Artists: Apparatus 22, Benedikte Bjerre, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Matti Sumari, Viktor Timofeev and MYCKET
Curator: Julia Björnberg
Chapters I–III, 2024-2026
The Spell of New is a curatorial experiment unfolding in Malmö’s historic Kungsparken—a park layered with centuries of memory, speculation, and regeneration. Artists and publics are invited to inhabit this transitional site as a living studio: a place where the museum-to-come can already be imagined, questioned, and enchanted.
At its core, The Spell of New transforms the site into a field laboratory of place-based inquiry. Here, the institution repositions itself not as a container of works, but as a collaborator in acts of situated learning—a curatorial pedagogy grounded in patience, locality, and dialogue.
Each chapter unfolds as both exhibition and rehearsal, tracing the park’s shifting meanings through site-specific installations, performative gestures, and collective gatherings. The project invites the public to consider the museum as an evolving ecosystem rather than a completed form.
The Spell of New is a long-term curatorial framework for thinking through institutional metamorphosis—how museums can remain porous, public, and pedagogical amid constant change. By transforming Kungsparken into a testing ground for new forms of museal presence, Malmö Konstmuseum engages in a speculative practice of future-building—one where the “new” is less an arrival than an ongoing enchantment. New chapters will be added until the rebuilding of the museum has been completed.
Chapter I: The Spell of New—Apparatus 22 (Maria Farcas, Dragos Olea, Erika Olea)
The transdisciplinary collective Apparatus 22 initiated the first spell: an evening of questions, falafel, and shared singing in Kungsparken. Their illuminated text installation, composed of speculative and humorous inquiries, proposed a poetics of institutional change—asking what might be gained, lost, or transformed when the museum moves on into its next stage of life.
Chapter II: Patiens (game)—Benedikte Bjerre, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Matti Sumari, Viktor Timofeev
To enter the former casino in Kungsparken is to enter a liminal state: between ruin and renewal, between chance and endurance. Patiens (game) is conceived as a total installation—an embodied meditation on waiting, risk, and the temporalities of transformation.
Curatorially, Patiens (game) re-situates the exhibition as a game of one—a spatial soliloquy in which the visitor confronts the site’s own patience: its willingness to linger within uncertainty.
Chapter III: Live the Legend—MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson)
The city’s former casino is a site steeped in layered stories that haunt our present: an entertainment venue, monastery, burial ground, ice sea, sediment of shells and mussels, visited by those who crawl, swim, climb, fly, and dance.
When the artist group MYCKET joins this legendary lineage, a story unfolds of how Malmö Konstmuseum becomes part of this continuum— and in the same moment, the museum itself begins to transform. Their contribution extends The Spell of New’s curatorial premise by proposing a queer, feminist, and ecological reading of institutional transformation—one in which memory, matter, and desire cohabit as active agents in shaping the museum-to-come.
