Reshaping Boundaries: English

Reshaping Boundaries

As part of the project Curera, initiated by Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten, five students from the Master's Program in Curating Art at Stockholm University, recently developed a proposal for the relocation of Kiruna’s public art to the new city park. While the planning process is long, and while this park will only materialise at some undetermined point in the future, we neither want to, nor need to wait.

In this soon-to-be sculptural area, the future artistic heart of Kiruna, a site-specific manifestation will prime the space for what is yet to come, breathing life into a construction site destined to be Kiruna’s new city park. The event will not merely mark the physical movement of sculptures but will also symbolize the bridging of past and future as well as the intersection of art and nature, while fostering collective aspirations of unity and community.

Together with the artist Anna Zingmark (b.1990, Gällivare) we will explore the area where the future park is being built, tracing its contours, marking its boundaries and imagining its future possibilities. The manifestation aims to create a sense of collective ownership of Kiruna’s new city park as a space for art, and thus we invite you to actively participate in this ceremonial inauguration.

"When given the opportunity to work with Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten and partake in Curera, we were excited to be able to help relocate Kiruna’s historic public art collection to the new city center. Moving an entire city is a tremendous task, but what happens specifically to the memory and to the function of public art which might easily be overlooked? How can we find aid in finding new, meaningful placement for art with such established histories? Our working group is specifically interested in accessibility to art and thinking through meaningful ways in which art can heighten or alter our experiences of public space. Working closely with Kiruna Kommun, Konstfrämjandet and the landscape architects Outer Space, our proposal På Väg aims to capture the dialogues, playfulness and natural elements already present in the Kiruna art collection and carry that through in their new proposed placements. Wanting to visualize our proposal and contribute to the vision of what the future city park might look like, we invited Anna Zingmark to present an artwork in the intersection between workshop and performance. This one-day event ties together the themes that have permeated the project and activates the site of the park as a place for art through active participation before the park has come into being" – says Joel Albinsson, Hanna Mara Noor Bargheer, Jonas van Kappel, Victoria McCarthy and Linnea Wästfelt, curators for Reshaping boundaries.

Participating artist

Anna Zingmark (b. 1990, Gällivare), is interested in humanity's spiritual nature and the search for belonging. Zingmark holds a BFA from HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and an MFA from Umeå Konsthögskola.

Participating curators

Joel Albinsson is a Stockholm based curator whose work engages with the temporal and spatial qualities of sounding art, as well as with questions regarding democracy, urbanities, and the power over the city.

Hanna Mara Noor Bargheer is a curator working between Sweden and Germany. She aims to combine art and politics in her work, thinking about the ways in which we have meaningful and democratic access to culture and our cities.

Jonas van Kappel is a curator and art historian from the Netherlands, Amsterdam. His work centers around multisensory and associative art experiences, site specificity and audience perspectives by combining social issues with philosophical questions.

Victoria McCarthy is an Argentinian visual arts curator and producer specialised in contemporary art. She is currently looking into the intersection of art and lithium extraction, focusing on neoextractivism and the ‘green’ transition.

Linnea Wästfelt is a curator and artist based in Stockholm. She holds a degree in fine art photography from Glasgow school of art and is mainly focusing on audience participation and involving the local community in projects.

Cover image: Linnea Wästfelt

Documentation

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Reshaping boundaries is a part of the Curera project's collaboration programme Learnings.