Regnegotiations The Role of Public Art in the New Millenium (2025)

How It's Made: Behind the scenes of Public Art production at Public Art Agency Sweden

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CREATIVE PRACTICES IN CITIES AND LANDSCAPES, 2024

The paper aims at investigating what working structures and methodologies lie behind the implementation of artistic practices in urban spaces, through the case study of Public Art Agency Sweden, the leading institution dealing with public art projects in Sweden. Production processes of art in public space may often seem unclear and contorted, thus discouraging its inclusion in urban development and design projects. This problem is also stoked by a relative scarcity of scholarship regarding procedures and methods to develop public art projects: the present contribution constitutes a first attempt to start filling this gap, outlining both the bright and dark sides of Public Art Agency Sweden's model. This research has been carried out by the author during a six-months internship at the aforementioned governmental agency, where she did documental and bibliographic research in the agency's library and archive, interviewed staff members, participated in the agency's activities, and personally took part in the development of two artistic projects.

Planning With Art: Artistic Involvement Initiated by Public Authorities in Sweden

Urban Planning, 2022

In a Swedish context, public authorities have, over the past 10 years, implemented a number of initiatives to make art a central part of not only sustainable development but also urban planning as a practice, process, and knowledge area. Art and artistic methods are seen to contribute with new methods for site analyses (often in combination with citizen involvement) to enhance embodied and situated knowledge and give space to critical reflection. One of the Swedish initiatives is called Art Is Happening. Between 2016 and 2018, the Swedish government assigned the Public Art Agency Sweden money to work with public art and citizen inclusion in million program areas. The initiative was framed as using artistic methods to strengthen democracy in areas with low turnout. Fifteen places around the country were selected. In this article, the focus is on one of those projects in Karlskrona, where an artist collaborated with citizens to create a public artwork and local meeting place. During the process, the artist partly lived in the area. Rather than discussing the artistic project from a binary logic as disempowerment/empowerment, consensual/agonistic, and political/antipolitical, it is examined as a process involving a mixture of both, where power unfolded in ways that were both problematic and valuable at the same time. This approach moves away from "good or bad" to a nuanced way of discussing how artistic methods can contribute to understandings of situated knowledge production in urban planning. Keywords artistic involvement; Karlskrona; participation; planning; public authorities; Sweden Issue This article is part of the issue "Co-Creation and the City: Arts-Based Methods and Participatory Approaches in Urban Planning" edited by Juliet Carpenter (University of Oxford) and Christina Horvath (University of Bath).

OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space.pdf

OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space — laying the groundwork for OSLO BIENNIAL FIRST EDITION, 2018

OSLO PILOT — a project investigating the role of art in and for public space — laying the groundwork for OSLO BIENNIAL FIRST EDITION To make art in and for the public domain today is to engage with the precariousness that both defines and threatens our experience of it. OSLO PILOT (2015–17)—a project investigating the role of art in and for the public space—laying the groundwork for Oslo Biennial First Edition brings together 38 previously published texts spanning the past 80 years and 19 commissioned texts exploring art in public spaces and spheres. It also includes an edited transcript of the symposium, organized by OSLO PILOT in the fall of 2016, “The Giver, the Guest, and Ghost: The Presence of Art in Public Realms.” The publication embodies the idea of the city as a prerequisite and basis for work, and focuses on the conditions of public space as a field where many agencies, identities, and interests meet and are made visible.

75 Years - The Nordic Art Association´'s Swedish Section

75 Years - The Nordic Art Association´'s Swedish Section, 2020

Published on the occasion of the Nordic Art Association’s seventy-fifth anniversary, this publication is initiated and produced by the Swedish section, and traces some of the association’s activities over many years and across the entire region. The book is both an examination and a celebration of a visual arts organisation from the Nordic region that has aimed at creating collaborative networks between artists since 1945. It includes historical texts and new contributions by researchers and critically engages both with a newly retrieved archive and the Nordic art world at large. The Swedish association’s activities have in recent years primarily gravitated towards the programme of the Nordic Guest Studio. International guests and collaborators share their thoughts on the notion of ‘hospitality’ in the form of a guest book that was collected from CRIS, Curatorial Residency In Stockholm. Articles by Marta Edling, Jonas Ekberg, Maria Nordwall, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Björn Norberg (et al). Published by Arvinius+Orfues Publishing Graphic Design: Matilda Flodmark Editors: Camilla Larsson, Jonatan Habib Engqvist & Björn Norberg. ISBN 978-91-89270-06-0

Axelsson, B. (2014) The Poetics and Politics of the Swedish Model for Contemporary Collecting, Museum and Society, March 2014, vol 12. no.1.

Between 1977 and 2011 the Swedish organization Samdok presented a nationwide programme for contemporary museum collecting, including an increasingly flexible intellectual and methodological framework. This article considers Samdok, its evolving programmes and self-presentations. It suggests that Samdok's selfimage was one of inclusive progressiveness, social engagement and equality. It also suggests that they display four major rhetorical shifts: from an economic rationale to a social and cultural approach; from studies of a welfare state based on industrial production to fieldwork concerning the adaptation to a postindustrial economy; from modern to post-modern epistemologies; and finally from engineering collecting to networking collecting, connecting contemporary collecting in Sweden to a transnational professional community. It is suggested that the case of Samdok casts light on the ways in which museums negotiate managerial issues, professional values and needs for inspiration and friendship.

The Professorship of art and public space organizes a symposium on the transformations of the public realm and the possibilities for art and design to play a role there since the 1960s. Dutch policies regarding public space have a long history of ideas on the communal and educational potentials of visual art. Shifts in concepts and practices of public space as well as concepts of art have given this tradition new directions. During the last decades artworks have for instance been functioning as stimuli for the senses, as demarcations for specific places and spaces, and as agents for social change. This symposium focuses on the relation between art and the public domain in the post-industrial societies and more specifically on the transformations during the last 40 years.

The Heritage seminar at the University of Gothenburg

A Century of Swedish Gustavian Style : Art History, Cultural Heritage and Neoclassical Revivals from the 1890s to the 1990s

2017

This is a study of the intersection between art historical theory and practice, and cultural heritage, where the revivals and mediations of the neoclassical Gustavian style have been used as a plat ...

Art as Compact Knowledge - Art Public Zurich: A Research Project

Art as Compact Knowledge - Art Public Zurich: A Research Project, 2021

The publication presents an overview of the research project "Art Public Zurich" and also places it within a theoretical framework. After introducing the mission statement and the Organization Art in Public Space Zurich, developed in cooperation with the City of Zürich, the methodological approach will be described that underlies the project, namely, to determine factors that will open contextual fields of reference for public art, thereby strengthening its social relevance. One section of the contribution leads to the thesis that art in public space – similar to comparable phenomena in the sciences – can trigger a profound reevaluation of the concept of art. The closing section examines artistic research and its significance in our knowledge society. This booklet is an English-language supplement to the German publication "Kunst und Öffentlichkeit: Kritische Praxis der Kunst im Stadtraum Zürich," edited by Christoph Schenker and Michael Hiltbrunner (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2007). It includes the English version of the survey article "Kunst als dichtes Wissen: Das Forschungsprojekt Kunst Öffentlichkeit Zürich" (pp. 29–48) by Christoph Schenker. The booklet also reproduces four artworks that were completed only after the publication of the original German volume - public artworks by Harun Farocki, Zilla Leutenegger, Lawrence Weiner and Sislej Xhafa.

Collectively Annotated Bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art

Collectively Annotated Bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art , 2020

The Visible project (Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto/Fondazione Zegna) was commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden to conduct research on the relationship between theory and socially engaged artistic practices, and Collectively Annotated Bibliography: On Artistic Practices in the Expanded Field of Public Art is the result of such research. At the core of this Collectively Annotated Bibliography are the ten curators and researchers (Miguel A. López, LU Pey-Yi, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, Narawan Kyo Pathomvat, RAW Material Company, Shela Sheikh, Pelin Tan, Meenakshi Thirukode, Joanna Warsza, Vivian Ziherl) from diverse backgrounds and contexts who have been invited to suggest the titles that are most representative of the current debate on the present and future of art in the public domain. Each bibliographical note is supplied by one or more quotes – some in their original language – and links to the publishers or reviews to explore topics addressed in the suggested books in more detail.