Studio grant holder in Stockholm August 3 – October 26 2020

Maja Hammarén. Born 1978 in Stockholm. Lives and works in: Gothenburg and Stockholm.

Editorial, curatorial and artistic work with language forms, movements and organising in the broad sense. Interested in political movements and public spaces, historiography, types of narrative and knowledge and their politics, institutional history and the organisation of work. Assumes various roles in projects and combines/alternates collective, editorial, pedagogical and choreographic approaches.

Photo: Maja Hammarén

I will use my IASPIS residency to focus – partly by asking what an editorial practice can comprise – on the (semi-)public art project Botandets iver in Uppsala (A Zeal for Curing), which looks at historic sites of mental health asylums and knowledge institutions to explore the contemporary zeal for curing, improving and developing.

Hammarén has been co-editor for Stockholmstidningen and the art magazine Paletten. She teaches at the Valand Academy and runs the art organisation Konstarbete KAS. In 2017, she curated the Botandets iver bus tour, featuring performative, walking lectures by the artists Ioana Cojocariu, Cecilia Germain and Johanna Willenfelt, visiting sites in Gothenburg that had formerly been mental institutions or poorhouses, and which are now Skönhetsfabriken Spa & Gym, the Chalmers School of Entrepreneurship and the building project Nya Lillhagen. Participants took part in training sessions and ACT meditation, to experience today’s working life, and had lunch at the former “mental hospital” Lillhagen’s restaurant.