Fittja Pavilion
7 June–7 September 2014
Press & preview: 5–6 June, 12–6pm
Opening: 6 June, 6–11pm
Serra dei Giardini, 1254 Castello, Venice
Cini-Venier Naval Institute, 787 Castello, Venice
What role can an art institution play in our times? What can it become? As a way of launching the New Biennial of Art and Architecture, Botkyrka konsthall presents the Fittja Pavilion in Venice.
Can the Million Programme (the plan to build one million housing units during the years 1965–75 in Sweden) with its modernist grand-scale planning, and its weakly defined public spaces, be reevaluated? Can it even bring about another kind of contemporary art?
On 7 June, the Fittja Pavilion in Serra dei Giardini and in the Cini-Venier Naval Institute opens in conjunction with the 14th International Architecture Exhibition hosted by the Venice Biennale. The curator of the biennale, Rem Koolhaas, has called for a closer look at modernism (1914–2014) in the exhibition entitled Fundamentals. In the Fittja Pavilion participating architects and artists reevaluate the architecture and city planning of the 1960s and 1970s in Sweden.
In the exhibition the research from Fittja is presented in extensive artistic and architectural research projects, inspiring artists, architects and activists from Sweden, South Africa, Great Britain, the United States and Japan to work together. The Fittja Pavilion presents artistic productions and projects that have been preceded by an extensive time of context-specific research and collaborations in Fittja through Residence Botkyrka. A number of the works in the pavilion will become permanent public art works and public interventions in Fittja through the New Biennial for Art and Architecture in Botkyrka that will open in September. Many of the participants of the Fittja Pavilion have been inspired by the philosopher and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka in their thinking about how a new arts institution can be built through the element of chance and unexpected encounters.
On 13 September, Botkyrka konsthall inaugurates the New Biennial of Art and Architecture in Botkyrka. It is a way of researching how a new kind of art institution can grow from the specific qualities of northern Botkyrka, the modernist housing complexes that make up part of the southern suburbs of the greater Stockholm area.
Artists and architects
Johanna Billing (Sweden), DK-CM (UK/Portugal), Derek Gripper (South Africa) and Lindy Roy (South Africa/USA), Mako Ishizuka (Japan/Sweden), Junior Residence (Sweden), Kultivator (Sweden) and Stu Wright (South Africa), Tor Lindstrand and students from KTH School of Architecture (Sweden), Elena Mazzi (Italy), Lorenzo Nassimbeni (South Africa), OPENrestaurant (USA) and Ayhan Aydin (Sweden), Jelena Rundqvist and Aron Kullander-Östling (Sweden), Pia Sandström (Sweden), Spridd (Sweden), James Webb (South Africa), Karl-Jonas Winqvist (Sweden)
Open call
Labyrint Press is a series of exhibitions, an archive and a publishing house for artist’s books. For the Fittja Pavilion, Botkyrka konsthall is now initiating an open call for submissions of artist’s books, audio and video works, fragments and ideas around the question of the Labyrinth as an axe wheel for a new artist’s book library, adjustable for the ideas of rethinking and building a new art institution in Fittja, Sweden.
To participate, please send your work before September 1: Botkyrka konsthall, att: Labyrint Press, Botkyrka kommun, 147 85 Tumba, Sweden.
Digital text works can be sent directly as PDFs to publisher [at] labyrintpress.com.
For further information: www.labyrintpress.com
About Botkyrka Konsthall
Botkyrka konsthall has been running the context-specific residency programme Residence Botkyrka in the neighbourhood of Fittja since 2009. The new institution grows from the knowledge produced by artists, architects, thinkers and curators from within the residency programme, in close collaboration with the community of Fittja, whose inhabitants come from 161 nations around the world, and a rich cultural life consisting of many cultural associations and religious centres. Botkyrka konsthall in Fittja is an arts institution that is open to future practices of contemporary art and architecture; it is an institution that grows organically, that operates internationally through the local context and that produces new knowledge rather than representing the already existing.
Organisers:
Botkyrka konsthall
Support:
Iaspis
Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown
Botkyrkabyggen
Swedish Arts Council
Kulturbryggan
Holosonics
Isomorph Production
Collaborations:
Microclima project, Venice
Nordic Pavilion through the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design
KTH – School of Architecture
Serra dei Giardini
Cini-Venier Naval Institute
Second Eyes
