Potluck
In Swedish, the word for potluck is knytkalas—a communal meal where everyone brings something to share. Rooted in knyta, meaning to tie or pull together, a knytkalas becomes a temporary and festive gathering. A moment to knyta an—to weave relations, to make something held in common. The use of this metaphor for the exhibition—a joint table made from many contributions, practical, symbolic, and otherwise—feels particularly pertinent at this moment in time, when we are eagerly and attentively following how the students’ works take shape: how thoughts, feelings, preoccupations, concepts, and desires come together as proposals that will become works of art. The table itself became part of the conversation through the students’ own reflections, as both a concept and something to be planned, placed, and returned to.
To follow this process—its sincerity, cheeky playfulness, and complex twists and turns—is a privilege. The students are about to leave us, on their way out of formal education. Our role, alongside and with them, is shaped by pedagogical care: offering structure, asking questions, sharing experience. But more than anything, it is about reminding them that being an artist is a practice of lifelong learning and experimentation, in which the exhibition is part of a process, not its final form. The exhibition taking shape is not built around a curatorial scaffolding or a singular voice. It is a joint project carried out by a group in which each member pushes their own processes while also acting as test audiences, sounding boards, and co-conspirators for one another. This publication is one such contribution. It extends the exhibition into print, and this year it also takes digital form—offering more tables to gather around, broadening access and reflecting the many ways in which students work today: across formats, across distances.
Still, curating is not absent. To curate is to care, and that care has taken many forms: being in conversation, thinking alongside, making room for doubt, attending to rhythm and timing, to how the works meet and move together. This exhibition does not ask visitors to search for a unifying narrative or read the works as parts of a cohesive statement. Instead, it invites attention to what is made possible by them and between them: the resonances, the tensions, the shifts and openings. Working together doesn’t necessarily make the work easier. Often, it takes longer, becomes messier, more layered. But that, too, is part of the process. We cannot emphasize enough that art is never shaped by the artist alone. It emerges through encounter, through talking, listening, and responding. Collaboration thrives on the interplay of distinct voices; it does not require dissolving into one. The preservation of diverse perspectives and spaces is essential. Within this entanglement, the relationship between the personal and the collective also shifts. These works may begin in proximity to lived experience, but they do not stop there. They open outward—towards questions of how we communicate, how we build meaning, how we are with others.
The context around this exhibition has also shaped its form. In the summer of 2024, the school began a major renovation. Walls came down, studio spaces were reduced, and communal areas became rare. In their absence, the exhibition space—and the extended space of planning meetings, studio visits, and working groups—gained new urgency. A table, metaphorical or otherwise, became something to gather around, to lean on, to hold things together.
What remains when shared space becomes scarce? What kind of work is possible, and for whom? In a time of infrastructural instability—within institutions and politically beyond them—it matters how, where, and with whom we sit down. And above all, that we do so in person. We learn by sharing space: tools, workshops, kitchens. What we bring to the table—questions, drawings, shared food, coffee cups, unfinished thoughts, and objects in progress—is only part of the story. The table matters just as much: not only as a place to gather, but as a form of infrastructure. A structure that holds, supports, and sometimes confines.
The influence of space on artistic process and practice becomes especially clear when looking at this year’s graduating students. Spaces appear here not as isolated zones, but as methods woven into a wider mesh of materials, gestures, and relations—circulating through how things are made, spoken, written, built, or broken down. Not in parallel, but entangled, interrupting and informing one another, in conversation rather than along disciplinary lines. As part of the process, students were invited to engage with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and its collection—not only as a host institution, but as a layered context with its own history and infrastructure. Through generous conversations, Svante Helmbæk Tirén shared archival material, anecdotes, and institutional knowledge, opening the space beyond its walls. What is often perceived as a white cube revealed itself to hold another story: earlier exhibitions with coloured walls, stage sets, woven textiles, plants, chairs—a different imagination of what a space for art could be. The rooms, with their skylight ceilings and absence of windows onto the street, suspend time in their own way. During group conversations, someone wondered whether the architecture had once been shaped primarily with painting in mind—a thought that lingered. And what does it mean, then, to fill it otherwise—not in opposition, but in addition? Though no longer hosting the school, this building still carries shared histories—between institutions, across generations, through shifting ways of working. And for this moment, it has become a temporary commons: a space of continuity, interruption, tradition, and transformation.
Thinking, dreaming, and making happen in proximity—in shared rooms, across difference, through gestures and repetitions. Collaboration is not always easy, but the willingness to try, to return to one another, is already a form of trust. This spirit of support and shared responsibility can be traced in the very materiality of the exhibition. As you move through it, think of the many tables that have shaped it: lunchroom benches, studio desks, workshop tables, coffee-stained surfaces, improvised digital spaces. Consider what has been exchanged on and around them—drafts, refusals, support, sound, doubt, conviction. A potluck of forms and gestures, assembled in shared time.
Jenny Olsson, Johanna Gustafsson Fürst and Silvia Thomackenstein
The Royal Institute of Art
Stockholm, 6 April 2025