Supermarket 2007

SUPERMARKET is a newly established and independent art fair in Stockholm.

SUPERMARKET art fair is a collaborative effort between artist-run spaces and organisations in Stockholm. Our objective is to create a dynamic and a free-flowing meeting place for artistic experimentation and initiative.
SUPERMARKET is a parallel event to Market, an art fair including some of the most well established galleries in the Nordic region.
In 2007 the SUPERMARKET concept will evolve into an international art fair for artist-run spaces and organisations. It will be a tight fitting, bustling, and upbeat social event.

SUPERMARKET art fair 2007 takes place in February 22-25 at Konstnärshuset (The Artists’ House), an old Art Deco palace in the centre of Stockholm.

For further information on the project please contact:
Pontus Raud, email: pontus@konstnarshuset.com, mobile: +46 739 99 34 29

Monica Bonvicini @ Bonniers Konsthall

What does your wife think of your rough and dry hands?

The main exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall this spring features Italian artist Monica Bonvicini. Bonvicini, who is based in Berlin, is one of her generation’s most acclaimed artists, and the exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall is the first major presentation


Monica Bonvicini’s art explores the experience of space and architecture. Her large-scale installations and sculptures, which often use the art institution’s own architecture, critically addresses the western architectural tradition to reveal how a culture’s values infuse every last building block of its construction.

Thematically, Bonivicini works within a tradition in contemporary art where artists question the idea of perception within the exhibition space as well as in art history. She often uses industrial materials like glass, metal, and chains in her works, exploring and redefining their functions. One of the most distinct characteristics of her art is its physical concreteness, and the way it violently addresses and directly influences the observers’ experience of the room.

The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall shows several of Monica Bonvicini’s prominent works from her production since the 1990’s and up to today. Her floor-piece Plastered will cover a large part of the konsthall. The ongoing work What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands? is exhibited in its totality, with additional questionnaires filled out in Stockholm. It is a series of questionnaires that has been distributed to hundreds of construction workers in different countries. The questionnaires have challenging questions such as “What is so appealing about construction workers?” or “Whom would you like to wall up?” Bonvicini uses aggression and humor to make us ponder how architecture and buildings are connected to sexuality and power. The exhibition also features a series of Monica Bonvicini’s later works, like the text-based large scale sculpture Not For You, one of her double swings, and a screen-print drawing on safety glass.

With solo exhibitions at respected institutions around the world, like Kunstwerke in Berlin, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Wiener Seccesion in Vienna, and The Sculpture Center in New York, Monica Bonvicini has established herself on the international art scene. She participates frequently in biennials all over the world, and she received the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, one of Europe’s most prestigious art awards, in 2005. Bonvicini is represented by Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan - West of Rome Inc., Los Angeles.

A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition.


Bonniers Konsthall
15 Feb - 29 Apr 2007

Sally Mann @ Kulturhuset Stockholm

Mythically exquisite and intimate visual worlds

Sally Mann is one of the most acclaimed photographers of our time, thanks to her personal choice of subjects and the way she stretches the boundaries for the photographic processes. Today, when more and more photographers and photo-based artists are working with new digital technology, she goes back to the origins of photography and develops its potential in new visual worlds.

Naked and personal portrayals

This exhibition focuses on three of Sally Mann’s art projects, starting with her breakthrough as an artist, the photographic suite “Immediate Family” (1992), in which she portrays her children in an intimate and naked manner. Next are her mythical landscapes, “Deep South” from 1997, and the exhibition ends with her controversial portraits of her now grown-up children, in the project “What Remains”, from 2003.

Her debut shocked the American public

Few, if any, have experience such success with a debut project as Sally Mann with “Immediate Family”, photographs of her children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, captured with a large-format camera in intimate family situations, with and without clothes, sometimes grubby or with grazes. Many Americans felt that these child portraits were shocking and too exposing. The criticism from politicians and the church contributed to the publicity, and Sally Mann grew famous as an artist.

Southern landscapes

Her exhibition “Mother Land” in New York in 1997 was the starting-point of a new chapter in her career. Sally Mann sought new forms of expression and aimed her camera at the deep south and the countryside in Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. Her technically experimental photos in the “Deep South” series harks back to the early days of photography and gives the impression of a painterly 19th century patina.

“I have been photographing the South for thirty-six years, finding memory, love, and, occasionally, paradise in the uniquely radical Southern light. I look for it always, the thick, vespertine gloaming that douses the day´s heat. When it comes, the landscape grows soft and vague, as if inadequately summoned up by some shiftless deity, casually neglectful of the details,” writes Sally Mann in the introduction to “Deep South” (Bullfinch, 2005).

Portraits like death masks

The death of her father sparked her most recent project, “What Remains”, which consists of several photographic suites on the theme of death. Sally Mann has sought various motifs with a personal, scientific and documentary purpose, including subjects such as the well-beloved dog, rotting corpses and a killed escaped convict. It was in this context and emotional state that Sally Mann once more photographed her children, now as adults. The series “Faces” consists of close-up portraits of Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. In their exquisite beauty these portraits resemble death masks.

Photo methods using tea and asphalt

Sally Mann generally uses a large-format camera and has experimented with various early developing methods. The suites “Deep South” and “What Remains” were largely printed using her own chemical mixture, incorporating tea and asphalt in the process, all to achieve the right structure and atmosphere in the picture. Her methods require her to use a mobile darkroom when doing field work. Both the coating of glass plates and developing have to be performed in complete darkness. Sally Mann’s devotion to doing everything herself enhances her almost mythical persona. Nor does she have any inclination for the new digital technology:
“Digital images don’t smell,” she says.

Sally Mann

Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia. She studied at several of the most prestigious art and photography schools in the USA. Her work features in several prominent art collections, including that of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with several private collections and institutions in Europe. The influential TIME Magazine dubbed Sally Mann America’s foremost photographer in 2001. The BBC recently made a documentary on her unique career.

A ViPS Exhibition
Produced by Kulturhuset.
Curator: Hasse Persson.
The exhibition is part of Kulturhuset’s major photography and moving image project, ViPS – Video Photography Stockholm.
Technical partners: Mitsubishi Electric
We are grateful to Metro, Fondberg & Co and Best Western Wallin Hotel for their support.