Öyvind Fahlström

Curator: Fredrik Liew

Öyvind Fahlström’s oeuvre was extremely multifaceted, and comprised poetry, drama, journalism, criticism, drawing, painting, film, TV, happenings, radio, objects, prints and installations. Although he was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century, he is underrepresented both on the international art scene and in art historical research. Over the past years, Moderna Museet has had a special focus on his practice, and from 2016–18 a series of publications, events and exhibitions are presented, ranging from the announcement of newly-found archive material, to the major contemporary group exhibition Manipulate the world based on strategies and methods extracted from works by Öyvind Fahlström.

Altogether, Moderna Museet’s Öyvind Fahlström project will comprise six parts.

Part 1: Exhibition
Image Machines
Image Machines was an exhibition about the invention Fahlström called “variable paintings.” It showed how he developed figurative and movable elements in his works, and consequently the growing interaction between his art and the world around it. Fahlström described his works with small, movable parts as “machinery for making paintings,” or “picture organs.” The variable paintings were intended for mass-production, with the instruction to everyone to “manipulate the world.”

Part 2: Publishing
Kisses Sweeter than Wine
Kisses Sweeter than Wine was part of the performance programme 9 evenings: Theatre & Engineering, in New York in 1966. Three months later, Swedish Radio broadcast a feature on the work, made by the artist himself. This audio material was believed to have disappeared, but it was found during our work and published for the first time since the original broadcast in 1967. The published material—which has now been translated into English—gives us a unique look into one of the most remarkable experimental performances of the 1960s, and enables us to understand the work in a completely new way.

Part 3: Exhibition and book
Ade-Ledic-Nander  
The Ade-Ledic-Nander project comprises an exhibition and a book about this series of works. Ade-Ledic-Nander is a central group of paintings in Öyvind Fahlström’s oeuvre and can be seen as a link between his concrete use of language and signs, and his subsequent preoccupation with games and constructing worlds. Fahlström worked on Ade-Ledic-Nander for several years in the mid-1950s. Jesper Olsson is currently writing the book about Ade-Ledic-Nander.

Part 4: Events
Kalas på BORD
In 1966, Öyvind Fahlström’s BORD. Dikter 1952–1955 was published. This was an epochal book of his concrete poetry from the early 1950s. His concrete poetry was the culmination of an intense literary period that resulted in several manuscripts, but very few of them were ever published. This is an unbelievably rich and important material, which had a profound and seminal impact on his later work in the field of visual arts, but has remained hidden and untouched. Kalas på BORD was a full day of readings, performances and lectures; an excavation, processing and representation of the unpublished novel Ryska dansöser (1948–49), the unpublished poetry books Borborygmernas fall (1949), Trumpeten i stjärten (1949), Apskaft (1949–50), Fyra rörelse (1951–52), Ta-o-tie (1952–53), and Överhuvudtaget (1953–54), and extracts from translations and notebooks.

Part 5: Book
Monopoly
In the early 1970s, Öyvind Fahlström made nine paintings based on the iconic board game Monopoly. In these works, he implemented his idea of magnetic “variable” paintings, creating a game about the globalised world’s ideological and financial power struggles. Pamela M Lee, an art historian and professor at Stanford University, is the author of the book we are publishing on Öyvind Fahlström’s monopoly games: Cold War Historical Painting: Fahlström against Monopoly.

Part 6: Exhibition and book
Manipulate the World
Manipulate the World is a contemporary group exhibition based on four seminal works by Öyvind Fahlström: Dr Schweitzer’s Last Mission (1964–66), Mao-Hope March (1966), Indochina Monopoly (1971), and The World Bank (1971). These works generate the game board for the exhibition, transforming Fahlström’s theatrical enactments of fact and fiction into a contemporary “game” about reality, global politics and economics. The title of the exhibition is from a text by Fahlström, which was published in Art and Literature in 1962. The featured artists include: Öyvind Fahlström, Walid Raad, Hito Steyerl, Goldin+Senneby, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Pratchaya Phinthong, Ibrahim Mahama, Nicolas Mangan, Lawrence Abdu Hamdan, Núria Güell, Otobong Nkanga, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, and Katarina Pirak Sikku.

For more information about the project and schedule of the events visit www.modernamuseet.se.