Litmus Commission, 2010

Studio44 presents The Litmus Commission, a site-specific project during Supermarket, a collaboration between three of the galleries members: Joel Hurlburt, Monica Melin, and Ola Nilsson.

The Litmus Commission take notice of the fact that Supermarket will be held, and become part of Kulturhuset (Stockholm’s “Culture House”) in 2010. Our starting point is situation -- and site – specific. There exists many similarities between artist-driven initiatives and Kulturhuset, all of which are of interest. At Supermarket we will focus on one such similarity, dialog, engaging in a visual and auditory investigation.

Background

Participation is one of the most important notions of democracy, but also within the cultural arena. Kulturhuset is the result of such reasoning, with it’s many different types of activities: it’s reading room, youth center (Lava), environmental resource center (Ekoteket), comic book library (Serieteket), The City Theater, art exhibition spaces, among them. A common thread is the sense of a cultural living room. The discussion goes back to the beginning of the 1970’s, with the idea of cultural democracy, and the use of art as an instrument of democracy. But Kulturhuset was also conceived of as part of a cultural resistor, a type of cultural capital, to ward against the commercialization of the urban center, when the area was razed and urban-planning and redevelopment were attempting to modernize the area.

Litmus Paper –to absorb and interpret

How does this immaterial landscape inside the walls of Kulturhuset become known to the visitors?

What is art to you?

Interviews, done earlier this year with visitors to Kulturhuset, in addition to those to be done during the Supermarket Artfair, take up the issue of visitors’ relationship to culture and site. The interview process will show who or what we wish to see, and with this discussion comes an invitation of participation. With the collected material as a starting point, we set our focus on our relationship to art, but also the cultural climate, as it is viewed at the moment.

The Litmus Commission is here a laboratory where the processes of registration become a basis for our work, to interpret, reiterate, rework, and possibly to understand. We see the booth as a weigh station in an ongoing process which can make itself known through different means, and with which we wish to display the site and culture’s interactivities. By remaining open to the surroundings and the situation, we believe we can make visible the interaction between the public aspects of culture and our private artistic practices.

Exhibited at Supermarket Artfair, 2010