After joining the 1st of May manifestation at Kungsträgården, I went out to take a walk at the sunny side of the city. The park’s cafe was full of people that got the same goddamned idea as me and swarmed like pigeons while the Sven-Harrys Museum pointed Carl Fredrik Reutersward’s knotted cannon gun at us. Prepubescent kids competed in a wheelbarrow game guarded by a hooded tutor on his 40’s. On the grass, yellow and green patches gave one a hint that spring was still too early. I swore this year I would celebrate my birthday. Sometimes I buy things so that nobody gets it by Cajsa von Zeipel – a fabulous white sculpture of a punk girl, her hair on micro braids, legs spread, horny on a Strindberg’s expressionist tempestuous sea painting. All happening in the museum’s yellow attic room, which impregnated the situation with a folky air of the collector’s house replica. At the yellow room the hyper-sexual, hyper-ventilated gathering of three teens took place, one of them looked out from the window as if she looked at us from a peasant’s past. These bored youngsters took pills and apricot liquor while their parents were away. In the other room, I find small tropical handicrafts more or less carefully placed at the bottom of a fake palm tree, sort of a naughty smile drew on my face caused by that Eurocentric pseudo-colonial gaze at this Maori figure matched with a parrot, both provably bought by the collector at a souvenir shop during a Caribbean cruise-trip. As its name puts it, Swedish Art: Now! is an exhibition aspiring to gather the upcoming glocal art, in a inclusionist gesture which could (if needed) have been easily sponsored by Volvo-Zlatan Ibrahimovich “made by Sweden.” It all sounds to me way too ridiculous like saying “Swedish Mathematics” or “Swedish Science” (as Juan Castillo would exclaim). But … hold your horses, and here’s also the trap, to think and say “Swedish Art” after a number of members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Art attacked and openly criticized foreign academics of the Royal Institute of Art, particularly its former rector Marta Kuzma (now dean of Yale University ¡take that!) makes my stomach churn and reminds me of several students’ stomachs who prefer taking an exchange to Vienna over staying in Stockholm.

Let’s put it in a different way, if we take a definition of nationality as the legal relationship between a person and a state, we talk about the negotiations that an individual partakes in from the moment of his birth within a given state.

So, I find it definitely more appealing to look upon a constant negotiation process that an individual takes, than ‘surname-ing’ an art production in bunches such as: nationality, gender, age, ethnicity as they often do at poorly thought-through art-fair-like exhibitions. I was thinking about these on the train to another show located a bit away, by a shopping mall, in a place far less glamorous than the previous show. I entered Coming Into Being at Rymd Konstrum to hear “The goal is not to win, but having an entertaining time with your fellow partners” which opened Pella Kågerman’s video Stormarkstiden (Imperial Times) where a series of characters, in a fragrant and green Swedish summer, engage in a roleplaying game of Swedish Empire (1629-1721). The players are constantly confronting contemporaneity while “doing like” or “being in character” on varying degrees of expertise and amateurism, making me think of our peculiar Swedish attitude of behaving like individuals whom, although, surrounded by the latest technology and comfort, and even after becoming Newly Rich on the last century we still do transmit that peasant air, that not-knowing-how-to-be-bossy like people from former imperial countries such as England, France and Spain.

Something that might be fixed by following TheBritishAreCumming makeup tutorial by Paul DC Kindersley who shows us how “to achieve that – Margaret Thatcher – dominant look.” Later, I encounter two sweet girls: one a PhD in Mathematics, the other a happy owner of cat’s coffee chain a la Japonais. I was told they met in a pizza place because of an accident the waitress made. Kristina Jovanović & Sandra Stojanović (yeah I know, sounds like a kick-ass Slavic female tennis duo) are #identical a project and video of the same name where both on a white cube are interrogated by a middle-age male off-screen voice with whom they get involved in kind of conceptual three-way definition quiz-game of contrasts. Two munches of an apple. A photo of them and several of their lookalikes under a neon sign reminds me that, to some peoples eye’s we blondes all look the same.

Following the trace, artist Pilvi Takala’s performance Real Snow White takes a step further into the entertainment field where she confronts fantasy and hard-dry legal facts.

I think “I’m very glad to be here” and it is not me who says it, but the voice of Carla Garlaschi, her English pronunciation hints to a mixture of Hispanic and Scandinavian accents. She’s taken a whole corner installing How to be Someone. On a black wall a rainbow colored Pyramid of Needs pops up reminding me of a highly desirable Lucifer Rising’s jacket I once saw online and never bought. The artist publishes the third edition of her Dale Carnegie style self-help manual for reaching success in the art scene, a strategy of autonomous Machiavellian seductive restlessness. As a proof, the videos of her appearances on TV are on display. The artist, a lonesome star, walks in exclusive areas wearing cocktail clothing.

I keep hearing voices: Our Names by Siri Landgren, is a project where anyone who identifies as transgender can contribute. The audio is an intimate compilation of recorded names pronounced by the name holders. Siri explained that these names are online for any transgender to exist at every time, even if when they don’t dare to.

 

I take a break. Then I continue.

 Birth Series by Lundahl & Seitl makes me slide into an abyss, perhaps because I skipped lunch. I let myself be seduced and I end up lost in a game. I wasn’t me for a couple of minutes, but I somehow saw my other reflection on a TV screen when it went to black. I step out of the experience. I’m walking though the hall with a strange sense of déjà vu … I was covering the show, but I could see inside another person by then. For a moment I was not Swedish, I was not a man, neither did I write. I was only in the landscape and I preferred to refer to geography and nature. The landscape was a sturdy horse[1] and its manes became the blue-green pines of a nativist delirium. Beasts surrounded this city, where these works I saw were moving. In a second, I was beyond a Postfordist cacophony, beyond all regulations of public and private spaces, beyond the ventilation pipe structure to our contemporary cathedral’s life[2]. I was another inside a white cube.

[1] Kurzio Malaparte, Kaputt.

[2] Rem Koolhaas, Junk Space.

The exhibition is curated by Jovana Nedeljkovic, Frida Gustafsson, Daphne Carolus, Christoffer Reichenberg, Anna Baca & Alina Abdullayeva.