Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary

Online Seminar, Wednesday 13 May, 10:00–12:00 Artists Organising in Times of Upheaval: Learning from Poland Participation is free, but booking is required. Register via the link in bio. Building upon the success of last year’s collaboration between Public Art Agency Sweden and CAPIm during the 2025 Contemporary Art Days (Samtidskonstdagarna), we are continuing our cooperation through a series of online seminars exploring how artists and artists’ organisations navigate shifting cultural policy agendas and political instability. The third seminar in the series, Learning from Poland, features contributions from: • Joanna Mytkowska — curator and art historian, and Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw since 2007. • Kuba Szreder — researcher, curator, and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. • Michał Głowacki — Associate Professor at the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Book Studies, and Deputy Dean for Research and International Collaboration at the University of Warsaw. • Sara Edström — Chair of Konstnärernas Riksorganisation (The Artists’ Association of Sweden), representing 3,500 professional visual artists, craftspeople, and designers. • Emmeli Person — artist working within institutional structures and educational platforms, and operational manager of Bildkonst Sverige (Visual Arts Association Sweden). The seminar series Artists’ Organising in Times of Upheaval, co-programmed by Public Art Agency Sweden and CAPIm together with invited national and international colleagues from Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia, explores strategies used by artists’ organisations to navigate radical changes in cultural policy contexts. The series forms part of CAPIm’s research strand Organisational Imaginaries. Learn more via the link in bio. Images: 1. Pages from Gary Farrelly’s artist’s notebook as presented at a performance-lecture Gothenburg, 3 September 2024. Courtesy of the artist. 2. Kuba Szreder, Joanna Mytkowska, Michał Głowacki. #artandpolitics #artisticresearch

Public Lecture on Affordances and Study by Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney 27 April | Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, Stockholm Together they move away from a traditional Eurocentric production of subjects and objects of study and towards the notion of affordances as an alternative approach to perception. Scientists have identified eight independent senses in our bodies, however three of them (proprioception, interoception and vestibular sense)  are ‘ranked’ lower than the more familiar five senses and have largely been confined to specialized knowledge, such as psychology or dance. Throughout their collaboration Desideri and Harney have been questioning the social and political work that such an organization of the senses perform, and how these less individuated senses may hold some kind of opening to the way we think about perception. Could these senses unfold affordances that provide an alternative way to perceive and to be with, and in, this earth? Learn more and register via the link in bio. Images: Valentina Desideri. Performance Studies: On Abundance at GfZK Leipzig, 2023. Photo  by Alexandra Ivanciu Valentina Desideri, Myriam Lefkowitz and Lendl Barcelos. A (Mis)reader’s Guide to Listening, at CentroCentro Madrid, 2019.  #artisticresearch #artandpolitics #affordances #studiopractice

Warmly welcome to the second Research Annual 25–27 September, Stockholm Epochality: Art and the Limits of the Present Epochs organise and narrativize time and shape our way of seeing both the past and imagining the future. These metered and ordered descriptions blind us to our own present. Our self-reflection of being-in-a-time-period, within-an-era, shapes what can be thought, experienced, or known at all. The removed distance needed to describe and interpret periods of social reorganisation, industrial development, political upheaval and technological advancements is always imperfectly present. To live inside an epoch is to feel its weight, its pressure, its perplexities but to be perpetually behind in our understanding of it. How do we cope with being too late, and what are the implications for what is to come? How do we act with what can only be imperfect knowledge? In order to think together on epochality, imagination and the limits of the present we are delighted to host a keynote by Professor Yuk Hui (Erasmus University Rotterdam), whose work has contributed one of the most sustained and influential bodies of contemporary thinking on technicity, art and our epochal condition(s). Our investigation of epochality will also take us to the newly initiated art centre “Epoken” in Mölnbo, directed by artists Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören for an embodied and aesthetic making of new time. We invite you to take time to practice new forms of attention where we work through art practices that possibly disrupt catastrophic thinking. The full programme will be presented during the spring. Register via the link in bio. Images: Epoken in Mölnbo, Sweden. Photo: Erik Viklund Keynote: Professor Yuk Hui “Wild Inclusion” by artist Signe Johannessen #artisticresearch #epoch #politicalimagination #artandpolitics #researchsymposium

Residency Invitation Solastalgia Pangolin – Mölnbo, Sweden, May 2026 CAPIm, together with artists Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören, invites applications for short stays in Solastalgia Pangolin — a sculpture, cabin, and field hospital for the mind on the front lines of the climate crisis. Solastalgia Pangolin is a small hut designed for living, thinking, and resting within a changing landscape—built to outlast the short-term project economies that often shape cultural production. With care and maintenance, the structure is intended to outlive us all. It will travel from place to place where it is invited, and CAPIm is delighted to become part of its early history through this residency program. Located in Mölnbo, this small hut offers a place to sleep, read, think, and work in nature. Residents can stay 1 day to 1 week during May 2026. Open to students and staff at HDK-Valand, KKH, and researchers connected to the Swedish Research Council’s Centres of Excellence. Apply with a short motivation letter to [email protected] Deadline: 10 April 2026 For more information about the invitation please visit www.capim.se More info: solastalgiapangolin.se More about the artists: rorenjohannessen.se #solastalgia #pangolin #artandecology #climateart #residency

Research Seminar, 2 March 2026 The Figure of the Archive (seminar series) (RE)FIGURE The word figure enfolds multiple meanings – as a verb: to appear, be mentioned, represent, be a symbol of, imagine, pat-tern, calculate, understand, determine, consider - all remultiplied by the word’s hospitality to prefixes. Almost as complex… is the word ‘archive’ (the noun), which plays (is played) as idea, as institution, accumulation of physical or virtual objects, profession, process, service. Conjoining these words ‘figure’ and ‘archive’ is to open up a cornucopia of meaning. (“Introduction,” C. Hamilton et al. REFIGURING the ARCHIVE, Cape Town: New Africa Books, 2002.) The archive has been a central figure and preoccupation over several decades for both the organizational infrastructure and the practical production of contemporary art. Indeed, it might be argued that the archive has become the enabling and the limiting horizon of many cultural practices. It often seems that all forms of collection, all forms of memory work, and all forms of programme are only conceivable through some appeal to the figure of the archive. In this online workshop we will explore the reasons for this ascendancy of the figure of the archive, the different ways in which it has been experimentally re-constructed, and the wider contexts of current archival impulses across contemporary artistic practice and research. Participation is free. Booking is required; please register for the event via the link in the bio. Programme 15:00–15:30 Introduction – Prof. Mick Wilson 15:30–16:00 “The Living Archives of Rural WWII Sites” – Monika Gabriela Dorniak 16:00–16:10 Short break 16:10–16:45 “Indentation: Placing a Table in the Irish Architectural Archive” – Dr. Fiona Hallinan 16:45–16:55 Short break 16:55–17:55 “Archival Configurations: Mediations and Performative Images” – Prof. Jyoti Mistry 17:55–18:00 Closing and advance information on the next seminar in the series Image Fiona Hallinan, Buildings End installation shot, 2023. Photo: Faolán Carey. Courtesy of the artist. #capim_se #politicalimagination #artandpolitics #artisticresearch #archivalpractices

We are thrilled to welcome choreographer Alice Chauchat as Senior Guest Researcher at CAPIm. Based in Berlin since 2001. Alice’s practice is grounded in collaboration as a lived condition. A form of collaboration where distance, alterity, and de-centering are not obstacles but generative forces. Trained in Lyon and at P.A.R.T.S. Brussels, she has worked across collective and independent contexts with artists including Jennifer Lacey, Anne Juren, Xavier Le Roy, Tino Sehgal, Juan Dominguez, and many others. Her long-standing engagement with modes of sharing, through different situations, forms of responsibility, tools, and infrastructures, has taken shape through initiatives such as Praticable, everybodys toolbox, the Performing Arts Forum in Saint-Erme, Teachback at ImpulsTanz, and Nobody’s Business. Since 2014, Alice has been developing Togethering, an ongoing choreographic research into the ethics of intimacy across radical difference. Through dance, it activates practices of not-knowing, approximation, and tending-towards. These practices unfold as scores, performances, concepts, and texts across studios, stages, museums, and urban space. Alongside her artistic work, Alice is a committed pedagogue, teaching internationally at institutions such as HZT Berlin, DAS Choreography Amsterdam, DDSKS Copenhagen, Stockholm University of the Arts, and AdBK Nürnberg. Alices practice speaks with CAPIms concerns by dwelling in choreography as a space of shared attention, ethical exposure, and collective imagination, without necessarily resolving these relations into fixed forms or instrumental outcomes. We’re excited for the conversations, practices, learning and forms of collective attention her presence will open at CAPIm. 1. Alice Chauchat. #alicechauchat #togethering #choreographicresearch #collectivepractice #radicalpedagogy

The Looking Glass Dialogues Magnus Bärtås and Sam Hultin on archives and microhistory Wednesday 11 February 2026 Time: 17:30–19:00 Place: Kungl. Konstakademien, Högtidsalen Secure your seat by emailing [email protected] The Looking Glass Dialogues presents Magnus Bärtås and Sam Hultin in a conversation on archives and microhistory in the context of artistic research. Bärtås and Hultin share important methodological ground in their commitment to close reading of collected material, their attention to narrative construction, and their sustained critical engagement with how history is mediated. Each insists on staying with specific lives rather than resorting to grand synthesis or explanatory closure. Yet their practices also diverge in productive ways as well. Bärtås’ practice deploys montage and essayistic structures to examine geopolitical histories. Hultin’s work foregrounds embodied research, durational engagement, and the collective activation of archives. Taking a cue from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the conversation unfolds across a reflective threshold—between visual analysis and participatory practice; between institutional archives and personal ones shaped by intimate proximity. The Looking Glass Dialogues foregrounds practice-based reflection based on the assumption that artistic research must be defined by artists through their methodological, material, and institutional entanglements. The series hopes to offers a nuanced contribution to current debates on the politics of knowledge production in contemporary art. Magnus Bärtås Artist, writer, and filmmaker based in Stockholm. His work explores history, archives, and storytelling through film, video essays, and artistic research. www.magnusbartas.se Sam Hultin Artist and writer working with queer history, memory, and public space through performance, walks, readings, and participatory projects. 1. Sam Hultin. Photo: Ida Borg 2. Magnus Bärtås. Photo: Elin Åberg #artisticresearch #archivalpractise #microhistory #contemporaryart #queerhistory

OPEN CALL — CPR 2026 (Self)Organization in North Africa Algeria · Tunisia · Morocco The Curatorial Program for Research (CPR) invites curators to apply for CPR 2026, its 10th fully funded international research program, taking place May 3–26, 2026 across North Africa. What to expect Up to 8 international curators will be hosted by local arts organizations, artists, and independent curators in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. The program includes artist-run workshops, screenings, guided walks, institutional visits, and collective discussions grounded in socio-political, artistic, and cultural histories of the region. Focus How do arts ecologies (self)organize across North Africa? What institutional forms enable cultural work, experimentation, and sustainability? Initiated by Myriam Amroun (Algiers) and Natasha Marie Llorens (Stockholm), in collaboration with CPR. Fully funded International flights, local transport, accommodation, and some meals are covered. Deadline: January 20, 2026 Apply & learn more: [email protected] This project is realized with generous support from the Swedish Institute. #opencall #curatorialresearch #cpr2026 #northafrica #selforganization This an associated initiative of CAPIm.

Spring and summer 2026 offer an extensive program, and our website has just been updated with new courses and events. Below is a selection: 28 June – 6 July CAPIm Summer School in Marseille “Studies for a Potential History” Applications open — link in bio. Starting in January Seminar Series “The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales” Register now — link in bio. 11 February The Looking-Glass Dialogues: Sam Hultin and Magnus Bärtås on Archives and Microhistory Konstakademien, Stockholm 23–25 February Workshop in Gothenburg Collectively Voicing Radical Imaginaries Applications open — link in bio. 25 February – 30 June Online Course Writing Research | Research Writing, 2026 (KF3BAS1) Applications open — apply via our website. 2 March Research Seminar The Figure of the Archive HDK-Valand in Gothenburg and online via Zoom 27–29 April Studio Practice Spring 2026: On Affordances Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm Summer course, 9 June – 28 August Introduction to Contemporary Arts and Politics Open for applications from 16 February. As we now head into our Christmas break, posting will pause for a while, but we will return in early February. For updates on courses and events, please visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter. Images: 1. Participants gather for a public performance in as part of the “In Between Ourselves” intensive, central Chișinău, Moldova (2025). 2. Henk Slager (ed.) The Pleasure of Research, 2015. 3. Participants gather for a public performance in as part of the “In Between Ourselves” intensive, central Chișinău, Moldova (2025). 4. Birgitta Nordstrom, Infant wrapping cloths (2019). Photo: Courtesy of the artist. #capim_se #thepoliticalimaginary #politicalimagination #artandpolitics #artisticresearch

Dr. Kerry Guinan invites researchers, practitioners, and students to participate in a recurring online research seminar, ‘The Politics and Aesthetics of Hyper-Scales’, to support and expand upon her postdoctoral project within CAPIm. The project explores how perceptions of scale structure and limit political imaginaries, aiming to develop artistic methodologies that can potentially reorganise spatio-temporal experience, and analysing how such strategies may affect ethico-political sensibilities of responsibility, causality, and agency. This seminar series will expand critical thought to the reach of planetary politics and probe the potential political implications of, for instance, subatomic processes, while addressing timescales ranging from the digitally instant to the geologically incremental. For more information and to register for the seminars please visit our programmes page (link in Bio). IMAGE Avril Corroon, For You, For Me, 2025 (Film still). Petri dish with gene-edited potato plant leaves infected with late blight disease. Courtesy of the artist. #politicalimaginaries #seminarseries #artandpolitics #artisticresearch #capim_se

CAPIm Summer School 2026 — Studies for a Potential History Marseille, France June 28–July 6, 2026 Accepting applications! Deadline is January 10, 2026, at 23:59:59 Central European Time (CET). Link to application through capim.se (link in Bio). The 2026 edition of the CAPIm Summer School gathers artists, curators, architects, and artistic researchers in Marseille to explore the political imaginary through Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s notion of potential history. Using SHED’s publishing catalogue as a point of departure, the program invites participants to collectively unlearn imperialism and consider how artistic research can repair and reimagine shared worlds. Over nine days, the Summer School hosts workshops with invited artists and theorists—including Azoulay—alongside participant presentations, close readings, collective meals, and a public evening program curated by Arthur Eskenazi. Rooted in Marseille’s complex histories of migration, extraction, and empire, the gathering unfolds in close collaboration with local cultural structures such as Artagon Marseille and SHED Publishing. Free and held in English, the program covers travel, accommodation, mid-day meals, and materials. Fourteen participants will be selected through an application process open until January 10, 2026. For more information about the CAPIm Summer School - Studies for a Potential History please visit our website capim.se (link in Bio). IMAGES 1. 2025 CAPIm Summer School participant Elmer Blåvarg. 2. CAPIm researcher Dr. Valentina Desideri performing a poethical reading with Denise Ferreira da Silva during CAPIm Summer School 2025. 3. Natasha Marie Llorens, “Situated Justice: Walking Tour” at the Monument for the Armies of the Orient, Marseille Corniche. 4. Anna Dasović at the memorial in honour of the the philosopher Walter Benjamin in Portbou, “Passages” by Dani Karavan. 5. Collective workshop to produce a code of conduct, CAPIm Summer School 2025 on the steps behind Marseille City Hall. All images courtesy of CAPIm. #summerschool #marseille politicalimaginary #ariellaazoulay #SHED Publishing # Artagonofficiel

CAPim Postdoc Dr. Kerry Guinan will participate in the ‘Idiorrhythmic Imaginaries’ artistic research pavilion at Uniarts Helsinki, December 5-21. The exhibition asks, what will the future look like? How can we imagine the future in a time that seems determined by various crises? And what will be the role of artistic research in this? In the artistic research project The Political Aesthetics of Scale – Artistic Practice at the Limits of the Political Imaginary, Guinan investigates the ability of artistic practice to conceptualise and render perceptible politically significant phenomena that operate at extreme spatio-temporal scales, such as high-turnover, globalised, production chains, international, tele-communication networks, and deep-time, geological activity. Through the development and analysis of artistic methodologies, the research project explores whether a political aesthetics of scale can reorganise spatio-temporal experience, and how such strategies may affect ethico-political sensibilities of responsibility, causality, and agency. For more information about this project and our research please visit our website (link in Bio). —— The centre’s research consists both of projects led and executed by CAPIm staff and of associated initiatives and collaborative projects realised with our colleagues and partners. IMAGE Kerry Guinan, Portraits, 2025. Series of HD video portraits live-streamed from three intercontinental locations. Photograph of the artwork in Ormston House, Limerick. Photo: Jed Niezgoda. #capim_se #thepoliticalimaginary #politicalimagination #artandpolitics #artisticresearch