IASPIS Open Studios Spring 2025
Schedule
Tue Apr 08 2025 at 01:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC+02:00Location
Maria Skolgata 83, Stockholm | Stockholm, ST
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8 April 2025 | 1–8 PM, IASPIS/Konstnärsnämnden,Maria Skolgata 83, Stockholm
Welcome to IASPIS Open Studios Spring 2025
For one day only, the doors to IASPIS at Maria Skolgata 83 open wide to the public. Artists, architects, and choreographers currently in residence invite you into their studios for a day of dialogue, process, and shared inquiry. Across IASPIS, spatial experiments, moving images, embodied languages, and sonic landscapes unfold—offering glimpses into how stories take form through material, place, and relations.
Throughout the day, residents host conversations, performances, and screenings together with invited guests: artists Johanna Billing and Jens Fänge, architect Sara Brolund de Carvalho, curators Ulrika Flink, Hendrik Folkerts, and Joanna Sandell, writer Tova Gerge, and researcher Elof Hellström. The day also features a sign language poetry performance by Amina Ouahid. Stay and connect with the practices and the questions and urgencies shaping them.
Artists
Dilşad Aladağ (Turkey/Germany), Patricia Bentancur (Uruguay), Carin Blücher (Sweden), Rebecka Hansson (Sweden), Jamie Hignett (UK), Michelle Jean de Castro (Sweden), Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson (Sweden), Caroline Ricca Lee (Brazil), Khairullah Rahim (Singapore) and Munish Wadhia (UK/Sweden).
Programme
1 PM Doors Open
1–6 PM Screening Programme with video works by Khairullah Rahim, Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson
Drop in throughout the day, Total program loop duration: 54 min (The Project Room)
1-6 PM On the Edge of Becoming: The Space Between Listening and Moving
Immersive installation by choreographer Rebecka Hansson (Dance Studio)
How does it feel to sense an impulse and act on it? Rebecka Hansson welcomes you into her ongoing research, where a room with simple prompts awakens the body’s curiosity and hesitation, desire and resistance. By exploring the threshold between play and vulnerability, the space offers an invitation to practice being in contact with oneself – and perhaps also with others.
1:10 PM Official Opening Welcome address by Mika Romanus, Director General, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee (Foyer)
Conversations & Performances
1:30 PM If Rivers Could Weave Back: Speculative Ecologies & Nomadic Histories – on Land use and landscaping patterns in Anatolia and beyond
Performative tour by Dilşad Aladağ in conversation with Magnus Ericson (Studio 1)
Architect and researcher Dilşad Aladağ traces the entangled histories of land laws, migration, and environmental transformations in Çukurova in southern Anatolia, drawing connections to stories of landscapes in the North. Through speculative storytelling and archival and material research, she explores how water bodies, vegetation, and pastoralist movements shape—and are shaped by—cultural and political structures.
2 PM Fragments, Territories, and the Power of Perspective
Patricia Bentancur – Screening in Studio, short introduction at 2 PM (Studio 6)
Patricia Bentancur presents a selection of video works as part of an ongoing artistic inquiry into the symbolic, political, and affective dimensions of territory. Working with film archives, voice, text, and image, Bentancur assembles poetic constellations that challenge the boundaries between personal and collective memory, visibility and absence. Bentancur’s practice questions geographic epistemologies and the segmentation of planetary struggles, inviting viewers into a space where images become fragments of a wider archive—one that unfolds across distance, precariousness, and shared imaginaries.
2:15 PM “mulher de rua”, shouldn’t you be building a home?
Michelle Jean de Castro in conversation with Sara Brolund de Carvalho (Studio 8)
“Growing up in Brazil, it’s common to hear someone say: But you don’t want to be a ‘mulher de rua,’ right? (‘woman of the street’). This phrase is frequently directed at girls and women as a form of social control, implying they should avoid behaviors deemed inappropriate or that challenge the norms of domesticity.
…I do want to be a mulher de rua…
What initially seemed like a fight to occupy the streets gradually turned into complete outrage against the concepts and ideas associated with home. Maybe both are part of my attempt to understand where I could exist.”
In conversation with architect and researcher Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Michelle Jean de Castro reflects on architecture, gender, and the unstable notion of “home” as both site and symbol—asking how spatial imaginaries can hold complexity, dissent, and autonomy.
2:45 PM Landscapes of Privatization and Resistance
Jamie Hignett in conversation with Elof Hellström (Foyer)
How do collective spaces resist the processes of urban erasure? Jamie Hignett maps the socio-political restructuring of cities through self-initiated infrastructures, such as Folkets hus in Sweden, and the transformation of working-class neighborhoods in the UK. Through research and conversation, he examines how privatization and redevelopment displace communities, while self-organized spaces offer counter-narratives and alternative futures.
3:15 PM The Roles We Play: Exploring Participation in Art
Rebecka Hansson in conversation with Tova Gerge (Dance Studio)
Writer and dramaturge Tova Gerge together with choreographer Rebecka Hansson reflect on the dynamics of power in performance, role-play as a method, and how to hold space for both agency and fragility in participatory encounters.
3:45 PM Unstable grounds: Memory, Myth and Materiality
Munish Wadhia in conversation with Ulrika Flink (Foyer)
What might ancestorial memory look like? Munish Wadhia discusses material histories, displacement, and artistic processes that blur the boundary between personal and collective narratives. Wadhia’s practice draws on abstraction, pigment, and inherited forms to explore how memory lives in matter – and how myth and absence shape visual language.
4 PM The Staged Image: Painting, Space, and the Theatrics of Stillness
Carin Blücher in conversation with Jens Fänge (Studio 9)
How does painting interact with scenography, photography, and the body? Carin Blücher constructs atmospheric, staged compositions where human figures engage with spatial and painterly elements in a carefully choreographed tension between movement and stillness. In conversation with artist Jens Fänge, they will discuss the intersections of painting, scenography, and the theatricality of image-making.
4:30 PM Dynamo stipend Award Ceremony
Matts Leiderstam, Chairman introduces this year’s awardees: Jonelle Twum for Black Archives Sweden and Sebastian Dahlqvist and Elof Hellström for Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus (Foyer)
5 PM Speaking with and through
Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson – sign language poetry performance by Amina Ouahid followed by a conversation with Johanna Billing (Studio 2)
Through sign language poetry and film, Keisu & Thuresson explore the limits and possibilities of linguistic visibility. In conversation with Johanna Billing, they will go through how minoritized languages and embodied storytelling become acts of agency and self-determined narratives in their practices.
With translation into and from Swedish sign language.
5:45 PM IN(to)visibility
Khairullah Rahim in conversation with Hendrik Folkerts (Studio 3)
How have visual traces of resilience manifested in materials throughout history? Rahim unpacks his use of synthetic surfaces, reflection, and queer aesthetics as strategies to navigate surveillance, visibility, and the assertion of identity and autonomy.
6:15 PM Unwritten, Unseen, Unforgotten
Caroline Ricca Lee in conversation with Joanna Sandell (Studio 4)
How can personal archives unsettle dominant histories? Caroline Ricca Lee draws from feminist methodologies, diasporic memory, and material storytelling to reclaim erased and fragmented narratives. The conversation will explore how embodied memory and everyday objects can confront institutional representations and offer alternative ways of remembering and knowing.
7–7:30 PM Frequencies of Freedom: Rave and Radical Assembly
The After Party by Jamie Hignett – (Project Room)
Through storytelling, sonic traces, and reflections from Pelican House in London, Jamie Hignett explores the importance of collective gatherings in developing alternative political imaginations. This session weaves together sound, image and narrative to reveal how spaces of collective release have tried to imagine new worlds and how throughout history they’ve been restructured from above to repress those desires.
6-8 PM Bar & Music (Foyer), Bread & Cheese (Kitchen)
All conversations are in English.
Guest Curator: Corina Oprea
Graphic design: Aron Kullander-Östling
Guests
Johanna Billing, Artist
Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Architect, Ph.D student and Lecturer School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Royal Institute of Technology
Ulrika Flink, Curator, Artistic Director of Konstfrämjandet Stockholm
Hendrik Folkerts, Head of Exhibitions and Curator of International Art, Moderna Museet
Jens Fänge, Artist
Tova Gerge, Writer, Performer and Project Manager
Elof Hellström, Co-Artistic Director, Hägerstensåsens medborgarhus and Adjunct Lecturer, The Royal Institute of Art
Amina Ouahid, Actress and Poet
Joanna Sandell, Director, Liljevalchs Konsthall
Screening Programme – Project Room
Total Duration: 54 minutes
Repeats on the hour: 1:00 PM / 2:00 PM / 3:00 PM / 4:00 PM / 5:00 PM
Khairullah Rahim
• Shapeshifter(s), 2022, 2:29 min
• Buah Dahsyat (Fantastic Fruits), 2022, 7:17 min
• Penjaga Hutan Batu (Guardian of the Concrete Jungle), 2024, 3:00 min
Karin Keisu & Josse Thuresson
• Back to Back (2024), 41:00 min
Each screening cycle begins at the top of the hour and runs continuously.
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Where is it happening?
Maria Skolgata 83, Stockholm, SwedenEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
