Fall 2018 program

The autumn programme at Malmö Konsthall starts with a solo exhibition featuring Maria Lindberg (b. 1958, Sweden) and an exhibition project devoted to the magazine The Situationist Times and its editor Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939, Netherlands).

Chronologically, Maria Lindberg’s exhibition at Malmö Konsthall begins with some of her immaterial production from the 1980s. At this early stage in the artist’s career, she undertook a series of activities involving mail art, small-scale interventions in public spaces, and action art inspired in part by the international Fluxus movement and performed by Lindberg in person. Included in the exhibition are for instance Ephestia Khveniella (1983), a collection of correspondence between the artist and various Swedish food manufacturers, and Poste Restante (1989), in which the artist sent letters to herself poste restante to all corners of the world.

Alongside these, a retrospective selection of the characteristic paintings Maria Lindberg produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s will also be shown. These works were executed in accordance with a reduced, minimalist ethos, and constitute a series of stylised motifs that serve as both a play with figuration and a direct challenge to the viewer by virtue of the ambivalence engendered by their many possible meanings. This apparent commentary on different kinds of claims to power, abuse, and submission established Maria Lindberg as an artist with a conceptual method, a feminist objective, and an underlying, subtle, and quirky sense of humour.

Maria Lindberg is perhaps mainly associated with drawing, her favourite artistic technique that she has constantly returned to and turned into her own special form of expression. The exhibition at Malmö Konsthall includes a large number of works in which she experiments with paper as a background, idea, and execution, and which open a doorway to an entire world we can think of as Maria Lindberg’s own. The show also constitutes an opportunity for the artist to translate the dimensions of drawing to a larger scale, and work in dialogue with the exhibition spaces, for instance, by executing works directly on the walls.

The Situationist Times was a magazine edited and published by the Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong (b. 1939) during the years 1962–67. In her early twenties, de Jong joined the Situationist International, a revolutionary avant-garde movement that included leading figures such as the French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord and the Danish artist Asger Jorn. 

In a meeting of the central committee of the Situationist International in Brussels in 1961, de Jong proposed the publication of a magazine in English called The Situationist Times, to accompany the movement’s French bulletin Internationale Situationniste. By the time the first issue appeared in 1962, however, de Jong had been excluded from the Situationist International and transformed the magazine project beyond all recognition. 

In its multilingual, trans-disciplinary and cross-cultural exuberance, The Situationist Times challenged not only the notion of what it means to be a situationist, but also traditional understandings of culture in the broader sense and of how culture is created, formatted and shared.

The exhibition invites the visitor to explore The Situationist Times in all its maze-like knots and controversies. Accompanied by Jacqueline de Jong, who tells the history of the magazine’s creation in a series of recent video clips, one can browse original editions or navigate the whole body of work through a digital interface developed by the Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism. In addition, the show unfolds the material that de Jong assembled in the early 70s in collaboration with Hans Brinkman. They intended to use this collection for a seventh, unrealized issue of The Situationist Times, which was to be devoted to the game of pinball. This until recently forgotten material is exhibited alongside selected works by Jacqueline de Jong dealing with pinball.

Curators: Ellef Prestsæter and Torpedo, with Jacqueline de Jong. The exhibition is supported by Nordic Culture Point and Arts Council Norway.