #28
Gustav Sjöberg, Karolina Erlingsson, Peder Alexis Olsson and Mårten Björk
Readings, performances, presentations, comments
Wednesday 20 September 2017
7pm
* apud by Gustav Sjöberg
* EME EMAUTO by Karolina Erlingsson
* Efterkrigsmusik by Peder Alexis Olsson
Life takes place in the space between words
Joseph del Pesco
Monday 4 September 2017
7pm
Join us for an evening with curator, writer and publisher Joseph del Pesco, who will read (very) short stories from his forthcoming book, The Museum Took a Few Minutes To Collect Itself, published by Art Metropole in Toronto. He will also give a short presentation, A Thousand to One.
Since 2009 he is Director, and last year became International Director of KADIST (Paris & San Francisco), where he has established a fast-paced program of weekly events that position art as a vehicle for discussion about global, social and political issues, in addition to starting the first residency for international art magazines. Previously he was adjunct curator at Artists Space (NYC), and as an independent curator organised exhibitions, projects and publications at The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Temple Contemporary, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, The Banff Centre, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the UC Davis Museum among others.
The talk is organised in collaboration with the Critical & Pedagogical Studies programme at Malmö Art Academy.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
today, tomorrow
Hardy Strid
16 September–26 November 2017
Opening Saturday 16 September 6-9pm
Not so long ago, in a country far up in the northern parts of Europe, a kung fu master wrote down two Chinese characters on a piece of paper. He then translated them into “never always same thing” for his students. This is of course a sketchy translation based on a creative relationship to a limited English vocabulary, but nevertheless and maybe because of this a very precise and telling one. “Always same thing” suggests a constant repetition of the same and “never” a refusal. It resembles change, but stretches beyond that. “Never always same thing” seems to indicate the turning away from a continuous repetition of sameness.
Hardy Strid’s art praxis, throughout his entire career, is definitely something that relates to the phrase above. His work was a perpetual exploration of styles and inspirations, a never ending influx of impressions ranging from international art currents and global politics to local news and everyday dilemmas. He was not afraid of leaving well known grounds to find and explore new territories. He kept looking everywhere, and elsewhere. Within an art context the approach of “never always same thing” places you in a tricky position – you are out on deep waters, to say the least. For Hardy Strid it was never about renewing himself for the sake of it. His work was always triggered by a curious exploration and thus in continuous transformation – a constant reinvention of himself and his art over and over again. Maybe, this was an attempt to escape narrow categorisations and isms, a refusal to be inserted into a square art system. His diverse practice became a critique of the present. Like a pirate, Hardy Strid sailed the seas of the art world moving between islands of expressions, tendencies and ideas, sometimes with and sometimes against the wind.
Today, as yesterday, recognition in the full sense of the word is generally ascribed to the familiar and understandable, while difference is met with questions, at times even suspicion. For Hardy Strid consistency was the total opposite of conformity. He was consistent in his diversity of expression rooted in a restless desire for a tomorrow. Instead of cultivating his artistic legacy or letting strategic career moves guide the outcome of his work, he was on a constant quest that pushed him towards a tomorrow that resonates with our today. A sort of travel in time, if you like. We don’t know much about the future to come or how the art of tomorrow will be like, but why not look at the production of Hardy Strid’s 70 year-long never always same thing artistic approach and be inspired to reimagine the kind of art world we wish to have today, tomorrow.
Epilogue
Hardy Strid (1921-2012) was a Swedish artist based in Halmstad. He studied at the Valand Academy of Arts for Professor Endre Nemes. In the 1960s he was part of the Scandinavian section of the Situationist International, later called Bauhaus Situationiste. In 1975, together with colleague Stefan Thorén, he founded KAF (The General Union of Artists) as an alternative to KRO (Swedish Artists’ National Organisation). He was also part of initiating what later became Teckningsmuseet (The Museum of Drawings) in Laholm.
idag, imorron (today, tomorrow) was the title of an exhibition Hardy Strid did at Galleri 5 Sekler, Stockholm in 1965. The exhibition became controversial, not for anything that was exhibited, but because of its catalogue formulated as an ironical protest.
Our deepest gratitude goes to Peter Johansson, a greater custodian of an artistic oeuvre is rare to find, and to Jean Sellem for all his knowledge and wit.
What’s in it for you? Plenty! The practice of Sister Corita
12 April–10 May 2008
The exhibition takes place at JET, Berlin
Curated by Signal
With the 2008 exhibition series Adventurers, JET explores various situations where art and life coincide in artistic practice and where aspects of artists’ own lives are woven into their artistic production.
What’s in it for you? Plenty! The practice of Sister Corita is the first exhibition in this series. It focuses on the multifaceted creative practice of the nun, teacher and artist Corita Kent (1918-1986), a practice that in every way exemplifies such deep affinity between art and life. A practicing Catholic nun and teacher, Sister Corita encouraged the creativity of thousands of people at the legendary, progressive art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. She is also considered one of the most unusual pop artists of the 1960s, challenging political and religious establishments and experimenting with graphic design and printmaking.What’s in it for you? Plenty! maps out these diverse activities of Sister Corita. It highlights her joyous understanding of art, education, religion and social engagement and emphasizes the ways in which such affirmative perspective is present in all her undertakings. The exhibition displays key publications by and about Sister Corita and photographs from her own archive, alongside Baylis Glascock´s documentary Corita Kent: On Teaching and Celebration and a selection of serigraphs.
Wittingly sampling well-known slogans and images, Sister Corita used the efficient visual language of advertisement and popular culture to transform the commercial and banal into inspiring messages and celebratory exclamations that merge philosophical reflection and a sense of protest against social injustice. Her slogan for the art department at Immaculate Heart College, ‘We have no art, we do everything as well as we can,’ testifies to her conviction that art is not something that stands apart from life, but something that forms a part of our continuous dialogue with the world in which we live. Through her work she shows that optimism can be a subtle yet powerful form of criticality.
Bright Leaves
by Ross McElwee
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 8 June 2017
7pm
Bright Leaves (2003), 105min
Bright Leaves describes a journey taken across the social, economic, and psychological tobacco terrain of North Carolina by Ross McElwee, a native Carolinian whose great-grandfather created the famous brand of tobacco known as “Bull Durham.”
Part mystery, part ethical inquiry, this film is a subjective, autobiographical meditation on the allure of cigarettes and their troubling legacy for the state of North Carolina. It’s about loss and preservation, addiction and denial. And it’s about filmmaking – homemovie, documentary, and fiction filmmaking – as the filmmaker fences with the legacy of an obscure 1950′s Hollywood melodrama, purportedly based on his great-grandfather’s life, starring Gary Cooper.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Den unga jorden
Andreas Mangione & Frans Josef Petersson
with the publishing house Den unga jorden
Wednesday 31 May 2017
7pm
Artist Andreas Mangione together with art critic and editor Frans Josef Petersson are the persons behind the publishing house Den unga jorden (The young earth), an art book publisher where the publications seek to trace and in themselves constitute a “walk of resistance”. Andreas Mangione and Frans Josef Petersson are coming to Signal to share the intentions, origins, plans and motifs behind their recently started collaborative publishing project, and introduce their first publication Optimisten (The Optimist), a paperback with works by Andreas Mangione and an afterword by Frans Josef Petersson.
The conversation will be held in Swedish.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
with wounds of clarity / with wounds of dust
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Emil Westman Hertz, and chants by María Sabina
28 April–18 June 2017
Opening Friday 28 April 7-9pm
Gathered at the threshold, sheltered by a row of staves: soldiers, travelers, healers, the convalescent and the sick. On one side, an obscure space. On the other, distant mountains.
Thunder rattles and all direction is reversed. The whistle becomes a whirlwind, becomes a wheel, becomes a wand. A wand summoning opposites.
Angels trumpet knowledges from deep within the marrow – which is sung and sucked and given like offerings of rice. Cellular histories meet with cadmium and lead; fangs are met with hoof and shell; skin is met with thorn.
Oak people, Rain people, Ant people. Dog and Mushroom people. Not the same, yet neither unrelated. Ears tuned to each other’s speech, wounds formed to witness.
Tearing visions from their hearts like flowers on the field of battle, the seers shall remain, undeterred.
with wounds of clarity / with wounds of dust brings together the work of filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (1972, Puerto Rico), sculptor Emil Westman Hertz (1978-2016, Denmark), and curandera (or healer) María Sabina (1894-1985, Mexico) on the fragile and porous boundaries between human and non-human worlds.
Creative Indifference
Presentation of Raoul Hausmann x 3
Subaltern journal & Eskaton publishing
Monday 3 April 2017
7pm
The journal Subaltern and publisher Eskaton present, in parallel to the recent publication of Raoul Hausmann’s Eccentric Sensoriality and Subaltern #3 and #4 (2016), an evening dedicated to Raoul Hausmann and his circle.
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) is best known as the inventor of the photomontage and one of the driving forces behind Berlin DADA, but he was also a poet, philosopher and political theorist who called for a complete transformation of Western civilization, and had close ties to so-called “left communism”. In the two issues of Subaltern, Hausmann’s political and philosophical works are presented alongside kindred thinkers including the Kantian philosopher and lawyer Ernst Marcus, art-theorist Carl Einstein, revolutionary and director Guy Debord, and the expressionist provocateur Salomo Friedländer.
The evening is presented in conjunction with This Event has Now Ended by Vangelis Vlahos, the third chapter of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes.
Iaspis informs about residencies and international exchange
Thursday 20 October 2011
5.30pm
Welcome to Signal and a meeting with information about Iaspis and the Swedish Arts Grants Committee´s studio grants and support for international exchange and collaboration. What is the purpose of the grants and the residency programme? What requirements are necessary to receive a grant? Is it possible to initiate and organize projects in collaboration with Iaspis? Iaspis director Lisa Rosendahl and project coordinators Jonatan Habib Engqvist (visual art) and Annika Enqvist (design, architecture and craft) will inform about Iaspis and answer questions.
A small bar will be arranged at Signal after the meeting.
The Forgotten Space
by Allan Sekula & Noël Burch
Thursday 2 March 2017
7pm
The Forgotten Space (2010), 112 min
Our film is about globalization and the sea, the “forgotten space” of our modernity. The sea is forgotten until disaster strikes. But perhaps the biggest seagoing disaster is the global supply chain, which – maybe in a more fundamental way than financial speculation – leads the world economy to the abyss.
The Forgotten Space follows container cargo aboard ships, barges, trains and trucks, listening to workers, engineers, planners, politicians, and those marginalized by the global transport system. We visit displaced farmers and villagers in Holland and Belgium, underpaid truck drivers in Los Angeles, seafarers aboard mega-ships shuttling between Asia and Europe, and factory workers in China, whose low wages are the fragile key to the whole puzzle. And in Bilbao, we discover the most sophisticated expression of the belief that the maritime economy, and the sea itself, is somehow obsolete.
- Allan Sekula & Noël Burch
The Forgotten Space is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Two-hander by Rallou Panagiotou.
III. This Event has Now Ended
Vangelis Vlahos
10 March–9 April 2017
Opening Friday 10 March 7-9pm
Chapter 3 of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes at Signal.
Three details, three protagonists, three cases: the notes of Euclid Tsakalotos, the current finance minister of Greece; the suitcase of George Koskotas, a former Greek banker; the hat of Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb military commander currently on trial in The Hague.
Using existing material from the press, state archives and the internet, Vangelis Vlahos engages with the recent history of Greece. In his re-readings and juxtapositions, the grayness of facts transforms into intriguing narratives and timelines revealing a reality juicier than fiction.
This Event has Now Ended is a showcase on how the micro politics of details mirrors the entangled complexities and complicities of global economics and international negotiations. A Beckettesque absurdity unfolds gradually in the third chapter of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes.
I. Economy Class
Eleni Bagaki
18 November 2016–29 January 2017
Opening Friday 18 November 7-9pm
Chapter 1 of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes at Signal.
As the sequence of autonomous presentations unfolds, facts and fictions derived from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting forces operate at different levels and intensities. A Ryan Air flight hovers between corporeality and intangibility in the first chapter of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes.
II. Two-hander
Rallou Panagiotou
3 February–5 March 2017
Opening Friday 3 February 7-9pm
Chapter 2 of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes at Signal.
If I did spit on something, I just spat on a piece of clothing. I was only showing contempt for this bit of cloth, and a bit of cloth doesn’t demand you settle accounts
Bernard-Marie Koltès, In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, 1985
The Dealer, the Client. The law of repetition, the law of the series. Transactions are negotiated, desires are fabricated, roles are reversed, and treasures are symbolic.
Two-hander, the darker sub-sequence to Kalypso Volume II, troubles the dreams of an erstwhile idyllic holiday resort with a scene of potential exchange. In a staged marketplace, isolation is condensed beyond luxury. A currency of emotions sets the tone in the second chapter of the exhibition trilogy …this is Radio Athènes.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
by Jonas Mekas
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Tuesday 6 December 2016
7pm
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), 88min
A film diary divided into three episodes. After a twenty-seven year absence, Adolfas and his brother Jonas returned to their birthplace in Lithuania. They had left Lithuania as young men, destined for a German labor camp. Now they came home for a visit, Adolfas with his wife, the singer Pola Chapelle.
“The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg.”
“The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semeniskiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years.”
“The third part begins with a parenthesis in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, where we spent a year in a forced labor camp during the war. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna where we see some of my best friends – Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. The film ends with the burning of the Vienna fruit market, August, 1971.”
- Jonas Mekas
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
…this is Radio Athènes
Eleni Bagaki, BLESS, Rallou Panagiotou, Vangelis Vlahos
18 November 2016–9 April 2017
Opening Friday 18 November 7-9pm
Responding to an invitation by Signal, Radio Athènes is bringing to Malmö four distinct projects by Eleni Bagaki, BLESS, Rallou Panagiotou and Vangelis Vlahos as well as titles from its library in Athens, Greece assembled by artists, curators and writers we have worked with. Books selected by Darren Bader, Kirsty Bell, Josephine Pryde, Teddy Coste, Thomas Boutoux, Kerstin Cmelka, to name a few, will become part of the Signal library available to peruse in the months to come and in an environment infused with the spirit of BLESS.
As the sequence of autonomous presentations unfolds, I. Economy Class (Eleni Bagaki),
II. Two-Hander (Rallou Panagiotou) and III. This Event has Now Ended (Vangelis Vlahos) facts and fictions derived from the constant and unique interaction of conflicting forces -corporeality and intangibility, exchange and reification, reality and mediation- operate at different levels and intensities.
A Ryan Air flight (Bagaki), a street-seller’s bench (Panagiotou) and the notes of Greece’s finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos (Vlahos) trigger these presentations, all conceived in 2016.
I. Economy Class, Eleni Bagaki 18 November 2016–29 January 2017
II. Two-Hander, Rallou Panagiotou 3 February–5 March 2017
III. This Event has Now Ended, Vangelis Vlahos 10 March–9 April 2017
Organized by Helena Papadopoulos, founding director of Radio Athènes, institute for the advancement of contemporary visual culture.
**
…this is Radio Athènes follows a series of events under the title Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes, the first part of which took place in October 2016 in Athens.
Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes #2
Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be
Thomas Boutoux & Teddy Coste
Saturday 15 & Sunday 16 October 2016
8pm at Radio Athènes
Merging the intimate story-telling aspect of the voice on the radio with the performative quality of bodies sharing this same experience in space Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes sets out on a meandering journey between art, music, dreams, desires, politics and life.
A two-episode radio drama written and performed by Thomas Boutoux and Teddy Coste. It follows a plot and a group of characters from Somewhere, France, on a random year in the early 1990s, to Athens, on the night that preceded this radio show.
Thomas Boutoux is a writer, curator and publisher from Paris.
From 2007 to 2015, he was one of the persons behind castillo/corrales, and he’s now one of the members of the new collective entity Paraguay, Paris.
Teddy Coste is an artist who lives in Lisbon.
In his sculptural and installation work, Coste stresses the adaptability of the art object as a carrier of alternative stories and anecdotes.
Radio Athènes, institute for the advancement of contemporary visual culture, is a book project, a showroom, an exhibition space and a curatorial practice. Flexible, independent, nomadic, interdisciplinary, Radio Athènes works together with local and international artists and institutions to present exhibitions, lectures, screenings and readings in the fields of contemporary art, literature, philosophy, dance and the applied arts.
**
Thomas Boutoux & Teddy Coste on Radio Athènes:
Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be_Part 1
Thomas Boutoux & Teddy Coste on Radio Athènes:
Maybe i’m not the person that I never wanted to be_Part 2
Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes #1
If loving you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right…
Kerstin Cmelka
Friday 14 October 2016
8pm at Radio Athènes
Merging the intimate story-telling aspect of the voice on the radio with the performative quality of bodies sharing this same experience in space Sending a Signal out in the Ether: Live on Radio Athènes sets out on a meandering journey between art, music, dreams, desires, politics and life.
Artist and occasional radio-host Kerstin Cmelka will perform a live DJ set and radio broadcast, exploring female emotional desires and their attempts of expression in pop music.
Cmelka’s practice spans from her early experimental films through photographic reworkings of film stills, ad images, and production shots to her performances—known as “microdramas”—which act as reflexive commentaries on the poles of art and life by blurring the line dividing staging from reality. Her recent work is titled The Animals (2016) — an 81 min art feature film on the insular experience and work of the performer.
Radio Athènes, institute for the advancement of contemporary visual culture, is a book project, a showroom, an exhibition space and a curatorial practice. Flexible, independent, nomadic, interdisciplinary, Radio Athènes works together with local and international artists and institutions to present exhibitions, lectures, screenings and readings in the fields of contemporary art, literature, philosophy, dance and the applied arts.
**
Kerstin Cmelka on Radio Athènes: If loving is wrong, I don’t wanna be right…
Malmö Gallery Night 2016
Saturday 24 September 2016
6pm-midnight
On view is the exhibition c̶o̶n̶s̶e̶n̶s̶u̶s̶̶ with works by Katinka Bock, Dana DeGiulio, and Raha Raissnia.
Please note that we will be closed during the day and remain closed on Sunday 25 September.
Alog
Wednesday 24 May 2000
7pm
Make it Happen
Saturday 23 September 2000
7pm
Johanna Billing, Sweden presents the Stockholm based record company Make it happen together with Karl Holmqvist and Saralunden.
Simon Starling
Wednesday 10 May 2000
7pm
Frotté Factory
Tone Hansen & Marit Paasche
Wednesday 27 September
7pm
Tone Hansen and Marit Paasche talks about their project Frotté Factory and their work with the Norwegian art magazine Frotté.
Hans T Sternudd
Tuesday 10 October 2000
7pm
Artist and art historian Hans T. Sternudd talks about his work with performance art.
Göran Christenson
Wednesday 8 November 2000
7pm
Göran Christenson, head of Malmö Art Museum, gives a talk on his work and the criteria’s for the museums art collection.
Clémentine Deliss
Friday 10 November 2000
7pm
Clémentine Deliss talks about her work as an international curator and editor for the art magazine Metronome.
Natalie Melikian
Wednesday 15 November 2000
7pm
Nathalie Melikian, film/video-artist from Vancouver, Canada, gives a talk about her work and methodology.
Ballongmagasinet
Tuesday 8 May 2001
7pm
Lisebeth Bik & Jos van der Pol
Thursday 15 February 2001
7pm
Torbjörn Limé
Wednesday 25 April 2001
7pm
Gitte Villesen
Sunday 29 April 2001
7pm
Charles Esche
Wednesday 2 May 2001
7pm
Luis M. Alonzo-Barkigia
Monday 7 May 2001
7pm
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Tuesday 27 November 2001
7pm
Jacob Fabricius
Thursday 29 November 2001
7pm
Apolonija Sustersic
Tuesday 15 October 2002
7pm
c̶o̶n̶s̶e̶n̶s̶u̶s̶̶
Katinka Bock, Dana DeGiulio,
Raha Raissnia
16 September–6 November 2016
Opening Friday 16 September 7-9pm
1.A
A multitude of voices, a plurality of bodies.
An assemblage of exchanged goods surpasses the literal economy of the marketplace in favor of a stuttering and stumbling mode of communication; the traces of actions and transactions. Sweeping and erratic bodily movements capture their surroundings on film. Image and sound compose an ode to the margin; the outskirts of our sight. Insufficient (political) speech is caught between bodies and language; medusa’s gaze is petrifying, turns everything into stone.
Consensus struck through is a dense layering of voices. Like verlan, it is language that adapts and defies at the same time. It articulates dissonance, not consonance, and keeps matters as composite as they really are.
1.B
held between two words, something given and something refused. disavowing what is normally avowed – spurning what is offered and claiming what is not. traces are fugitive, fleeing capture and improvising forms of shelter: safe havens for what escapes. traces, too, can be excessive, commoning in sense to the rhythms of a great disorder. in twin orbits, broken windows intersect with mutual aid. images are shot on phones. listen: “it’s a life thing.” shit is upside down.
1.C
It feels – literally – like I’m being pushed around – into the corners and up against the walls of the room. I’m bouncing! I try to find a protected position, to get an overview – an objective perspective, a comfortable place to start from. But all attempts fail. My eyes wander. I desperately try and read the elements that surround me – that confront me! I fail because of my bad position. I’m left here on my own. In my body, surrounded by objects, signs, sounds and moving images – urging me to make sense, pushing me from all directions – I feel dizzy. I lose my balance and almost step on one of the copper plates on the floor. I stumble and make a guttural sound. And then I become silent. Still. I take a deep breath and begin to focus on my feet against the floor, on my footsteps, on my breathing. I slow down and let my whole body relate to the space and everything that surrounds me. I use all my senses. I relax and slowly begin to perceive everything from a new horizon.
1.D
Bodies are flashing by. They appear as jarring moments in a street, as rifts in a collage, as figures in a room that is also a stage. They are swarming, like intersecting layers of the same reality.
The body is its own, yet never alone. It is jostling and merging with everything that surrounds it: the other, objects and structures, both visible and invisible. The bodies share an elusiveness, but also a realness, as if volatility were at their core. What we are left with are traces of that which is constantly taking place but in the end always escapes us.
Digital Distress – Consumed by Infinity
Kah Bee Chow, Andreas Kurtsson, Alexandra Lerman, Adriana Ramić
8 December 2017–25 March 2018
Opening Friday 8 December 7-9pm
This could be an example of AI generated concrete poetry, or how digitalization appears in the augmented reality of our everyday lives. The interface between cloud and body, hardware and soul.
Ghosting
iPhone elbow
Infinite scrolling Phygital
Facial puppetry Swype
Street view
Biometrics Machine learning
Google translate iRobot GDPR
Vaporwave Phishing Skeuomorph
Filter bubble eSports i-Frame destruction
Super-hybridity Datamosh Brain-machine interface Videoglitch
Facial recognition ASMR
#Additivism Content-Aware Fill Fake news
Copypasta Shitposting TIL NSFW Chatbot
Hypernormalisation
Post-digital Off-the-grid
Kah Bee Chow
Two furry robotic vacuum cleaners perform an intricate choreography – part household chores, part improvised couple dancing – in an algorithmic balance between technical aid and pet-like behavior.
Andreas Kurtsson
A fictionalized travel journal from a trip to Facebook’s semi-secret datacenter in Luleå. High technology and primeval forest live side by side in two parallel feeds.
Alexandra Lerman
The patented and copyrighted system of Apple Inc.’s and Google LLC’s touchscreen gestures as raw material. The contemporary body language of “pinches”, “scrolls” and “slides” shared by everyone, everywhere, everyday.
Adriana Ramić
Ant pathways are traced onto a Swype keyboard which interprets fingertip swipes into text in any of the 71 languages supported by its patented technology. The effects of technology on human language seen through insect behavior.
Morten Søndergaard
Wednesday 23 November 2005
6pm
Lecture with Morten Søndergaard, Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, in connection with the exhibition with Henrik Andersson at Signal.
OPEN
Critique meeting at Signal
17–18 April 2007
OPEN is a critique and discussion forum for professional artists initiated by the artists Anna Henriksson and Kamilla Levring. OPEN invites artists to present and discuss their work and/or their working process with and among peers.
The OPEN Critique meeting includes one hour of individual presentation/discussion for each participant. Maximum 8 participants, there will be no audience besides the participants.
Tuesday
6pm-10pm: We present ourselves and set the schedule for the individual presentations followed by discussion
Wednesday
6pm-8 pm: Individual presentations followed by discussion
8pm-9pm: Evaluation
OPEN Bar at 9pm Wednesday 18 April 2007
On Wednesday we conclude with a drink at Retro across the street from Signal. This meeting is open for all who are curious about OPEN. Welcome!
OPEN is not a place, it is an attitude towards discussion, art and collegues. OPEN offers a feasible way to progress on an individual level and in the professional life as an artist. OPEN is built on common needs and provides talks and meetings about artistic processes, contemporary society and economic issues.
Evening Salon at Signal
29 March–24 April 2007
The Evening Salon presents a series of events with performance / dance / lectures / poetry / film during five weeks in March-April. The Evening Salon borrows elements from various forms of public gatherings like the literary salons of the 18th century, the town hall meeting and Speaker’s Corner to bring forward a number of means of expression and different strategies of how to make one’s voice heard.
29 March at 7pm
Edda Manga (Researcher in History of Science and Ideas at Uppsala University)
4 April at 7pm
Rani Nair, dancer & choreographer (performance- work in progress)
10 April at 7pm
Jeremiah Day, artist (performance)
12 April at 7pm
RåFILM (VJ session)
An evening on film as weapon.
19 April at 7pm
Johannes Anyuru, poet (lecture/poetry reading)
Johannes Anyuru was first published in 2003 with his collection of poems entitled Only the gods are new, using the Iliad as a frame for his portrayal of contemporary Sweden. At the Evening Salon Johannes Anyuru departs from the novel he is currently working on entitled The tears of the cities, which deals with the tools, money and the walls and doors of houses, with the birth of writing as an economical system in the ancient Sumer, where Iraq lies today. Borders, cavities, emptiness, war, state of emergency, sovereignty. How we measure time with clocks and calendars, and every year we dance below the rockets and recreate power from chaos. It deals with what is possible to say and if there is any dignity, or rather maybe any values.
Johannes Anyuru (born 1979) is based in Gothenburg.
24 April at 7pm
Ida Börjel, Pär Thörn, Andrzej Tichý (Reading)
A litterary evening with Ida Börjel, Andrzej Tichý, Pär Thörn, Gustaf Fröding, Patrik Ourednik, Hertha Müller, Anne Carson, Anonymous, Michel Foucault, Mircea Cartarescu, Nils Holmberg, Enver Hoxha and Erik Beckman.
Four formats and a space: Curating at Kunstverein München
Maria Lind & Sören Grammel
Friday 6 September 2002
7pm
hands-on utopias
Ola Gustavsson, Unnar Örn
10–13 April 2003
Egill S and the Mammoths
Friday 30 May 2003
7pm
Barbara Wien
Wednesday 15 January 2003
7pm
Harrell Fletcher
Sunday 30 March 2003
6pm
”For the past seven years I have worked collaborativelly and individually on interdisciplinary, site-specific projects exploring the dynamics of social spaces and communities. My approach is to first understand a site’s physical and social characteristic, and then to create work which illuminates compelling aspects of that site. Because I work with diverse non-art related populations and individuals, inherently my audience expands beyond the art world.” Harrell Fletcher
The artist Harrell Fletcher (US) will come to Malmö in October 2003 to make a project at Signal. He is invited by Axel Lieber and this collaboration is generously supported by IASPIS. In connection to his first visit in Malmö, Harrell Fletcher will talk about his work on Sunday the 30th of March at 6:00 pm.
Lars Bang Larsen
Tuesday 18 November 2003
7pm
Signal has invited the danish curator and art critic Lars Bang Larsen to hold a lecture. Lars Bang Larsen has recently been curating The Echo Show at Tramway in Glasgow together with Soren Andreasen. “Inspired by dub reggae’s use of feedback and the ways in which psychedelic art dramatised pictorial elements as pulsations of form, The Echo Show explores the impure moments when art opens up to external events that have repercussions on it and forces it to improvise.”
He has also been curating the exhibition Fundamentalists of the New Order together with Charlotte Brandt and Cristina Ricupero at Charlottenborg in Copenhagen late 2002.
Lars Bang Larsen is active as a critic and writer, and released the book “Sture Johanesson. About the 1960s and ’70 psychedelic art of Sture Johanesson” last year. He has also been writing for Nu:The Nordic Art Review, Art/Text, Los Angeles and the danish newspaper Politiken.
Fata Morgana – Between Belief and Illusion
Vita Zaman and Magnus Edensvärd
Tuesday 16 December 2003
7pm
Lecture by Vita Zaman and Magnus Edensvärd, directors of IBID projects, Vilnius/London.
Gratis Design (Fredrik Holmqvist & Peter Thörneby)
2–24 September 2000
Opening Saturday 2 September
Conversation: Maryam Jafri and Alex Villar
Moderator: Simon Sheikh
Sunday 4 april 2004
5pm
Signal has invited the writer and curator Simon Sheikh for a discussion with Maryam Jafri and Alex Villar in relation to the exhibition Tropes and Tresholds.
Lise Nelleman
Tuesday 7 December 2004
7pm
Examples of extreme enthusiasm: How science-fiction-fans construct reality
Claus Richter
Sunday 8 February 2004
4pm
Claus Richter (artist based in Frankfurt) has been invited by Michael Beutler to hold a lecture.
Richter will talk about fandom and the influenc that fiction can have on reality. Some Science-Fiction-Film-Fans tend to recreate the surroundings, costumes and props from their favourite films. Through these fan-reconstructions, primarily fictious settings become part of a consensual “real world” to a certain degree. Learn how to build Stormtrooper-Uniforms, a lifesize starship or a whole new world.
Julie Ault
Tuesday 30 November 2004
7pm
The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light
Tommy Olsson & Elin T. Sørensen
12 May–3 June 2001
Opening Saturday 12 May
Kvällskurserna / Aftenskolen
Tone O Nielsen & Morten Goll
31 August–22 September 2001
Opening Friday 31 August
the diffracted dash
Publication release and reading
Minia Biabiany and Imri Sandström
Friday 17 June 2016
6.30pm and onwards
“(Bindestrecket i all-männing är en vild rot som tvingar en över randen. En försvunnen rot, som håller en på plats.)”
“(le trait d’union des lieux-communs est une racine folle, qui vous pousse par-delà les lisères. Une racine en-allée, qui vous maintient au lieu.)”
the diffracted dash is a collaboration between Minia Biabiany and Imri Sandström. It started as a sharing around the book Philosophie de la Relation – poésie en étendue by Édouard Glissant, and its Swedish translation, Relationens filosofi – Omfångets poesi. Talking back and forth through these texts and languages continuously opened up different meanings and connections. This scattering and linking of variations and details formed a conversation on language, translation, colonization, opacity and traces. Parts of this conversation have taken the shape of a risograph publication that will be presented during the evening.
A reading of the diffracted dash will take place in conjunction with the closing of the exhibition Spelling by Minia Biabiany, and as a satellite to the artistic research project of Imri Sandström entitled Howe Across Reading – Performing the Past.
Doors open at 6.30pm
Reading starts at 7pm
There will be drinks and Luca’s halloumi on the grill from 7.30pm and onwards.
Come and join us for a season finale under the stars!
SaMaPaSa
Lars Siltberg
28 November–20 December 1998
Opening Saturday 28 November
Astrid Svangren
28 November–20 December 1998
Opening Saturday 28 November
On a kind of cosmic level
Paula Wallmark-Nilsson
31 October–22 November 1998
Opening Saturday 31 October
Sven Nilsson
31 October–22 November 1998
Opening Saturday 31 October
Picture of a state of mind
Mats Andersson
10–25 October 1998
Opening Saturday 10 October
Gryningen
Morgan Schagerberg
24–28 November 1999
Opening Wednesday 24 November
David Svensson
1–26 September 1999
Opening Wednesday 1 September
Simon Starling
1–26 September 1999
Opening Wednesday 1 September
Marika Bredler
8–30 May 1999
Opening Saturday 8 May
Den första sången av sju / Jag är så glad att ni alla är här
Annika Ström
13 March–3 April 1999
Opening Saturday 13 March
A massive introduction to another way of loving
Andreas Korsár & Henrik Persson
13 March–3 April 1999
Opening Saturday 13 March
Malin Bogholt
13 February–7 March 1999
Opening Saturday 13 February
Mats Adelman
13 February–7 March 1999
Opening Saturday 13 February
Åsa Sonjasdotter
16 January–7 February 1999
Opening Saturday 16 January
Library Surf
Lise Harlev
16 January–7 February 1999
Opening Saturday 16 January
No Home Movie
by Chantal Akerman
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 9 June 2016
7pm
No Home Movie (2015), 115min
“This film is above all about my mother, my mother who is no longer with us. About this woman who arrived in Belgium in 1938, fleeing Poland, the pogroms and the violence. This woman who is only ever seen inside her apartment. An apartment in Brussels. A film about a world in motion that my mother does not see.”
- Chantal Akerman
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
Ny i stan
Joachim Carlson, Charlotte Eliasson, Daniel Ferdman, Johan Frid, Åse Frid, Unni Gjertsen, Mette Hansen, Ronny Hansson, Tatiana Jensen, Ingegerd Johanson, Jone Kvie, Kristina Matousch, Vegar Moen, Tommy Olsson, Peter Persson, Carola Priedite, Morgan Schagerberg, Monix Sjölin, Karin Solberg, Anders Stolt, Johan Sunesson, Petrus Vavami
Saturday 9 December 2000
7-11pm
Dave Allen, Jonathan Monk
4–26 November 2000
Opening Saturday 4 November
Slow
Jo Torkel Fenne, Berit Henning, Lotte Konow Lund, Sofie Persvik, Beathe C. Rönning
Curated by Frotté Factory
30 September–22 October 2000
Opening Saturday 30 September
Lars Blomqvist, Magnus Ottertun, Lisa Torell
10 March–2 April 2000
Opening Friday 10 March
Pure et Dure
Ann Böttcher, Kajsa Dahlberg, Tova Mozard & Ylva Westerlund
8 December 2001–13 January 2002
Opening Saturday 8 December
Alan Currall
3 March–1 April 2001
Opening Saturday 3 March
Not Only Printed Matters
Karl Holmqvist, Dieter Roth, Peter Thörneby
29 November 2002–26 January 2003
Opening Friday 29 November
Cambio de Lugar_Change of Place
Andrea Geyer & Sharon Hayes
31 May–16 June 2002
Opening Friday 31 May
Viktor Kopp
19 January–10 February 2002
Opening Saturday 19 January
Slaves and free black in the court of justice at Swedish Saint Barthélemy
Fredrik Thomasson
Wednesday 15 June 2016
7pm
Sweden became a slave nation with the takeover of the Caribbean island Saint Barthélemy in 1785. Serfdom had been abolished in 1335 and as Swedish law did not regulate slavery a version of the French slave laws, the Code noir – the black law – was introduced in 1787.
Fredrik Thomasson, historian at Uppsala University, will share with us his research on the justice system in the colony. He especially focuses on how the enslaved and free black population was treated and punished by the Swedish court. This almost century long colonial period (1785–1878) has been overlooked in Swedish historiography, and reasons for this amnesia will be discussed.
The talk will be held in English.
In Sweden, As In The Rest Of The World, It’s Time To Reread Summerhill
Harrell Fletcher
24 October–16 November 2003
Opening Friday 25 October
Jag är inte ensam i universum
Catti Brandelius/Miss Universum
5 September–5 October 2003
Opening Friday 5 September
David Sherry, Clare Stephenson, Anders Stolt
26 April–18 May 2003
Opening Saturday 26 April
Mary Beth Edelson
Saturday 12 August
2pm at Malmö Art Museum
The artist Mary Beth Edelson will talk about her artistic practice and method in connection to the exhibition A Well Lived Life, a retrospective at the Malmö Art Museum which spans 30 years of issues and activism.
In addition Edelson will present and talk about the idea of a flexible international artists’ contract that is in the process of being formed, and begins with a survey of artists’ conditions.
The talk will be held in English.
Catrin Andersson, Kajsa Dahlberg, Christian Hillesø, Tova Mozard
21 February–16 March 2003
Opening Saturday 21 February
Can Altay, Petra Bauer & Annette Krauss, New Beginings
15 May–13 June 2004
Opening Saturday 15 May
Signal ends its spring season with a group show featuring Can Altay, PetraBauer & Annette Krauss and New Beginings.
The exhibition takes as its starting point different ways of working in (with) public space. The debate surrounding where the line is drawn between the public and the private, how public spaces have become ever more commercialised, and the ways in which these structures lead to people developing new ”spaces” or relationships to the existing architecture are all central questions for the artists.
The work Minibar by Can Altay effectively documents the ”non-places” in central Ankara, Turkey, that local youths use as makeshift bars where they can socialise in the evenings. The minibars spring up in places where the surrounding architecture has inadvertently created an environment for sitting and setting down drinks.
Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss have for a longer time been collecting stories that are presented in a publication entitled In search of a toolfor subversive actions in everyday life. The stories are about people trying to cope with various everyday situations, navigate their way through existing structures or even use them to their own advantage. The work poses questions such as when and in which way an action is considered subversive.
The artist group New Beginings has been working at breaking down existing structures in the public space for several years now. Their actions range from the public placement of comfortable park-benches to radio transmissions. At Signal they will be presenting a sustainable cycle based on potatoes* as raw material.
*Early Puritan is a variety of potato
Tropes and Tresholds
Maryam Jafri and Alex Villar
2 April–2 May 2004
Opening Friday 2 April
Signal continues its spring season with the exhibition Tropes and Tresholds by New York based artists Maryam Jafri and Alex Villar. This exhibition will bring together for the first time the video work of two artists whose practices both intersect and collide.
Jafri focuses on questions of gender and language whereas Villar interrogates spatial structures that influence everday behaviour. Jafri´s stagings of the psyche, elaborating on gender identity, the relation between speech and thought, counterpose Villar´s incongruent positioning of the body in situations that expose the instrumental logic in the design of public spaces. A substantial commonality is perceived in the tactical use of performative strategies which question the regulating codes dominant in contemporary society.
Michael Beutler
6 February–7 March 2005
Opening Friday 6 February
Signal is opening the new season with an exhibition with Berlin based artist Michael Beutler (1976).
In his practice Michael Beutler is interested in conceptualising the relationship between the process of production and the quality-use of materials. In his playful method, Beutler also questions issues of standardisation of production. By building his own structures from common building materials as well as still-somehow-useable leftovers from the street, his method takes on a do-it -yourself strategy. In the logic of production he often constructs devices to rationalise the connection between given resources and the final object. These devices operate as helping tools which also provide the possibility to involve more people in the process of realisation of the work.
Beutler’s sculptural interventions can be seen as a materialisation of his dialogue with the given architecture. Most of the work is improvised on spot, the ideas of the final object change with the development of an appropriate material and vice versa.
Although a recent graduate from the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Beutler’s work has been exhibited at the Secession, Vienna, Galerie Michael Neff, Frankfurt, Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, Kunstverein München, the “Frieze Art Fair, “Utopia Station Sindelfingen” Sindelfingen, “Was ist in meiner Wohnung, wenn ich nicht da bin?” Berlin.
Get Real
Tommy Ericsson
10–25 October 1998
Opening Saturday 10 October
SweDe
Johanna Billing, Markus Degerman, Ingrid Eriksson, Peter Geschwind, Carina Gunnars, Erla Haraldsdottir, Karin Johnsson, Anna Kindgren, Gunilla Klingberg, Bo Melin, Bella Rune, Christine Ödlund
10 April–2 May 1999
Opening Saturday 10 April
Last Virgin on the Left
Johannes Kahrs
4 February–5 March 2000
Opening Friday 4 February
Talk to Me
Boris Achour, Lenka Clayton, Edvard Gran
20 January–18 February 2001
Opening Saturday 20 January
Das Schwedenhaus
Per Hasselberg
12 October–10 November 2002
Opening Saturday 12 October
Spelling
Minia Biabiany
29 April–19 June 2016
Opening Friday 29 April 7-9pm
A beginning. To open, to introduce.
An artist is invited to live and work in our city for three months. We call it a residency. It is an open invitation, extended in the spirit of mutual curiosity and trust. It is an invitation to work together and allow the process to find its own pace. Together we decide to think and treat the exhibition as unfixed time – alive and changing over the days and weeks to come. Or maybe, as an archipelago – like islands belonging to the space, connected by water in constant motion.
The artist is Minia Biabiany. Her spatial compositions perform a visual vocabulary that weaves together her concerns on a Caribbean present formed by our shared History. Through repetition – as a way of rethinking – and aggregation – as a way of composing – a map of our creolized world slowly emerges. It is based on connecting points marked by violence, silencing strategies, and legacies of resistance. A recurrent questioning of place accompanies every layer in this texture.
We imagine the exhibition as a visual and rhythmical movement beginning with an initial spatial articulation, like the first carefully selected words in a sentence formulated by an archipelagic thinking. An understanding that a single island can not be fully grasped without a sense of its relationship to the whole. Like an evolving and unfolding sentence that will be erased, re-formulated and recomposed again, some meanings will shift, while others will escape us; some will reappear, others still will leave only traces. An ignored colonial past is resurfacing weaving a relation between distant geographical points, and moments in time. The linear, sequential order of syntax is fragmented.
Slowly and firmly, we allow time to be fluid and resist a constricting structure.
We invite you to share this time with us.
Minia Biabiany holds an Iaspis residency in Malmö hosted by Signal during 1 April–30 June 2016.
An Injury to One
by Travis Wilkerson
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Tuesday 12 April 2016
7pm
An Injury to One (2002), 53min
An Injury to One reconstructs the unsolved murder of union organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana, and provides a corrective—and absolutely compelling—glimpse of a particularly volatile moment in early 20th century American labor history. Archival footage mixes with deftly deployed intertitles, while the lyrics to traditional mining songs are accompanied by music from Will Oldham, Jim O’Rourke, and the band Low, producing an appropriately moody, effulgent, and strangely out-of-time soundtrack.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
The Image and the machine: a cultural inquiry into contemporary forms of perception
Lila Lee-Morrison
Thursday 7 April 2016
7pm
Contemporary applications of machine vision involve processes that often, obscure human perception, whether through bureaucratic procedures of blacking out information as in the case of drone warfare or through the mathematical abstractions of perceptual algorithms as found in biometrics. This talk will be a presentation on contemporary shifts in visual syntaxes, which result from a reliance on machines to do the work of seeing and interpreting. What aesthetic processes occur when the scope of machine vision is turned back towards us, that is, the human figure? How do these processes inform the social and political conditions of the information age? Through a historical perspective of the role of the image at the intersection of art, science and the military industrial complex, Lila Lee-Morrison will present an introduction to her on-going research into the cultural implications of machine vision. Her analysis includes the work of both artists and theorists who have articulated and confronted these shifts in perception, including Francis Galton, Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, the collaborative group, Forensic Architecture and Thomas Ruff.
Lila Lee-Morrison is currently a PhD student at the Div. of Art History and Visual Studies at Lund University. She moved to Malmö, Sweden from New York, NY five years ago, to escape a life of pixel-pushing, working as a digital retoucher and now embraces the opportunity to write about it, amongst other curiosities, instead.
The talk will be held in English.
Under the full moon
Shadow Play Performance
Tuesday 20 May 2008
9pm
In connection to the exhibition To Square Light we are pleased to invite you to an evening of shadow play performances under the full moon. 12 artists and one poet have been invited to produce a shadow play each that will be performed starting at 9pm or as soon as it’s dark. The shadow plays will be shown through the windows of Signal and out onto the parking lot – bring warm clothes!
Participating artists:
Lars Brunström and Anna Ekman, Lucia Gustavsson, David Krantz, Trygve Luktvasslimo, Lisa Nyberg and Stina Nyberg, Madelene Oldeman, Peder Alexis Olsson, Morgan Schagerberg, Sofia Sundberg, Matteo Rosa, Susann Rönnertz, Helena Wikestam.
Natasa Petresin
Monday 7 March 2005
7pm
Natasa Petresin, curator based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, will talk about her practice in relation to the art scene in Slovenia and her experience from working with the experimental and activist art group Zavod Projekt Atol. Natasa Petresin was also involved in the curating, funding and management of the sound art series Re-lax and founder of the music label and music publishing series rx:tx.
While Waiting. Malmö-Manchester / Melbourne-Montevideo
Nikos Papastergiadis and Carlos Capelan
Thursday 19 May 2005
7pm
The Archive
Matthew Buckingham
Tuesday 18 October 2005
7pm
Matthew Buckingham is an artist living in New York and Berlin. Utilizing photography, film, video, audio, writing and drawing, his work questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. Buckingham examines dynamic connections between the present and past while scrutinizing the power and effects of images and narration. His installations and interventions create spatial and social contexts that encourage viewers to question the familiar.
Recent projects investigate the “creative destruction” of the city of St. Louis; the Indigenous people of the Hudson River Valley; and the genesis of the first dictionary of the English language. His work has been seen at Arc/Musée d´art moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Arnolfini, Bristol; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; KunstWerke, Berlin; Kunstmuseum, Luzern; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster and The Whitney Museum for American Art, New York.
The lecture will be held in English.
Rudi Laermans
Tuesday 25 October 2005
7pm
Perpetual Memory
Esther Shalev-Gerz
Thursday 27 October 2005
8pm
Based in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognised for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigation into the nature of democracy, cultural memory and the politics of public space. For over 20 years her work has focused on interventions and projects in public space, taking the form of collaboration and exchange with the audience. Her installations and photographic work raise questions on group memory and its interaction with personal history and souvenir. In these commemorative monuments, installations, video and photographic works, questions about history are posed, and its relationship with collective memory is explored and investigated.
Esther Shalev-Gerz is currently professor at Art school Valand, Göteborg University.
For a productive practice of failure
Michael Blum
Thursday 26 January 2006
7pm
Michael Blum studied history at Paris University and photography at ENP, Arles (F) before turning to an artistic practice as an escape from the numerous limitations of the academic field. His videos, installations and publications aim at re-reading the production of culture and history and at deconstructing myths. Whether they’re about Karl Marx (Wandering Marxwards, 1999), a pair of shoes (My Sneakers, 2001) or capitalism (Homo Oeconomicus, 2000; potlatch.doc, 2002; 400 years without a grave is longtime to shut up, 2002), his works are seeking new perspectives on and resonances to surrounding objects and concepts.
Recently, Blum has been addressing issues more closely related to European 20th century history: The Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century (O.K Centrum für Gegenwartskunst, Linz – Revolver Verlag, 2004-05) was based on the encounter of Hitler and Wittgenstein in a Linz schoolyard 100 years ago – and all speculations that might arise from it, ranging from political farce to memory discourse. In 2005, he was showing A Tribute to Safiye Behar at the 9th Istanbul Biennial, a museum dedicated to the Jewish marxist-feminist and free-thinker who had a 30-year long affair with Mustapha Kemal Atatürk and influenced most of the reforms he was implementing in the 1920′s and which founded modern Turkey.
Michael Blum is born 1966 in Jerusalem. He’s based in Vienna.
www.blumology.net
Art on TV
Valentinas Klimasauskas
Tuesday 9 May 2006
7pm
Valentinas Klimasauskas, curator at CAC- Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, talks about CAC TV. What does it mean for an art institution to produce TV? Is it possible to retain one’s agenda while collaborating with a commercial TV? How does the idea of open source and a fluid CAC TV team work?
The talk will be held in English.
Free television
Peter Dahlgren
Wednesday 24 May 2006
7pm
Lecture by Peter Dahlgren, professor at the Division of Media and Communication Studies at Lund University, on free television, democracy and the media. The lecture is held in connection with the exhibition Every program is a pilot, every program is the final episode.
TV on art
Pontus Kyander
Thursday 1 June 2006
7pm
Pontus Kyander, art critic and curator, talks about his previous position as editor of Format, a tv program on art. What can one accomplish with a program on art, what did the previous programs look like and what were the conditions for making Format?
The talk will be held in Swedish.
Hito Steyerl
Tuesday 13 June 2006
7pm
Måns Holst-Ekström
Monday 18 December 2006
7pm
Interventionist Art in the Age of Enterprise Culture
Gregory Sholette
Tuesday 8 May 2007
7pm
The aim of this presentation is to trace the effects of neo-liberalization upon politically committed artists in the United States by focusing on the shift from a post-war culture of administration to that of a post cold-war culture entrepreneurship. It concludes by asking what type of critical, artistic response is possible under the conditions of the new, homeland security state apparatus that emerged in the aftermath of September 11 2001.
Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, writer, and founding member of two artists’ collectives, Political Art Documentation and Distribution (1980-1986) and REPOhistory (1989-2000). Together with Nato Thompson he is co-editor of The Interventionists: A User’s Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT Press 2004), and his book Collectivism After Modernism that is co-edited with UC Davis Art Historian Blake Stimson is due out in 2006 from The University of Minnesota Press, and he also teaches in the School of Art and Art Professionals at New York University, Visual Culture Program.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
What to do About Painting
An illustrated lecture presented by Morgan Fisher
Wednesday 6 June 2007
7pm
After several decades as a filmmaker, Morgan Fisher returned to his original interest and started making paintings. He will show and discuss his work in painting, which he thinks of as a reaction to what in film is necessary, the rectangular format and an image.
Morgan Fisher was born in Washinton, D.C., in 1942.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
An Architektur / Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens
Wednesday 22 August 2007
7pm
An Architektur is a Berlin-based journal on the production and use of the built environment. An Architektur works on a discursive architectural practice, which understands the challenge of spatial phenomena and the visualization of notions of society manifested in space as a possibility of political action. In monothematic issues on concrete examples and places sociopolitical questions are applied to space and architecture. An Architektur is published bi-annually. Understanding the magazine as the focal product, we continue to develop and discuss topics raised and elaborated there in exhibitions, conferences, and other events.
Sabine Horlitz and Oliver Clemens from An Architektur will give the talk at Signal. They are currently artists in recidence at CPH AIR in Copenhagen.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Come Alive!
Julie Ault
Wednesday 28 November 2007
7pm
Julie Ault will discuss Corita’s art practice including her silkscreen prints, and will reflect on her engagement with Corita’s work through various exhibitions and publication forms.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
On teaching and learning art and cultural production
Andrea Geyer, Bo Reimer
Wednesday 12 December 2007
7pm
Andrea Geyer, artist and professor at the Malmö Art Academy, and Bo Reimer, professor of Media and Communication Studies at the School of Art and Communication at Malmö University.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Din vän datamaskinen
Release, reading and discussion with Pär Thörn
Pär Thörn
Monday 12 May 2008
7pm
Writing on art and writing art history
Will Bradley
Wednesday 23 January 2008
7pm
Will Bradley is a freelance curator and writer based in Oslo, Norway.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
IDEL ÖRA and New Beginings presents People Like Us
Wednesday 13 February 2008
7pm
Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Pia Mauno, Eivind Nesterud, Matias Ring
21 November–21 December 2003
Opening Friday 21 November
“Somewhere Over the Rainbow” presents works by Pia Mauno, Eivind Nesterud and Matias Ring. The exhibition centres around events or situations that extend from everyday routine and environment into personal configurations of landscape and methods of reflection.
Pia Mauno’s paintings depict unhabitable places. Landscapes, pools of patterns, repetitions and architectures where people are submitted to linear and circular structures in symbiosis or as if they challenged each other in an forever meaningless battle. Ideal human beings that strive for perfection, the lack of fools. Side by side, but without contact with each other, the figures move forward on the escalator.
Eivind Nesterud’s video work “Poe’s Room” shows a woman reading an extract by Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The philosophy of furniture” in which a room is described in its smallest details. The work explores the ideal of the domestic environment, which here falls in contrast with the gallery space, questioning the relationship between imagination and experience.
The works of Matias Ring can be seen as a materialisation of instants or experiences, in which the artist attempts to reconstruct a temporary manifestation. A reflection on a day spent at the seaside or a contemplation on Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo entering the inaccessible places of the deep sea.
Divercité! Some things can be taken to the bank
Endre Aalrust and Trygve Luktvasslimo
8–31 October 2004
Opening Friday 8 October
Signal is proud to present Divercité! Some things can be taken to the bank, a collaboration between Norwegian artists Endre Aalrust and Trygve Luktvasslimo.
The exhibition addresses questions such as can our choices as consumers lead to significant change? Is it possible to consume in a radical manner, and if so whose rules must you play by? The notion of the “pink pound” originated in the early 1990s when the advertising industry began to recognise the huge spending power of affluent groups who fell beyond the category of the nuclear family. In subtle ways advertising began to address groups, including gay consumers, and in turn indicated the conscious policies adopted by businesses to address these minority groups with significant spending power.
In Divercité! Some things can be taken to the bank developments in the aesthetics of gay friendly advertising are examined. What are the factors that create a uniform heterogeneous minority, and what happens when stereotypical identities are produced and reinforced through the benevolent marketing and self-conscious attitudes of business?
Through their work with the pink economy Aalrust and Luktvasslimo present scenarios that questions the market’s desire of a rational consumer and how the confusion connected to acting unpredictably can possibly make a new starting point for criticism.
Henrik Olesen, Mia Rosasco, Trung Ky-Danh Vo
13 November–12 December 2004
Opening Saturday 13 November
Mörklagd 1+2
Beata Fransson, Saskia Holmkvist, Simo Rouhiainen
12 February–20 March 2005
Opening Friday 12 February 7-9pm
Strange. Familiar. Places.
Mats Adelman, Deborah Ligorio
23 April–5 June 2005
Opening Friday 23 April 7-9pm
Signal is pleased to present Mats Adelman, Malmö and Deborah Ligorio, Berlin/Milan, with the exhibition Strange. Familiar. Places.
The title of the exhibition alludes to the strange sensation that one can experience when finding oneself in a hitherto unknown place that, nevertheless, seems somehow familiar. Where does this familiarity come from and which comes first – one’s own experience or the construction of how something is?
In Strange. Familiar. Places. Mats Adelman shows wooden sculptures, watercolours, drawings and washes that, together, form a world of their own which is in some way familiar to the viewer; a world that exists in nature and in the no-man’s-land of factories and abandoned sites. Animals, most particularly birds, are depicted in Adelman’s work with great detail and precision. Their surroundings and situations do not show the same regard for realism or exactitude but tend towards fable or poetry. Fable makes itself felt in an unreal, foreign dimension of something that we sense that we know very well. Perhaps it is nature as we believe that we know it but with elements that are not usually understood and that seem to belong to another world.
In the film “Donut to Spiral” (2004) Deborah Ligorio approaches the landscape from another direction. On her journey through the desert to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Great Salt Lake, Deborah Ligorio travelled through a landscape she had never visited before. In spite of this, the unknown seems unusually familiar and the magnificent landscape is difficult to grasp as really existing in that one’s experience of it is overshadowed by associations to backdrops from films and computer games. The journey to Great Salt Lake becomes a sort of cartography of a landscape which is already familiar to us through pictures, narratives and memories.
On Kunsthalle Athena and South as a State of Mind
Marina Fokidis
Sunday 6 March 2016
5pm
Marina Fokidis is a curator and writer based in Athens, Greece. She is the founding and artistic director of Kunsthalle Athena, which started as an experimental platform and is now taking its permanent form, and the founding and editorial director of South As a State of Mind, a biannual art and culture publication. Fokidis is also the head of the artistic office of documenta 14 in Athens.
Kunsthalle Athena is intended as a critical intervention in the art scenes of Athens, Greece and Europe at large. Reflecting on the social role of art institutions in the 21st century, Kunsthalle Athena eschews an attachment to the mere display of contemporary art, prioritising instead the possibility of co-producing culture. Drawing on creative sources of varied origins and providing a vital core of social interaction and exchange, Kunsthalle Athena is constantly informed by the idiosyncrasy and distinctiveness of Athens and its public. With a desire to emphasise the constant transformation of ‘the polis’ (Athens) as a symbolic location for the production and dissemination of contemporary culture worldwide, Kunsthalle Athena does not aspire to authority and infallibility but fosters a spirit of optimism and shared responsibility. Yet Kunsthalle Athena has no illusions. Building on the traditions of auto-critique, it inevitably operates within the limits of the possible, in the firm belief that something is better than nothing.
South as a State of Mind is a biannual arts and culture journal published in Greece and distributed internationally. Possessed by a spirit of absurd authority, it tries to contaminate the prevailing culture with ideas that derive from southern mythologies such as the ‘perfect climate’, ‘easy living’, ‘chaos’, ‘corruption’, and the ‘dramatic temperament’, among others. Through a twisted – and ‘southern’ – attitude, expressed through critical essays, artists’ projects, interviews and features, it wishes to give form to the concept of the South as a ‘state of mind’ rather than a set of fixed places on the map. People from different – literal or metaphorical – ‘Souths’ renegotiate the southern attitude, partly to define it and partly to invent it, within the post-crisis world. Opening up an unexpected dialogue among neighbourhoods, cities, regions and approaches, South as a State of Mind is both a publication and a meeting point for shared intensities. From September 2015 and until June 2017, South as a State of Mind hosts documenta 14 and for the next four issues the magazine is reconfigured as the official journal of documenta 14 under the editorial directorship of Adam Szymczyk and Quinn Latimer.
The talk will be held in English.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Something eerie
Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Graeme Arnfield, Ieva Epnere, David Kasprzak,
Daria Melnikova, Tadasu Takamine
26 February–17 April 2016
Opening Friday 26 February 7-9pm
I don’t know if you’ve noticed my absence, or maybe you have become used to it. It’s hard to calculate how long I’ve been gone or if I’ve been gone long enough to warrant calculation. Before I arrived in my present situation time was bounded—now that I’m here it’s inexhaustible.I am writing you partially as an attempt to consume this time, but also to record it, should someone find this.
The room—yes I’m pretty sure it’s a room—I’ve been inhabiting is exceptionally unremarkable besides the effect that it seems to have had on myself and my cohabitants, but I’ll return to that. Rows of institutional chairs line three of the four Escape Gray™ walls. (It’s the name of a shade of gray I saw on a paint sample sheet. I think it’s close.) All of the usual paraphernalia that decorates rooms such as this one seems to have congregated in the center of the space in a perplexing configuration. I’m sure it’s conversing about information that I haven’t been privy to.
A clock is the only object that decided to stay in its location on the wall. It’s one of those black rectangular ones with the red LEDs that are much brighter than necessary. The time hasn’t changed since I’ve been writing you. Checking it has become a ritual. Look up. Look back down. Wait for the afterimage of the red lights to disappear. Count to sixty. Look back up. I’m not even sure that the rule of sixty seconds applies here or to this particular clock. Another unsettling feature of this room is the low droning sound coming from somewhere within the ceiling, like a bow running against a saw blade. The drone itself could be soothing in another situation. The unsettling part is speculating about its origin.
As I mentioned before, this room has had an unusual effect on me and the others. I would ask them if they had noticed it too, but I can tell by the way they are looking at their hands that we’re sharing this experience. Everything in the room is in sharp focus except my own body and the figures of the others. If you hold your hand in front of your face but focus on something in the distance you can get a sense of what I’m experiencing. My own outlines are slightly vibrating.
The only person in sharp focus is a woman in a sterile gray dress who has entered the room several times. Each time she leaves, she takes one of the others with her. How she enters and exits remains a mystery, as I cannot see any doors, windows, hatches, or otherwise. On her last visit I asked her about the blurriness I was experiencing. She said that we are only archetypes or stand-ins for other people. It wasn’t necessary for us to be in sharp focus since we wouldn’t be recognized anyway. When I asked where she was taking the others she said that she was simply acting on behalf of someone else that we would never meet and that we would be given no more information.
Since I’ve been writing you three of the others have been returned by the woman in the gray dress. The first explains to me that she was taken to the foot of a great pyramid, but instead of sand she found herself surrounded by an expanse of frozen fjords sloping into glacier fields. The second found himself in Japan following a catastrophic event, and the third was placed in Palestine to investigate the murder of two children.
I’m afraid I must finish this record quickly. The woman in the gray dress has returned and appears to be walking directly toward me.
* This text is part of an ongoing work by David Kasprzak commissioned specifically for the exhibition.
** Something eerie transpires between the fiction and the reality of our times – think protocols, crises and meltdowns; causes without effects and effects without causes.
On typography
WKMP
Wednesday 20 February 2008
7pm
A talk by WKMP (Anders Bergman, Martin Bergström, Terje Östling), a Malmö based design collaborative from the fields of art, advertisement and graphic design.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Appunti per un’Orestiade africana
by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Introduction by Oskar Hallberg
Thursday 11 February 2016
7pm
Appunti per un’Orestiade africana / Notes for an African Orestes (1970), 71min
A film about an idea for a film never made: Pasolini journeys to post-colonial Africa to develop a film version of Aeschylus’ masterwork, The Oresteia. While his camera searches out potential locations, Pasolini on the soundtrack offers his ideas about the play as well as provocative observations about the continent. Different casting ideas emerge: Can a beautiful Masai warrior play Agamemnon, if the part of Orestes goes to a Western-dressed university student from Tanzania? Chorus members are drawn from the farmers, small merchants and beggars the director meets at markets. The background of impending violence in Aeschylus is evoked with images of the then-raging struggle in Biafra. Gradually, Pasolini conjures up his contemporary African Oresteia by finding the essence of Aeschylus’ dark vision in the world his camera discovers.
Oskar’s Gold Nuggets is an ongoing series of film screenings where our neighbor and cineaste Oskar Hallberg from Cinema Panora presents a film in dialogue with the current exhibition on view.
!?
Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Fia Backström, Andrea Geyer, Sharon Hayes, Fia-Stina Sandlund, Johan Tirén
29 October–12 December 2010
Opening Friday 29 October 7-9pm
Sweden has now an openly xenophobic party in parliament.
A party more than 300 000 people voted for.
A party that has kicked out the uniformed, put on a suit and a confiding look, gained the votes of dissatisfaction and pointed out a group of obvious scapegoats as the reason behind all social problems. Their former slogan “Keep Sweden Swedish” has become “Let Sweden remain Sweden”.
In Malmö, everyone who is not blond and blue eyed runs the risk of getting shot by a madman who in the press goes by the name Laserman II.
An exclamation mark and a question mark !?
We are now a step closer to the rest of Europe.
Hermann Scherchen: alles hörbar machen. An introduction.
Luca Frei
Wednesday 3 February 2016
7pm
Luca Frei will give an introduction to his long-term project about German conductor Hermann Scherchen (1891-1966) and his pioneering research in electroacoustics in Gravesano, Switzerland. Frei will discuss his role in the project as visual artist, researcher, archivist, and grandson of Hermann Scherchen, and contextualise it in relation to previous works such as his English interpretation of the book La soi-disant utopie du centre Beaubourg, written by Swiss sociologist Albert Meister, as well as his sculptural installations that reflect ways to encourage free learning and emancipatory practices.
Luca Frei, born 1976 in Lugano, Switzerland, studied in Lugano, Edinburgh, New Haven and Malmö. He lives and works in Malmö, Sweden.
The talk will be held in English.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Pier Paolo Pasolini. The sacred body
Lars Gustaf Andersson
Thursday 24 November 2016
7pm
In November last year, a dismal jubilee was celebrated; the 40th anniversary of the murder of the Italian filmmaker and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Setting out from Ilias Papailiakis’ Studies on Pasolini’s portrait, 2015, a presentation of Pasolini is unfolded by Lars Gustaf Andersson, who in 1992 published The Children of Angels, a study on Pasolini’s filmmaking. The universe of Pasolini – his art and his political position – is based on the idea of the material and bodily language as a shield against the consumerism and conformism that during the post-war era succeeded in implementing the fascist homogenisation of the human being that Mussolini failed to accomplish. Pasolini spoke of the new fascism as “The Power without a Face” and against this he juxtaposed the real faces of real humans. With Papailiakis’ pencil portrait of the murdered Pasolini, another face is added to this row.
The talk will be held in Swedish.
Water hollows stone
Pauline Oliveros, Ilias Papailiakis
20 November 2015–14 February 2016
Opening Friday 20 November 7-9pm
Listening is the foundation of social relations, of politics and of negotiations. It is the foundation for an articulation of opposition, the basis for protest and affirmation. A lack thereof nurtures conflicts, creates borders – the Us and Them.
Pauline Oliveros is a composer, artist, musician, educator and deep listener. Her practice spans 50 years of boundary dissolving music making, research and education. She is a prominent figure in the world of contemporary music and describes her life practice of Deep Listening as listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear, no matter what you are doing. This sonic sensibility is based on a synthesis of the psychology of consciousness, the physiology of the martial arts, and the sociology of the feminist movement. Understanding and performing such a listening is always a two-way processing of information – focal attention and global attention.
Seeing is the practice of the witness. It is what defines and distinguishes. Seeing is the foundation of differentiation, of discipline, but also of desire. For some, seeing is believing, the foundation of truth; others close their eyes to what is.
Through painting, Ilias Papailiakis takes on the task of identifying and archiving images. He zooms in on carefully selected details and lets the close study reveal the depiction of a merciless society marked by cruel battles in eternal repetition. In The Book of Silence, the attention is turned towards the notion of loss. What is left is a situation of vacuum, beyond the capacity of speech. It is the veil of silence that does not retreat. Political and religious conflicts, acts of intimate and domestic violence, the spatial boundary of a relief, and the attempt to render eternity and remembrance to a cruel assassination are all negotiations on the traumas that are reflected in the historical and contemporary monstrosities of human kind. What is the meaning of loss in an era of great silence?
The act of listening is about slowing down; the act of seeing is about paying attention. Two distinct artistic practices are juxtaposed, the audible and visual sensitivities of each practice are put to the forefront. The one enhances the other in this specific relationship, in this particular dialogue. It is about receiving and digesting, rather than delivering or declaring – a sensitivity, a tuning in on details. It is about thinking and understanding. It is about formulating an argument and articulating it. Listening is the beginning of the possibility to change, and seeing embraces the act of acknowledgement. Persistence is the strongest force of opposition, and water hollows stone.
Pauline Oliveros, b. 1932, lives and works in Kingston, New York.
Ilias Papailiakis, b. 1970, lives and works in Athens.
Pauline Oliveros, The world of possibilities is sound. Recorded in October 2015.
Listening questions published in Deep Listening: A composer’s Sound Practice, 2005.
Then and now. We and them.
Christina Zetterlund
Tuesday 27 October 2015
7pm
In conjunction with Allison Smith’s exhibition The Fort, Christina Zetterlund will talk about history never being neutral from the point of arts and crafts. In a time when certain forces wish to turn back the clock by invoking cultural, national and economic arguments of dubious nature, the ghost of history is ever more present and shows that there is an intimate connection between the now and then in the making of contemporary as well as historical subjects.
Christina Zetterlund is Professor at the Department of Design, Crafts and Arts at Konstfack.
The talk will be held in Swedish.
On Galleriet Läderfabriken and Galleri Lång
Presentation och talk with Marianne Andersson, Åsa Maria Bengtsson and Christina Lång
Tuesday 1 December 2009
7pm
On The Living Art Museum
Karlotta Blöndal and Gunnar Már Pétursson
Thursday 26 November 2009
7pm
The Living Art Museum was founded by a group of twenty artists in 1978 and was the first non-profit artist-run organization in Iceland. This reputation was founded upon the commitment to the presentation of innovative work by Icelandic and international artists. The very distinctive character and history of Nylo have cemented it’s reputation as a unique place to produce and experience contemporary art.
Through the last 30 years it has stayed true to its original goals; to create a platform for progressive exhibitions and critical discussions on experimental art practice. The museum has given equal weight to work by international and Icelandic artists. The Living Art Museum’s collection holds today more than 1000 works, all donated by artists that have been a part of Nylo’s history. Traditionally, artists that have exhibited in Nylo have donated works to the collection, which means that over the past 30 years the museum has acquired an eclectic collection of works by both international and Icelandic artists. The Museum also holds a vast collection of artist books and prints, as well as documents that speak to the context and history of the works in the collection.
Gunnar Már Pétursson and Karlotta Blöndal, artists and board members of the museum, will give a talk on The Living Art Museum as an artists run initiative for over 30 years and its presence and impact on Icelandic art scene, the predicament of being an artist run initiative and an establishment, responsibilities, past glory and future dreams.
Gunnar Már Pétursson and Karlotta Blöndal’s stay in Malmö is part of a residency project organized by SparwasserHQ (Berlin) – Signal (Malmö) – UKS (Oslo) – rum46 (Århus) and supported by Nordic Culture Point.
The talk will be held in English.
On CO Hultén
Lecture by Thomas Millroth
Wednesday 18 November 2009
7pm
Book launch
A Parallel History – The Independent Art Arenas of Skåne 1968–2008
Presentation, talk and djs
Thursday 24 September 2009
7-11pm
7–8 pm: Presentation of the book and discussion with the authors
8–11 pm: Party and DJs Gert-Olle Göransson/Galleri Ping-Pong and Peter Thulin/Musik&Konst
Place: Monbijougatan 17 H, 2nd floor
The publication A Parallel History – The Independent Art Arenas of Skåne 1968–2008 is a unique survey of Skåne’s independent art scene of the last 40 years. The book’s exhaustive timeline and specially commissioned essays relate the history of the independent art scene with focus on the variegated array of initiatives and exhibition spaces that have shaped the development of a vibrant art scene.Titel: A Parallel History – The Independent Art Arenas of Skåne 1968-2008
Editors: Carl Lindh, Emma Reichert, Elena Tzotzi
Published by: Signal- Center for Contemporary Art. Publishing year 2009
Texts by: Kim Einarsson, Leif Eriksson, Carl Lindh, Annelie Nilsson, Emma Reichert, Carolina Söderholm, Elena Tzotzi, Terje Östling
Design: Matilda Plöjel
Pages: 240
Language: Swedish/English
ISBN: 978-91-633-3923-3
Price: 300 SEK
Malmö Gallery Night: book, film & djs
Saturday 26 September 2009
6pm-midnight
During Malmö Gallery Night the book A Parallel History – The Independent Art Arenas of Skåne 1968–2008 will be presented, and a selection of archive and private films from Mitt Hjärtas Malmö [Malmö in my Heart] will be screened in collaboration with the film production company Auto Images. The presentations will take place in a festive atmosphere accompanied by music from the last 40 years.
DJs: Martin Theander/Auto Images, Per&Pam, revK.
Manipulation!
MFK – Malmö Fria Kvinnouniversitet
1-31 May 2009
Exhibitions, workshops, performances, lectures, film screenings, discussions and a school of manipulation (watch out!) curated by MFK- Malmö Fria Kvinnouniversitet.
Expect Anything Fear Nothing
Video documentation: Expect Anything Fear Nothing - Seminar on the Scandinavian Situationism
Wednesday 15 April 2009
7pm
Screening of Expect Anything Fear Nothing, a seminar on the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia that was held in Copenhagen in March 2007. The Situationist movement was a cultural revolutionary movement that had its highest point of activity across Europe in the 1960s. With the Situationist belief in the idea of an avant-garde that was meant to break the ice for the revolution, the debates about the means of the revolutionary struggle were crucial. The French-Belgian fraction that continued as the Situationist International was sceptical about art as a means in the struggle against the Society of the Spectacle and concentrated their effort on analysing spectacular free market capitalism. Contrary to this, the German-Scandinavian fraction believed in direct action and wanted to realise the revolution here and now by setting free the creative forces of art in the everyday. The artists should take over the means of production and the city should be transformed into one great work of art without spectators. The German-Scandinavian fraction was more open and anarchist, and worked under several names – The 2. Situationist International and Situationist Bauhaus among others.
The parts of the seminar that will be screened at Signal have been specifically chosen because they highlight the activities of Drakabygget / Situationist Bauhaus, in the south of Sweden, and include speakers such as Gordon Fazakerley (UK/DK), visual artist and founding member of Drakabygget, Jacqueline de Jong (NL), visual artist and former member of the SI. Editor of the Situationist Times, six issues, 1962 – 1965, Lars Morell (DK), historian and author of Poesien breder sig. Jørgen Nash, Drakabygget og situationisterne. Involved with Drakkabygget in the 1980s.
The seminar was organised by Mikkel Bolt and Jakob Jakobsen and is screened at Signal in conjunction with our current research project on the non-institutional art initiatives in the south of Sweden during the period of 1968-2008.
The YES! Association
Wednesday 1 April 2009
7-9pm
The YES! Association welcomes you to an open meeting and presentation of its work, history and future.
The YES! Association was founded in 2005 through the participation in the exhibition “Art Feminism – strategies and effects in Sweden from the 1970’s until today”. For this occasion the association put together a legally binding contract (Equality Agreement) stating a promise of equality through allocation of quotas within the institutions. In the “Press Conference /Performance” the YES! Association offered the institutions to enter the agreement.
Since then the association has exhibited, done actions, lectured, written texts and debated. In September 2008 “Privilege Walk/Symposium – Feminist and intersectional aspects of contemporary art” was organised at Lilith Performance Studio. The association is currently collaborating with artist Kajsa Dahlberg and the artist run space Transmission in Glasgow.
The evening at Signal begins with the screening of a 40 minutes video documentation from the “Press Conference/Performance” at Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2005) and then artist Kajsa Dahlberg will present the collaborative project “The Name Of This Association Shall Be Transmission”.
The presentations will be held in Swedish, the video documentation has English subtitles. For more info: http://www.foreningenja.org/
Kristoffer Arvidsson
Wednesday 19 November 2008
7pm
In conjuction with our current research project on the non-institutional art initiaves in the south of Sweden during the period of 1968-2008, Signal has invited Kristoffer Arvidsson, researcher at Göteborg Museum of Art. The lecture will focus on the artscene of Gothenburg during the sixties and seventies departing from the Göteborg Museum of Art, Göteborgs Konsthall, the galleries, Valand School of Fine Arts and public art projects.
In Swedish.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
Magnus Bärtås
Screening and talk
Thursday 13 November 2008
7pm
!ÄR DU? och PUNKT – A text/and sound performance
Mathias Kristersson
Thursday 16 October 2008
7.30pm
Malmö Gallery Night 2015
Saturday 26 September 2015
6pm-midnight
On view is the exhibition The Fort by San Francisco based artist Allison Smith.
Please note that we will be closed during the day and remain closed on Sunday 27 September.
Concert by s-åj
Sven-Åke Johansson
Thursday 4 September
8pm
Sven-Åke Johansson is a musician, artist and composer based in Berlin since the late 60s and an important figure of the improvisational music scene in Europe. Johansson has collaborated with among others Peter Brötzmann, Sonic Youth, Blixa Bargeld and Martin Kippenberger. The visual part of his performances has always played an important role, especially in the concerts where he uses cucumbers, cardboard boxes and packages of butter to make music.
The concert is a collaboration between Signal – Contemporary Art Center and Galleri Ping-Pong and takes place during Full Pull 08.
Source Materiel
Allison Smith
Sunday 20 September 2015
5pm
Allison Smith reflects on her sources of inspiration and the different kinds of research that inform her work. Allison Smith lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, California. She is a tenured professor and Chair of the Sculpture Program at California College of the Arts.
Metod is an ongoing series of talks about working methods within the field of contemporary art and culture.
The Fort
Allison Smith
18 September–8 November 2015
Opening Friday 18 September 7-9pm
A sconce /skans in Swedish/ is a centuries-old term for a type of fortification assembled as a base for defense operations primarily in Northern Europe. Mostly signifying a covering or protection, sconce is an interesting word of many meanings including a kind of candlestick, a fine, and a scull. Founded on the idea that historical events gain meaning and relevance when performed live in an open-air, interactive setting, living history as a form of history-making “institution”, as well as a form of entertainment and tourism, parallels the rise of 20th Century modernism. The world’s first open-air living history museum was founded in Sweden in 1891. Its name: Skansen (The Fort).
Allison Smith’s work is carved from a fascination and investigation into the cultural phenomenon of historical reenactment. Combining sculpture, photography, textiles, and traditional craft, this new body of work sheds light on objects and spaces of historical reenactment as props and sets for the performance of fundamentalist nationalisms in Sweden and the U.S. While the apparent task of living history museums is to resuscitate the past by performing, as accurately as possible, everyday activities such as sewing, weaving, basket and rope making, metal- and woodworking, as well as the art of warfare, Allison Smith’s research-based projects question the underlying impulses – perverse, economic, and haunting – that drive history-in-the making as a form of knowing.
Exploring notions of gender, culture and authenticity through craft and performance and the connections of both to war, violence and the construction of national identity, she imbues a haunted symbolism to each object, image, act. The figure of the scarecrow is crossed with an antenna-like transmitter of signals and coded messages, the image of an overripe harvest feast is hoisted as a flag, and other allusions to the notion of the fort as a construction crafted to protect from unwanted intruders and ward off potential threats to resources. Following the logic of history as an active process, Allison Smith applies a conceptually haptic, material and textured dimension to her work that brings forward a reading of traditional craft as a carrier of multiple and complex messages. The military, the domestic, the problematic, and the political are all aspects that make up history, which in turn renders a simplistic interpretation of cultural heritage impossible. In Allison Smith’s material and thematic reenactments, positions that are built upon conservative narratives of history are set rocking.
In the midst of the rapid industrialization that would change the old rural Sweden forever, the founder of Skansen introduced the principle of performing the past for knowing ourselves in the present. Thus began the project to bring the traditional culture to life by exhibiting furnished houses and farmsteads, cultivated plots and gardens, literally inhabited by human beings and live animals. But how we go about knowing the past is never neutral. In a time when certain forces wish to turn back the clock by invoking cultural, national and economic arguments of dubious nature, the ghost of history is ever more present. The question is how we perform it.
Special thanks to Martin Israelsson/Njudung Snickerier, Magnus Thierfelder, Elizabeth Moran, Christina Linden, Eva Linér, Smith Koy Smith, Annika Enqvist and Marie Andersson, Mogens Christian Didrichsen, Johan Schuisky, Sandra Åberg/Skansen.
Sunshine Socialist Cinema
Sunday 14 June 2015
9pm and as soon as it gets dark
A film evening on images of Malmö and good energies. The programme sets out with an image from 1946 found in the jubilee publication of the textile factory Kürzel and an educational film on the future green jobs in creative Malmö. The films are projected directly onto the former industrial buildings in the courtyard of Signal.
Sunshine Socialist Cinema is an outdoor cinema powered by solar panels run by artists Kalle Brolin and Kristina Müntzing. This evening’s film programme has been compiled by Sunshine Socialist Cinema in collaboration with Signal and includes among others the video The Myth of the Many in the One (2012) by artists Kennedy Browne based on sampled biographies of visionary entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley; the anthropological film Makwayela (1977) by Jean Rouch and Jacques D’Arthuys depicting a dance performed every morning outside a bottle factory in postcolonial Mozambique and fanakalo, a secret language invented by miners in South Africa in order to communicate without being understood by their overseers; and the video Reconsidering The new Industrial Parks near Irvine, California by Lewis Baltz, 1974 (2009) by artist Mario Pfeifer depicting the industrial development in the area from the 1980′s till today.
Film programme:
Kennedy Browne: The Myth Of The Many In The One (2012), 19:07 min
Jean Rouch & Jacques D’Arthuys: Makwayela (1977), 17:21 min
Mario Pfeifer: Reconsidering The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California By Lewis Baltz, 1974
(2009), 12:56 min
Bonnie Camplin & Paulina Olowska: A (Like Akarova), 2006. 3:01 min
The Pilgrim City
Hans Carlsson
Wednesday 10 June 2015
7pm
A talk on forward/visionary and backward/reactionary movements in Malmö. In the essay From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity Zygmunt Bauman compares the pilgrim’s search for inner peace and enlightenment with the modern subject’s belief in a shapable future. Bauman’s thinking, together with reflections on the film Båten (The Boat) from 1962 by Jan Troell, that will be screened during the evening, are points of reference in a talk about Malmö, nostalgia, borders, picture windows and walking across bridges.
The talk will be held in Swedish.
Image: Eric Sigfrid Persson’s archive / Malmö stadsarkiv
Oskar Hallberg and Cindy Lee
Wednesday 4 May 2011
7pm
Ubu-Websday is a series of events where invited guests are asked to present a personal selection of material from one of the largest web-based archives, www.ubu.com. Our guests this evening are Oskar Hallberg, suspected of sometimes being musician, art historian, organizer, projectionist, et cetera and Cindy Lee who runs galleri KRETS together with Anna Granqvist. They will each introduce a programme of approx. 30-45 min offering an opportunity to discover the treasures of UbuWeb, and together with others.
The Blessing / Inauguration
Friday 22 May 2015
7.30pm−11pm
The Blessing will be an evening of good karma and happy spirit to celebrate our new home on Monbijougatan 17H, Malmö.
As in all rituals drums, tunes and various potions are important ingredients.
There will be drums.
A concert by To\To, 8pm
To\To is an imaginative search of repeated rhythmic, a theatrical drum set-up of unusual stubborn appearance.
To\To is a shimmering rhythmic challenge with the drum set as the main substance in a slowly phase-displacing and sophisticated primal energy outlet.
To\To is a double drum set played by both members while facing each other.
To\To is Tobias Kirstein and Toke Tietze.
There will be tunes.
The Polyphonic Host
A performance by Sandra Mujinga, 9pm
“(…)They’re born with their brains in their hands. Don’t you see, that makes them peaceful!
They’ve got to be, cos a creature like that would have to trust anyone it meets.”
-Donna (Doctor Who, season 4 episode 3, The Planet of The Ood)
There will be drinks.
Come and celebrate with us!
* A very big thank you to artist Magnus Thierfelder, architects Josef Lindh and Testbed Studio, and Ola Gustafsson/Elastic Gallery for helping us achieve the right feng shui in our new home.
** Our new space is on the first floor with no elevator, please call us in advance if stairs is an obstacle.
New space opening in spring 2015
New address on Monbijougatan 17H, SE 211 53 Malmö. More info soon!
And Before It Falls It Is Only Reasonable To Enjoy Life A Little
Rana Hamadeh
Thursday 19 February 2015
7pm at Mitt Möllan
This performance, developed under the umbrella of the Alien Encounters Project that Rana Hamadeh initiated in 2011, is an exhaustive deliberation on the notion and gesture of ‘falling’: falling as a form of legal apathy; falling as a choreographic gesture; and falling as a dynamic of virulence. In this performance, the artist leads a journey amidst the legal coding of the terms ‘falling ill’, ’immunity’ and ‘quarantine’, to outer-space and land-sea relations plotted through science fiction projections, geo-political territory formation and cross-border travel. Thinking through the conjunction of the legal and the spatial, Hamadeh plays out an intensive scrutiny of the shared lexicons of criminology, epidemiology and theater.
Rana Hamadeh is a performance and visual artist from Lebanon based in the Netherlands. Interested in a curatorial approach within her artistic practice, she works on long term discursive research projects that operate as umbrellas to growing series of performances, choreographic/cartographic works, installations as stage sets, and writing projects. Her work stems from an extended investigation into specific concepts and terms, treating the field of theory as fiction. Selected exhibitions include a.o. CCA Wattis Institute, EVA International, KIOSK (solo), 2014; Lyon Biennale, The Lisson Gallery, Beirut (Cairo), Witte de With, 2013; Townhouse Gallery, 2012; Van Abbemuseum, 2011; Beirut Art Center, 2010; The New Museum, 2009.
The rhetorical situation and the ontology of the text
or
A revelation (of an aspect of the metaphysical experience that can not be revealed in any other way)
Christina Ouzounidis
Wednesday 4 February 2015
7pm at Mitt Möllan
This talk is an attempt by Christina Ouzounidis to think about issues of artistic method, materiality and forms of appearance through her own practice; issues always present within an artistic practice, but addressed at times in relation to the emerging artistic research within academia.
Christina Ouzounidis is a playwright and director and participates in the exhibition A House of Several Stories at Signal with an excerpt from the radio drama Tid för Ekot. She recently released the book Spår av Antigone (Traces of Antigone), which has its first performance at Göteborgs Stadsteater this February.
Release of the report Inga undantag (No Exceptions)
Mikael Löfgren, Louise Andersson,
Jonas Ekeberg
Wednesday 28 January 2015
5−7pm at Malmö Konsthall
Signal – Center for Contemporary Art and Lunds konsthall arrange a release of the report No Exceptions. The Creation of Value in Small and Medium Sized Art Centers at Malmö Konsthall. The report is written by Mikael Löfgren and produced by Klister, a nationwide network for small and medium-sized contemporary art centers in Sweden.
In the report, Löfgren argues that the demand for measurability and immediate numbers that characterizes contemporary cultural discourse is not suitable for evaluating the work of smaller art institutions. Löfgren also argues that what primarily characterizes the work of these art centers is their ability to establish effective networks locally, regionally, nationally and globally, and that networking is not just a geographical phenomenon. The art centers connected to the network of Klister act as links between the public and cultural life, between education and research, and between the personal and the political.
Invited contributors to the evening are Mikael Löfgren, Louise Andersson (cultural policy expert at the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions) and Jonas Ekeberg (Editor of Kunstkritikk).
The event will be held in Swedish.
Book market
-1, Sailor Press, the bookshop at Signal
13−14 December 2014
11am−5pm at Mitt Möllan
It is time for the yearly Christmas market at Mitt Möllan. Signal will – on our temporary stay here – participate with a micro book market. Besides publications from specialised publishing houses such as In Edit Mode Press, Paraguay Press, Tankekraft and A.R.T. Press, already regulars in our bookshop, we have invited -1 and Sailor Press to present a selection of titles.
-1 (Copenhagen) is a new bookshop located in the recently inaugurated basement space at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art. Their activities include a bookshop and an archive with a focus on independent publishing strategies, nordic collaborations and the relationship between visual art and printed matter.
Sailor Press (Malmö) is run by the graphic designer Matilda Plöjel. Focusing on a close dialogue and collaboration with artists, the making of each publication explores the specific artistic practice in relation to the medium of printed matter. In addition, Sailor Press distributes books on design-, craft- and art theory.
Come and browse among artists’ books, publications and assorted printed matters!
A House of Several Stories
Nevin Aladag, Jumana Emil Abboud,
Hamza Halloubi, Anna Nordquist Andersson, Christina Ouzounidis
21 November 2014–22 February 2015
Opening Friday 21 November 7-9pm
We now know this:
That what is claimed with certainty rarely is what is claimed with
certainty. That what is claimed with certainty gladly argues
something else, something much more unstable, something which
cannot completely guarantee its own survival, its position, its existence.
– Tid för ekot, Christina Ouzounidis
During the 19th century, a city court judge and editor named Nils Herman Quiding (1808-1886) lived in a two-story house on Östergatan in Malmö. Quiding was, in many ways, a contradictory and ambiguous man – officially deeply rooted in the bourgeois sphere, unofficially occupied by imagining a different kind of society under the pseudonym Nils Nilsson Workman. He believed that only through the study of history and learning from previous mistakes could society be reconstructed. His goal was, among other things, to establish a small-scale, egalitarian society that opposed the centralized nation state and questioned the conventions of both marriage and social hierarchies. While Quiding’s ideas were radical and provocative, he formulated them as legal paragraphs formally impeccable.
A House of Several Stories accommodates the inherent complexities of being human and how we relate to the constructed frameworks and different opinions that seek to objectively summarize the world we live in and how we should act in it – in relation to each other. Beyond the current claims on what is right and what is wrong, is there at all space for ambiguous narratives that will shake the ground we stand on?
As a newspaper editor in Malmö, Quiding’s work was characterized by a strong belief in public discussion. It is the public discourse that forces regimes to reform and the importance of this fact cannot be stopped by those with power and privilege. Therefore, said Quiding, the editor’s role is extremely important and should not be reduced to that of a “minister of mirth” attracting readers with anecdotes. Publicity is the sun of the immaterial world, he continues, and expanding the scope of public discourse must therefore include everything that can be the object of human knowledge. The task is as clear as daylight: to illuminate the dark areas of society through the access to public discussion.
The information about Quiding is collected from the book Det okända landet. Tre studier om svenska utopister by Ronny Ambjörnsson.
Occult Geometry
Sunday 26 October 2014
3pm at Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Combining and transforming elements from Tao diagrams, the Japanese sport of precision walking and ideas on geometrical abstraction articulated in the work of artists Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, a group choreography with 20 dancers and movers will be performed in conjunction to the exhibition Occult Geometry. The performance is developed in collaboration between Dutch choreographer Marjolein Vogels and visual artist Jennifer Tee.
Inga undantag (No Exceptions)
A report about the conditions and challenges of small and medium-sized contemporary art centers in Sweden
Mikael Löfgren
Inga undantag (No Exceptions) is the title of a new report by Mikael Löfgren produced by Klister, a nationwide network for small and medium-sized contemporary art centers in Sweden. In the report, Löfgren argues that the demand for measurability and immediate numbers that characterizes contemporary cultural discourse is not suitable for evaluating the work of smaller art institutions. Löfgren also argues that what primarily characterizes the work of these art centers is their ability to establish effective networks locally, regionally, nationally and globally, and that networking is not just a geographical phenomenon. The art centers connected to the network of Klister act as links between the public and cultural life, between education and research, and between the personal and the political.
Members of Klister: Alingsås konsthall, Bildmuseet i Umeå, Borås Museum of Modern Art, Botkyrka Konsthall, Gävle Konstcentrum, Göteborgs konsthall, Kalmar konstmuseum, Konsthall C in Hökarängen, Konsthallen Bohusläns museum, Konsthallen i Haninge kulturhus, Kulturens Hus in Luleå, Lunds konsthall, MAN-Museum Anna Nordlander in Skellefteå, Marabouparken konsthall in Sundbyberg, Röda sten konsthall in Göteborg, Signal in Malmö, Skövde kulturhus, Tensta konsthall and Örebro konsthall.
If you’re interested in receiving a pdf of the report (in Swedish) please contact: info@signalsignal.org
Signal moves to temporary location in November 2014
In the summer of 2014 Signal left the space on Monbijougatan 15 and will now move into a temporary location at Mitt Möllan, Claesgatan 8, in Malmö presenting the exhibition A House of Several Stories (21 November 2014 – 22 February 2015).
Drakabygget och Galerie S:t Petri
Presentation and discussion with Carl Magnus och Marie Sjöberg Altemani
Thursday 12 November 2009
7pm
Carl Magnus introduces Drakabygget and Marie Sjöberg Altemani introduces Galerie S:t Petri in connection to the project Parallel History.
Tone Hansen
Thursday 22 October 2009
7pm
What is the function of public space today? What defines it? How do we maintain it? Through reforms like New Public Management the structure of society has changed and the power has taken new forms. To understand art’s changing role in the public space, we have to analyze the major structural changes and investigate how they also influence the art sphere. Tone Hansen will discuss the basic juridical terms Allemannsretten (the public right to access) and Allmenning (Common land) in Scandinavia in order to shed light on a specific and vulnerable regulation that defines use of both public and private ground. Hansen vil use examples from the development of the Fjord City of Bjørvika in Oslo, as well as private initiatives such as the Capital Action that has created a set of aesthetic rules for the inner city. She will also visually represent the transition from a state that organizes its duties in the administrative bodies to a state that also manages its interests through state-owned enterprises.
Tone Hansen is an artist and curator who is currently working at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, Norway. In 2003-2008 she was a research fellow at the National Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo, and chaired the Young Artists Society (uks) from 2001-2003. Projects include exhibitions and publications such as Megamonstermuseum; How to Imagine a Museum of Today?, the anthology The New Administration of Aesthetics (2007) and What Does Public Mean? Art as a Participant in the Public Arena (2007). Hansen has also organised a series of seminars and workshops such as A Framework for Contemporary Activism. Can Art Create A Public Sphere of its Own? and The New Administration of Aesthetics.
Tone Hansen’s stay in Malmö is part of a residency project organized by SparwasserHQ (Berlin) – Signal (Malmö) – UKS (Oslo) – rum46 (Århus) and supported by Nordic Culture Point.
Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.
Mikkel Bolt and Jakob Jakobsen
Lecture about the Scandinavian situationism, and screening of So ein Ding (1961), a film by Jørgen Nash, Albert Mertz and Gruppe Spur.
Sunday 26 April 2009
7pm
This evening’s talk will deal with the two Situationist Movements in Scandinavia focusing on the developments that took place in Odense in 1962 and in 1963 with the exhibitions Seven Rebels and Destruktion af RSG-6 staged by respectively Jørgen Nash / Jens Jørgen Thorsen and J. V. Martin. Mikkel Bolt and Jakob Jakobsen will also address the question of how to engage with the Situationist material today.
The evening will end with the screening of So ein ding muss Ich auch haben (1961), a film by Jørgen Nash, Albert Mertz and Gruppe Spur. This film was made in the urban settings of post-war Munich and has a loosely improvised narrative with various surreal effects. The film was financed by Asger Jorn, who also made the soundtrack together with Jean Dubuffet. In 1967 Jean Luc Godard wanted to use the film as a short film to be shown before the screening of La Chinoise, but as the Situationists did not like Godard and his films, Asger Jorn rejected this offer.
Mikkel Bolt is an art historian with a PhD on the Situationist International and Jakob Jakobsen is an artist and cofounder of Copenhagen Free University together with Henriette Heise. In 2007 Bolt and Jakobsen organised Expect Anything Fear Nothing, a seminar on the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia that was held in Copenhagen.
The talk will be held in English.
Ilya Lipkin
Sunday 25 January 2009
7pm
In conjunction with our current research project on the non-institutional art initiatives in the south of Sweden during the period of 1968-2008, Signal has invited the artist Ilya Lipkin to present a talk on vanguard art and politics in Northern Europe.
Using the history of the Situationist International, and particularly the split between the Scandinavian SI and the 1′IS as a point of departure, Ilya Lipkin will discuss the legacy of radical aesthetic and political movements in Scandinavia, while considering the possibilities for alternative institutions today. In light of the most recent global crisis of capital, there is an urgent need to re-examine the role and framework of cultural production, as well as its entanglement with the neo-liberal order, if we are to imagine new ways of structuring the relationship of art to larger social realities. A discussion will follow–all are encouraged to attend.
For this occasion a poster has been produced through a collaborative process between Ilya Lipkin and Jacqueline de Jong, editor and publisher of the Situationist Times between 1962 and 1967.
Ilya Lipkin’s stay in Malmö is part of a residency project organized by SparwasserHQ (Berlin) – Signal (Malmö) – UKS (Oslo) – rum46 (Århus) and supported by Nordic Culture Point.
Sonia Dermience
Thursday 4 February 2010
7 pm
Sonia Dermience (b. 1971) is a curator based in Brussels. In 2002 she founded Komplot, a curatorial collective concerned with nomadic creative practices, trends of specialization and the infiltration of private, public and institutional space. She has conducted extensive research into post ’68 collaborative art practices in her native country of Belgium; organizing seminars and making two documentary films with artist Kosten Koper as Catherine Vertige. This research is on-going with the production of a new film and other projects which deal with the collaborative context.
http://www.kmplt.be/
Sonia Dermience is in Malmö through Residency Far Away So Close and is curating the project Y The Black Issue at Ystads konstmuseum, February 6 – March 14 2010.
The evening will be held in English.
Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.
Dorothea Jendricke
Thursday 25 February 2010
7pm
Dorothea Jendricke (b. 1975) is a curator based in Berlin, Germany. She will take on the position of the director at Neuer Aachener Kunstverein – NAK in April 2010, as well as she is co-curating a performance event for June 2010 at the Witte de With, Rotterdam, in the context of Morality (together with Renske Jansen). In 2008-2009 she was assistant curator at the Portikus in Frankfurt and prior to this she worked for Berlin based gallery Esther Schipper and collaboratively organized Center, a project space with a program focused on performativity. She also (co)initiated and organized further projects in Berlin such as the interdisciplinary Schinkel Progressive Residency, the studio house Zentralbuero, and other. Dorothea Jendricke is a contributor to among others Flash Art and Artforum.
She currently resides in Malmö invited by Residency Far Away So Close and is curating the project Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line presenting works by John Baldessari (USA), Simon Denny (NZ), Mario Garcia Torres (MEX), Thomas Kratz (D), Falke Pisano (NL), Ryan Siegan-Smith (UK), opening at Malmö Konsthall on March 3, 2010; on view through April 11.
The talk will be held in English.
FINE ART UNION
Tuesday 16 March 2010
7pm
FINE ART UNION will give a performative presentation at Signal.
FINE ART UNION was established in 2006 as an interdisciplinary and performative collaboration directed and produced by; Annette Stav Johanssen (NO) and Synnøve G. Wetten (NO).
FINE ART UNION investigates regimes of power, queer identities, future primitive theories and shock jock behavior – using satire, caricature and sadomasochistic play.
FINE ART UNION operates in public spaces, white cubes, black boxes, publications and on club stages as well as the World Wide Web.
FINE ART UNION has exhibited at Hannover Kunstverein/Crosskick Platform, Black Box Teater, Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Galleri 21, Wight Biennial 2008 and Wildness/Silverplatter, LA.
The evening will be held in English.
Samtal
We welcome you to the series of talks entitled Samtal (conversation) where artists working in Malmö are invited to discuss and reflect on their practice and their working process. With this series of talks we want to focus on the driving forces, sources of inspiration and references in order to share knowledge and talk about what we consider important and what makes us want to keep on working.
Anna Nordquist Andersson
Tuesday 23 March 2010
7pm
We welcome you to the series of talks entitled Samtal (conversation) where artists working in Malmö are invited to discuss and reflect on their practice and their working process. With this series of talks we want to focus on the driving forces, sources of inspiration and references in order to share knowledge and talk about what we consider important and what makes us want to keep on working.
Benjamin Thorel, castillo/corrales
Sunday 11 April 2010
5 pm
Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.
Mayo Thompson and the Red Krayola
Mikael Nordlander
Tuesday 11 May 2010
7pm
In conjuction with the exhibition Breaking Point: Kathryn Bigelow’s Life in Art that traces Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow’s presence in the art world in the 1970s in New York and her collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, Richard Serra, Sylvère Lotringer, the Red Krayola and others Signal has invited the music critic Mikael Nordlander to talk a bit about Mayo Thompson, the brain behind the Red Krayola. Departing from some ten songs he will present parts of a history that is still being written. From a psychedelic band in Houston in 1966, via a solo album and New York in the 1970s, to England and post-punk London in 1978 and on to today’s view of a musician that doesn’t seem to want to stop playing music.
On the aesthetics of editorial work and its potential as an artistic method
Frans Josef Petersson
Thursday 27 May 2010
7pm
In conjuction with the exhibition Breaking Point: Kathryn Bigelow’s Life in Art that traces Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow’s presence in the art world in the 1970s in New York and her collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, Richard Serra, Sylvère Lotringer and others, Signal invites you to an evening on the aesthetics of editorial work.
The editor is both worker and supervisor. At the same time subject to an assignment and to the task of supervising the entire production. The editor is an authority, a controlling instance, constantly undermining his own position. Constantly justifying his actions like a defendant towards a higher end. A vulnerable position with a tendency to act on the edge of total collapse.
Frans Josef Petersson (Aftonbladet, OEI) will talk about the aesthetics of editorial work and its potential as an artistic method.
The talk will be held in Swedish.
Andreas Kurtsson
Wednesday 9 June 2010
7pm
We welcome you to the series of talks entitled Samtal (conversation) where artists working in Malmö are invited to discuss and reflect on their practice and their working process. With this series of talks we want to focus on the driving forces, sources of inspiration and references in order to share knowledge and talk about what we consider important and what makes us want to keep on working.
Johan Tirén
Tuesday 14 December 2010
7pm
Johan Tirén will talk about his practice starting from the poster series Notes in connection with the celebration of a National Day, which is currently on view in the exhibition !? at Signal.
Metod is a series of lectures that focuses on working methods within the field of contemporary art- and culture.
The history of disco
Olof Olsson
Wednesday 27 January 2010
7pm
“I lost my heart to disco a few weeks after I’d become a teenager. It was a very cold night in January, 1979. I lived in a small town in Sweden, where there wasn’t much entertainment. I had a transistor radio, but there was a state monopoly on broadcasting, with only two hours of pop every week. That winter night, a bit past midnight, I discovered a local pirate station. And for the first time in my life I heard songs like ‘Le Freak’ and ‘In the Bush’. It was a completely overwhelming cultural experience.” Olof Olsson
Olof Olsson, artist based in Copenhagen, is on a European tour with his performance/lecture on the history of disco. Disco’s message of love was a politically charged one, demanding equality, freedom and fun for everyone. The next stop is Malmö and Signal – Center for Contemporary Art where Olof Olsson will play musical examples, and reflect on their role and relevance to the development and decline of the sound and social experience of disco.
Olsson lives in a one-room apartment in Copenhagen together with 6000 vinyl records – most of them disco. He has studied philosophy, languages and translation theory at Lund University, and art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In the 1980s he worked extensively as a pirate and community radio DJ.
The evening will be held in English.
With support from The Danish Arts Council.
Born in Flames (1983)
by Lizzie Borden
Tuesday 27 April 2010
7pm at Biograf Spegeln, Malmö
Tickets: 50 SEK
In conjuction with the exhibition Breaking Point: Kathryn Bigelow’s Life in Art Signal and IFEMA – International Female Film Festival Malmö organise a film screening of Lizzie Borden’s film Born in Flames (1983), where Kathryn Bigelow plays one of the parts. Ingela Brovik, film critic, will introduce the film.
“1983′s Born in Flames shows Lizzie Borden in full glory, a feminist filmmaker bursting with ideas and vision. The setting is the future, New York City 10 years after the Social Democratic War of Liberation. Technically, that makes Born in Flames science fiction. But the future depicted here is not one of laser guns and spacesuits. Borden’s American future looks remarkably like our present. Rape, day care, and discrimination are still unresolved issues in this new society. With sexual oppression the norm, women in this post-revolutionary world are still faced with the strategic decision of how to effect a social structure that is responsive to their needs and goals. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Born in Flames is a complex interweaving of characters, music, images, voices, editing, conflicts, and humor. It combines techniques of deconstructionist cinema and conventional narrative filmmaking and throws them together at a brisk pace that propels it all.” Marjorie Baumgarten
Conceptual Paradise: There is a place for sophistication (2006)
by Stefan Römer
Wednesday 19 May 2010
7pm
In conjuction with the exhibition Breaking Point: Kathryn Bigelow’s Life in Art that traces Academy Award winner Kathryn Bigelow’s presence in the art world in the 1970s in New York and her collaboration with Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, Richard Serra, Sylvère Lotringer and others Signal organises a film screening of Stefan Römer’s film “Conceptual Paradise: There Is a Place for Sophistication” (109:30 min).
The film essay traces out the debates that allowed the intellectual art movement of Conceptual art to emerge in the 1960s and led to some of the most relevant questions in art today. The artists speak about their own artistic practices and the socio-historical development of the various conceptual movements. In so doing, it becomes clear that there can be no one valid definition of conceptual art, since a permanent engagement also makes up its theoretical and philosophical complexity, including for example the question of whether there can be art without an object.
In these discussions, the fiction and ideal of art as political engagement are brought to life. The history of art is a history of struggles around strategies of representation. This makes this film about Conceptual art also a film about filmmaking. Stefan Römer reflects in numerous passages of the film with the well-known German filmmaker Hartmut Bitomsky about the documentary as a genre.
Artists: Vito Acconci, Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden), Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Hartmut Bitomsky, Mel Bochner, Gregg Bordowitz, Klaus vom Bruch, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Luis Camnitzer, Jan Dibbets, Mark Dion, Sam Durant, Valie EXPORT, Stano Filko, Andrea Fraser, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Renée Green, Shilpa Gupta, Hans Haacke, Július Koller, Joseph Kosuth, Sonia Khurana, David Lamelas, Sol LeWitt, Thomas Locher, Marcel Odenbach, Yoko Ono, John Miller, Adrian Piper, Yvonne Rainer, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula, Peter Weibel, Lawrence Weiner, Stephen Willats, Heimo Zobernig.
Curators/Theorists: Alexander Alberro, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, Charles Harrison (Art & Language), Geeta Kapoor, Geert Lovink, Seth Siegelaub, Gregor Stemmrich.
Music with roots in the aether – a portrait of Alvin Lucier (1976)
by Robert Ashley
Tuesday 7 September 2010
8pm
With an introduction by Frans Gillberg and Mathias Holmberg.
In connection with the opening of this year’s sound installation in Scaniaparken (Starfield Simulation #35), Signal – Centre for Contemporary Art, in collaboration with Music Doc, will screen Robert Ashley’s documentary on one of the pioneers of sound art, Alvin Lucier (b. 1931).
In his sound art, Lucier makes use of different scientific phenomena to create music where the composer is placed in the background and the physical and spacious aspects of sound itself become central. Music for a long thin wire and I am sitting in a room are two of his most well-known pieces, the latter being an attempt to erase his stammering speech by recording it, then playing back the recording into the room and re-recording it until the echo of the room replaces his voice.
The documentary is screened in conjunction with Alvin Lucier’s piece Sferics that will be performed by the Dutch artist Anne Wellmer in Scaniaparken. Sferics is a recording of electromagnetic disturbances, where their distance from earth is reflected in the character of the sound. The parabolic shape of Scaniaparken creates a kind of sci-fi-esque monitoring of information, a point of contact with outer space.
Anne Wellmer studied under Alvin Lucier and her sound installations, sound walks and radio art have been presented internationally in festivals and biennales such as New York Electronic Arts Festival, Happy New Ears in Kortrijk and Ars Electronica in Linz, where she also received an award of honour.
Scaniaparken, Sept 4 – Oct 3, 2010
A collaboration between Starfield Simulation, Signal – Center for Contemporary Art and Full Pull.
http://scaniaparkproject.blogspot.se/
Nordic Reputation in The World: A Passpartout
Jeuno JE Kim
Monday 29 November 2010
7pm
The lecture introduces the idea of self-branding and self-exotification to debates about identity politics and specifically formation of national identities. It investigates Nordic and Scandinavian representations of itself to the rest of the world, and what are prevailing ideas and discourses produced by others onto this region. The lecture examines how Scandinavia has branded itself since the Cold War, and how Scandinavian “specialness” and Nordic “exceptionalism” are challenged and altered since the post-Cold War period until now. A passepartout has two meanings, first as something that passes everywhere and second as a method of framing where a cutout cardboard is placed between the glass and the picture. The lecture asks how narrated histories and handling of historical documents determine the nation and its representation, and how points of comical tension and chance are strategies within an artistic research that can address issues of pertinence in our societies. Nordic Reputation in The World: A Passepartout is part of the collaborative project Everything for Everyone by artists Ewa Einhorn and Jeuno JE Kim.
The Mess and the Bless — Inside the Independent Art World
Tuesday 30 November 2010
7pm at Chisenhale Gallery, London
A conversation between Benjamin Thorel (castillo/corrales, Paris) and Elena Tzotzi (Signal, Malmö) on working methods, curatorial collaboration, cultural politics and stubborn visions.
Signal is a non-profit organisation founded in 1998 focusing on the production, presentation, discourse and diffusion of contemporary art and thought, run by a collective of artists and curators. Over the years, Signal has developed a central focus on exploring the possibilities of a collaborative curatorial practice and the manifold functions of an art arena.
castillo/corrales is a shared office space and collectively-run gallery initiated early 2007 by a group of artists, curators, critics and writers.
We are the good ones: The public debate on the Swedish Democrats and their politics
Anders Hellström
Friday 3 December 2010
6pm
In his book We are the good ones, political scientist Anders Hellström examines the role of the Swedish Democrats in swedish politics and public debate, and puts them in relation to the currents of populism and xenophobia in the rest of Europe.
Malmoe Free University for Women (MFK)
Wednesday 6 April 2011
7pm
“When we proclaimed Malmö Free University for Women (MFK) in 2006, it was done with a promise to fight for room for political action at a specific time, in a specific place. Six years later, we are standing here with a decision to end MFK, but to transform all the theory and practice into a collective mode of action. We have collected our knowledge and experiences in a manual - Do the Right Thing” – MFK
MFK will use their book “Do the Right Thing – en handbok från MFK” as a starting point to discuss working methods and strategies for their practice in dialogue with the audience.