A Hole in the Real

When the state-owned mining company LKAB in Kiruna celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1965, an ambitious exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso was presented. Under the title Picasso in Kiruna, one hundred works were shown over nine days in Kiruna’s old town hall. Now, sixteen of the works from Moderna Museet’s collection are returning to the town, in parallel to Dora García’s work on both Picasso and the mining industry.

Picasso’s cubism, classicism, surrealism, and message of peace are part of the exhibition, in which García also links him to LKAB’s dual role as both educator and exploiter. From today’s vantage point, and taking the 1965 Picasso exhibition as her point of departure, she has created a new series of works. She is both fascinated and alarmed by the vast hole in Kiruna—an open pit that was in use until 1962—and she also finds in Picasso an artist who dared to take a stand against fascism. The exhibition’s title—A Hole in the Real—is borrowed from one of her works, which refers to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s idea of a point in existence where language and meaning collapse.

The 1965 project was a remarkable undertaking in art education and mediation. Picasso had never before exhibited north of the Arctic Circle, and the Swedish state’s ambition to make culture accessible throughout the country meant that even the far north became the site of large-scale art projects. What could have been more fitting than to pair the state-owned company—a symbol of modern society’s cutting edge—with an artist more closely associated than anyone else with the innovation and forward momentum of the modern project? The Nationalmuseum, Moderna Museet, the Norrbotten Museum, Kiruna Municipality, and LKAB joined forces for the Picasso exhibition, which was accompanied by an extensive educational program.

Sixty years later, perceptions of Picasso have shifted, but questions about the role of culture, the geography of power, and the possibilities of art remain just as urgent. Through García’s work, this exhibition becomes not only a springboard for reflecting on our shared future but also a way to shed light on a unique event in Swedish art history. 

Castles in the air: Interior farce with Bella Rune and Jonas Nobel
From November onwards, the artists Bella Rune and Jonas Nobel will develop the work Castles in the Air: Interior Farce for Kin. The starting point is the new town hall in new Kiruna, inaugurated in 2018 and the location of Kin, which has replaced the award-winning town hall from 1963, which was demolished in 2018 as part of the radical transformation of Kiruna due to the expansion of the iron ore mine, LKAB.  With its many doors, sight lines on different planes, and multiple functions, the new town hall is an apt setting for a physical farce. The artists will be in residence at Kin during October and November 2025.