September ssions

SEPTEMBER SESSIONS
— A Contemporary Art Festival in Stockholm
19–22.9 2024 (with a prelude 14.9)

An initiative by Mint and Index including a specially curated program by Yaby

September Sessions – A Contemporary Art Festival in Stockholm is back with a four-day programme spread over various art organizations in the city as well as public spaces in Stockholm. It hosts exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings, IASPIS Open Studios, readings, and social gatherings. We want to consciously celebrate the diversity of the Stockholm art scene and create a platform for interventions by international curators.

During the festival, a series of exhibitions and events will be organized by Accelerator, Bonniers Konsthall, Filmform, Ghost Platform, IASPIS, Index, Konsthall C, Liljevalchs, Mint, among others, as well as a specially curated program taking place in unexpected places all around Stockholm.

This new edition is curated by the Spanish duo Yaby, and looks at the performative side of visual art through a series of offsite pieces that engage with “liveness” —they happen, they do something, they conjure up time and respond theatrically to the narratives staged by a particular space. Notions of here and elsewhere underlie these works, which pull their audience to different settings and point their attention to different places or moments where a sense of meaning or at least completeness might be located. Presentness gets boosted through anticipation and spark, charged with conjecture, tropes, wariness and hanging emotions.

Hereness, thereness and presentness bring up questions about the import of different sensory planes, social adjustments, how instants of engagement happen or last, and how closeness and distancing shape those collective feelings that will become significant. If performance names an “actualized sphere,” we can see this group of dispersed and ephemeral artistic gestures as contending with the palpability of certain situations or atmospheres, pondering their materiality, textures, chemistry, their entry points and the conditions of life that they afford.

Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo founded Yaby in 2017, an independent art space in Madrid that was open until 2022, where they programmed readings, performances and exhibitions with artists such as Caspar Heinemann, Rindon Johnson, Cole Lu, Precious Okoyomon, Nayland Blake, A.K. Burns, Atiéna R. Kilfa, Sitara Abuzar Ghaznawi or Angharad Williams. After closing their own space, they both continue to work together as an independent team, and have curated projects for the Joan Miró Foundation (Barcelona), EACC (Castellón), Vleeshal (Middelburg), ARCO (Madrid), La Casa Encendida (Madrid) or Hangar (Barcelona), with artists Kandis Williams, Jota Mombaça, Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes, P. Staff, Claudia Pagès, Sam Cottington, Deborah-Joyce Holman, David Moser, Phung-Tien Phan, Quay Quinn Wolf and Aria Dean amongst others.