Natascha Sadr Haghighian
: Fuel to the Fire / Babi Badalov: Partisanism / Halil Altındere: Homeland / Agnieszka Polska: The Wrong Side of Me

Fuel to the Fire by Natascha Sadr Haghighian
As part of The Eros Effect: Art, Solidarity Movements and the Struggle for Social Justice
Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s new large-scale installation featuring patio heaters, blankets, a full-scale balcony, and a newspaper raises topical issues like the militarization of the police, images as testimonies, and institutionalized racism and violence. Particularly highlighted in the exhibition is what happened in the Stockholm suburb of Husby in May 2013 when Lenine Relvas-Martins, a 69-year-old resident, was shot by Piketen police (SWAT police) in his own apartment. The police had claimed in their report that Relvas-Martins was injured during the incident and taken to a hospital. The images taken by neighbors and freelance journalist Björn Lockström proved that they tried to cover up Relvas-Martins’s death. The incident caused protests in Husby and resulted in a significant uprising in many major cities in Sweden.

Fuel to the Fire traces the Piketen police, the Swedish version of the SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) police, back to its beginnings in the United States. SWAT was founded in Los Angeles in the late 1960s after the Watts rebellion and was first used during a raid against the Black Panther Party of Self-Defense. The story of the emergence of the SWAT police proves the intimate relation between police militarization, social segregation, and institutional racism.

Partisanism by Babi Badalov
As part of Tensta Museum Continues
Language barriers, borders, and oppressive norms become visual poetry. Hand-drawn words like discrimiNATION, Rain-Car-Nation, Mona Khartoum, Musulman-Musulwoman, WHOMAN, Joseph Boys Joseph Girls, and 1001 Arabian nights, 1001 Arabian fights, are central to Babi Badalov’s (Lerik/St. Petersburg/Paris) installations. Sometimes written on textiles in different sizes which together create a pattern, sometimes written directly on the wall, the misspelled, fragmented, and assembled words are often combined with clipped images to form huge wall collages. Badalov’s visual poetry is characterized by different alphabets and personal fonts. At first sight, it appears playful, but a closer reading reveals language barriers, borders, nationalities, normality, queerness, and the dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. At Tensta konsthall, Badalov takes on the exhibition space in the reception area, allowing words and images to extend towards both the ceiling and the bookshop.

Homeland by Halil Altındere
As part of Tensta Museum Continues
“The home is lost. The home died. The home is behind me now.” In Halil Altındere’s video Homeland, the Syrian rapper Mohammed Abu Hajar takes us on a journey from a bombed Syria to Istanbul’s Basilica Cistern and on to the disused Tempelhof Airport, which now serves as a temporary refugee camp in Berlin. With a music video-like effect, we are thrown into a violent story about an ongoing war, where people are fleeing for their lives with the hope that Europe will open its borders. The fast tempo shifts, electronic soundtrack, and dramatic content are reminiscent of Hollywood film dramaturgy, but Homeland intersperses fiction with documentary. With a drone’s aggressive top-down perspective, the film examines “Fortress Europe’s” ruthless barbed wire fence.

The online platform Space presents The Wrong Side of Me by Agnieszka Polska. The slideshow begins with a crystal clear picture of the top part of a perfectly shaped champagne glass, filled with a liquid that shimmers in blue, purple, light yellow, and pink. It’s gasoline. But something is wrong—the surface is not horizontal but slopes downwards, as if there were no gravity. In a way, this is true, given how humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels has upset the laws of nature as we previously recognized them.

With support from Goethe-Institut Schweden and ABF Stockholm. The exhibition Fuel to the Fire is a part of the collaboration They Were, Those People, a Kind of Solution with WHW (Zagreb), eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (Vienna), and Centre for Peace Studies (CMS) (Zagreb). With support from the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.