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November 7, 2024 – Review
“Meditation Room: Sacred Spaces Program”
Natasha Marie Llorens
The tiled floor of Konsthall C has seen hard use, both in the twenty years it has functioned as an experimental art space and, before that, as the common laundry room for the rental apartments in this suburb of Stockholm. Time and traffic have eroded the diagonal pattern of beige and dark-gray squares, and now the floor looks clean and utilitarian. This kind of straightforward durability is the appropriately mundane ground for the inaugural exhibition of Mariam Elnozahy’s first program as Konsthall C’s artistic director. Her two-year thematic proposition “Sacred Spaces” is balanced between a positivist understanding of the sacred as someplace metaphysically safe and an idea that the contemporary art institution might offer “a place to discuss religious pluralism.” The intervention arises in a febrile context: a long-running debate in Swedish courts over whether burning the Koran could be seen as a form of political protest; an extreme rise in gang-related gun violence—Sweden is now second only to Albania in Europe—with attendant media coverage often emphasizing immigration and ethnic identity, with overtones of politico-religious affiliation.
It would have been easy to open a program along these thematic lines with something confrontational, but instead Elnozahy reproduced, inside the gallery, the …