I hope you don’t mind me publishing this letter to you here, along with, or rather as part of, the publication showcasing the artistic practices of the twenty-seven students who will conclude their education at the Royal Institute of Art with a group exhibition in spring 2024. Please stay with me for a moment before you continue browsing the pages or walking through the exhibition. Take a closer look at the font used here, do you recognize it? Admittedly, this may be a rhetorical question, as Times New Roman is one of the most conventional typefaces; however, this version is minimally adapted by Elina Birkehag, with whom I developed the idea for and concept of this publication and finally realized it so brilliantly graphically.
This publication, this exhibition catalog, is aligned with the school’s visual identity guidelines, which we consciously decided to use as a tool to make any mediation around the exhibition more accessible. My first engagement with these very guidelines, in spring 2021, when I accompanied the school’s Graduation Show for the first time, was somewhat disillusioning, seeing them as limiting, confining, even trivial. But it is precisely the familiarity of this typeface, as well as the sole focus on the addressee’s ability to comprehend what is being communicated, that may be the opposite of limiting, simply because “allows for leeway in the communication of the Institute’s many different identities, interests and needs.”1
This is the essence of my work on the Graduation Show, the conclusion of the students’ education. This exhibition is more an exploration and experience of possible modes of collaboration than a collective project. This publication also conveys these differences between the students’ artistic practices presented through documentation from the solo shows, alongside texts written by each artist. So many “different identities, interests and needs” that vary from each other just as they naturally intertwine, and the exhibition at the end of the school year presents a chance to encounter them all. To preserve each of these variants, yet not to separate them from each other—this was the challenge throughout the academic year 2023–2024, both for the exhibition and for this publication. So how convenient is it to have a tool, a tool that is adaptable enough to facilitate the needed space for everyone, while at the same time being intuitive and accessible in order to understand all the different artistic practices?
You might find it funny to see how much I cherish the process of producing a physical book, and how many different types of paper I have touched, turned, and twisted in my hands while Elina and I discussed how this very paper forms the pages that, in bound form, will become the publication that accompanies the Graduation Show. But I see books as an experimental, extraordinary, and complex form and I see the supposed limitation of a physical book just as I do the suggested use of Times New Roman for the typeface—more as a tool to make something accessible, clear to understand and applicable.
I know most people will talk about this book as an exhibition catalog, but I will stick with the term “book” for the sake of clarity, even though this can also be misleading. Not because what you are holding in your hands is not an exhibition catalog, but rather because such a catalog can take on countless different forms—the sheer complexity and scope of the medium of print has not prevented it from developing in a variety of forms and dimensions during the last decades. In the history of curating, curators like Lucy Lippard in the 1960s shaped the development of the medium to be far beyond the mere listing and archiving of the works included in an exhibition. Lippard, who in several projects expanded the format of the exhibition catalog to include loose, unnumbered cards that were individually composed and written on by the artists, not only made it possible for the exhibition to travel around easily via the book, but also provided no specific path “through” the exhibition due to the loose cards. To provide such a non-specific, non-prescribed path through an exhibition is indeed my aim for this show, too, but as the pages here do not talk specifically about the exhibited works, the form of the bound and clearly structured book also works—so don’t worry, there’s no need to cling to a stack of loose cards.
The students are featured here in chronological order, which does not suggest a specific path through the exhibition; instead, the progress through the academic year in which the students had their exam exhibitions one after the other. To emphasize printed matter and its importance, I want to highlight the fact that to be able to hold this very book in your hands while visiting the exhibition, it had to go to print weeks before it opened, therefore, it’s not specifically about the exhibition. Stating this, I also want to emphasize that its purpose stretches far beyond this show, archiving all of the students’ artistic practices and therefore, it’s going back in time to include plenty of photos from the students’ solo shows at Galleri Mejan. As I already mentioned, the texts were all individually written by the artists themselves, whereas all the photographs in the book have been taken by the artist and photographer Jean-Baptiste Béranger. This editorial decision was motivated by the goal of trying to highlight how there is no solitary point of access to the various contributions. The wide range of angles and readings, either through the lens of one person or the words of several, can always be seen, read, or handled differently.
It’s actually quite simple. I mean, you must be thinking how restrictive it is that our visual guidelines suggest relying on only three colors: red, silver, and black. But when you close the book, please tell me, what shade of red do you have in mind?
Silvia Thomackenstein is editor for this publication, issued on the occasion of the MFA Graduation Show of the Royal Institute of Art. She developed the exhibition jointly with Gunilla Klingberg, Asier Mendizabal and the participating students.
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The blazon for the coat of arms of the Royal Institute of Art: Argent, a lion and a boar in pale counter passant Sable, armed Gules. The shield is surmounted by the royal crown. ¹
| ¹ | A blazon is always as concise as possible. The terminology consists of some archaic words, particularly French as this language dominated the context for the emergence of heraldry. In English blazons the majority of the terms originate in Old French, for instance the tinctures: Argent (silver), Sable (black) and Gules (red). See: Rikard Heberling and Jonas Williamsson, Mellan sköldebrev och varumärkesmanual Riktlinjer för grafisk formgivning och kommunikation / Between Letters Patent and Brand Manual Guidelines for Graphic Design and Communications, Eng. trans. Sarah Clyne Sundberg (Stockholm: Kungl. Konsthögskolan/Royal Institute of Art, 2020). |
