Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden At Tensta konsthall and other venues Spring Department 18.01–18.05 2014 translate 1 Tensta Museum: Reports from New participants will also be looking forward Sweden and proposing future scenarios. At Tensta konsthall and other venues Tensta is an unusually multi-faceted Spring Department 18.01–18.05 2014 and complex place. Its most tangible feature is a large, late modernist housing Tensta Museum: Reports from New area built in 1967–72 as part of the Sweden is about history and memory in Million Programme. Nearly six thousand Tensta, both in relation to the place and to dwellings share space with iron-age graves, the people who live and work there. Some rune stones, one of the Stockholm region’s forty artists, architects, local associations, oldest churches from the 12th century, performers, sociologists, cultural a famous baroque chapel, and a former geographers, philosophers, and other military training area from the early practitioners address the past in artworks, 20th century which is now a protected research projects, seminars, and guided nature reserve. Around 19,000 people walks. And it is through this that they live in Tensta today, and roughly 90% simultaneously report on the condition have a trans- local background, many of Tensta today as a concrete image of from the Middle East and North Africa. what can be described as the New Sweden This means that the collective memory of — a Sweden that must be understood Tensta splits at numerous angles; it also very differently from how it was several means that tensions and conflicts erupt decades ago. This is a Sweden containing around questions of “whose history?” people of vastly different backgrounds, and “whose heritage?” Tensta Museum: where economic and social divides are Reports from New Sweden also touches intensifying. According to a new report upon the concept of cultural heritage and by the Organisation for Economic the complicated matter of how it is used in Cooperation and Development, of all Sweden and elsewhere in Europe today. of the 34 member states of the OECD, Just as the struggle for collective income gaps in Sweden are increasing memory can be liberating, it can also the most rapidly. In their contributions exclude certain people and even lead to Tensta Museum, some of the invited to war. A preoccupation with the past is fundamentally ambivalent. And yet about the purpose of cultural heritage it is impossible to deny the close bonds from a post-colonial perspective; Owe between a new “respect” for history – Ronström, professor of ethnology at both real and imaginary – and the sense the University College of Gotland, who of belonging, collective consciousness, discussed the cultural heritage situation in memory, and identity promised by Sweden; and Eszter Babarczy, associate shared memory. With the concept of professor at Moholy-Nagy University of “cultural heritage” as a thematic point of Art, Budapest, who discussed the cultural departure, Tensta Museum: Reports from strategies of the right wing in Hungary. New Sweden examines what it actually Tensta Museum: Reports from New means when the public debate concerning Sweden offers a richly contrasting memory and history is replaced by patchwork stretching across seven a preoccupation with memory and months in which manifold interests and “heritage.” expressions together form a narrative of This is also a question of what a new Sweden – its past, present and a happens when parties in general – and possible future. For this reason, Tensta the extreme right-wing in particular – konsthall is “playing museum” in order to claim rights of interpretation over the lend authority to a discussion of history, idea of national heritage. The symposium, and also to underline the need for stability Cultural Heritage: a treasure in search and continuity in the Tensta Konsthall of a value, addressed this question and Foundation. Since the gallery was founded took place at Tensta konsthall March in 1998 it has been run more as a project the 7th, 2013, in cooperation with than as an institution. Tensta Museum: Stockholm City Museum, as a part of Reports from New Sweden contains a Tensta Museum: Reports from New model of a 1969 brutalist pavilion in Sweden. The symposium was curated Newcastle which has been remixed by by the philosopher, Boris Buden from Thomas Elovsson and Peter Geschwind Zagreb and included Francoise Vergès, into something between a spacecraft and professor at the Center for Cultural a ruin, and moved to Tensta. A long- Studies, Goldsmiths College, who talked term collaboration on the politics of 2 Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden listening between the artist Petra Bauer nature reserve Järvafältet on the edge and the political scientist, Sofia Wiberg, of Tensta. Researchers at the Swedish in collaboration with, among others, Museum of Natural History have given the Tensta-Hjulsta Women’s Centre, is the Stone Loach a decisive role in city presented in the form of a room and a planning, and even inputting a stop to the series of acts. Here questions concerning exploitation of the Järva fields during the housing and housing conditions are 1990’s building boom. central; they comprise a red thread In cooperation with the Spånga Local running through several of the exhibition’s Heritage Society and the Local History projects. Society, a selection of photographs of During the autumn 2013, The Silent Tensta from their collection will be University, initiated by artist Ahmet presented. The photos were taken prior to Ögüt, was established in Stockholm. It the start of the so-called Million Dwelling is an alternative knowledge platform run Programme. by and for asylum-seekers, refugees and A mini-exhibition with art that reflects migrants without documents who have late modern housing areas confirms the degrees from their home countries but no great interest artists have shown in the opportunity to apply their knowledge in subject since the 1990s. On Wednesdays, Sweden. The project aims at reactivating open tours will be given of the “model this silenced knowledge, thereby exposing apartment” in Tensta, a museum situated a systematic failure to take advantage of in the middle of an ordinary block of flats. valuable knowledge and experience. A visit there entails time-travelling back The art collective Järva Project will to late 1960’s Tensta: the apartment is a present an aquarium and a video using reconstruction of the Artursson family’s documentary film methods to investigate dwelling as it was when they moved there the relationship between fauna and sub- in 1969 as one of the first families to live in urbs, nature and the built environment. the newly-built district. The work concerns a rare and protected Meron Mangasha and Senhay Berhe’s fish, the Stone Loach, which lives in the Blue Blood, a tribute to an underground overgrown stream running through the train in words and moving images, will be shown at www.tenstakonsthall.se/ Museum, where the artist Katarina space. Other projects will take place Lundgren presents a new work based on at, for example, the library in Tensta, Granholmstoppen on the Järva Field, and where during the spring it will be at the Museum of Medieval Stockholm possible for library card holders to where the artists Bernd Krauss and Nine borrow art. In conjunction with Ross Svensson show Tensta Horse Racing Tensta Gymnasium’s 30th anniversary Society. During the period 16.12. 2013 in 2014, four works from their historical – 6.2. 2014 Tensta Museum: Reports art collection will be shown as part of from New Sweden will take parts of the Tensta Museum: Reports from New exhibition to Galerija Nova in Zagreb, Sweden. Among the works is a sketch where they will be included in Beginning by Carl Larsson for a wall painting in as Well as We Can: How Much Fascism Norra Latin, one of Tensta gymnasium’s Can We Take, a collaboration between predecessors in Stockholm. During the Tensta konsthall, WHW Zagreb, and exhibition period, Tensta Library will Grazer Kustverein, Graz. Participants have a branch with children’s literature in Tensta Museum on the Move include and books on local history in the gallery. Petra Bauer, Thomas Elovsson & Peter Tensta Museum hosts a full programme Geschwind, Järva Project, Livstycket, that includes historical walks, seminars Meron Mangash & Senay Berhe and with people who experienced early Tensta Adam Taal. and on the large international – but now Four texts specially written for Tensta forgotten – housing conference that book Museum, which may be found at www. place in Tensta in 1989. There will also tenstakonsthall.se/bag, Historien om be a lecture by the cultural geographer Tensta konsthall (The Story of Tensta Irene Molina on the increasing ethnic konsthall) by Jan Ekman; Tensta – en plats and socioeconomic segregation visible in som ständigt ska bli batter (Tensta – A Tensta and in other Million Programme place that is constantly going to be better) areas. by Emma Holmqvist; Mamsell Josabeth Branches of Tensta Museum Sjöberg by Lawen Mohtadi and Kulturarv can be found at the Stockholm City (Cultural Heritage) by Boris Buden. translate 3 Tours of Stockholm City Museum’s seekers had all been denied asylum by the model apartment at Kämpingebacken, Dutch migration authorities on the basis on Wednesdays at 14.00 (meet at Tensta of analyses of their pronunciation. The konsthall). Introduction to Tensta controversial use of language analysis to Museum, Reports from New Sweden, on determine asylum-seekers’ background Thursdays and Saturdays, 14.00. has become more and more common in In cooperation with: ABF (Workers’ rejecting legitimate demands for asylum. Educational Association), Tensta These tests are relatively unknown outside Library, Ross Tensta Gymnasium of specialists inside the field and creating (upper secondary school), Stockholm a series of images and diagrams is a way City Museum, the Museum of Medieval of making them more publicly known.