Editorial thinking

EDITORIAL THINKING presents and explores editorial processes in artistic practices. The exhibition brings together works, publications and approaches to contemporary art through a process-based working method which could be considered an editorial mode or lens. EDITORIALTHINKING can be understood as a way to observe the world with multiple temporalities and focus, navigating through formats and collaborating with many agents.

The publishers and artists presented in this exhibition all work with sequences and temporalities of editorial making, producing and organizing; thus serialising, revisiting and recontextualizing their works. Simultaneously, this pattern of returning to central subjects through different formats echoes the narrative of Index’ ‘ongoingness’ – an approach that has shaped programming, exhibition making and continues to shape how Index works with and in support of artists.

Now during times of pandemic, it seems more necessary than ever to acknowledge and reflect upon artistic practices that investigate modes of connection. Artists continually find and invent ways to interact and to connect with groups of people and individuals, changing their artistic practices poetically and grammatically. In EDITORIAL THINKING we present some of these practices where the visitor becomes a partner in a dialogue, a reader, a thinker, the main recipient or the narrator.

– With her series of works, Rosa Barba starts from the understanding that a publication can be cinema: every edition of Printed Cinema is a publication, but it is also a film. A film to be touched while turning the pages, reading the texts and looking at the images. The film happens in our hands and the publication becomes something more than just paper.

– In 2011, Alex Reynolds created a specific narrative for a limited number of Stockholm residents. Produced by MAP (Mobile Art Production) and then published by Biel Books Men de är inte du (But They Are Not You) used the postal system to return letters to their senders – or supposedly to the ones who sent them. The letters were real but had in fact never been written by their senders: these individuals became characters in a fragmented story taking place between reality and fiction, framing a prolonged artistic action which played out in its own temporality.

– Pontus Pettersson activates choreographic layers in the exhibition, “editing” the members of the Index team. Clothes and a series of secret objects become part of everyday life within the exhibition space. The choreographic aspect of Pettersson’s practice entails a level of freedom for the participants and, at the same time, a score or set of edited rules.

– The Book Lovers is a research project by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska focusing on artists novels. In EDITORIAL THINKING, the Book Lovers present a collection of more than 500 novels written by artists who decided to use the book as an artistic practice, transforming visitors to readers.

– The exhibition includes also editorial work by OEI, the Stockholm-based magazine that has been challenging ways of editing and publishing a publication since it was founded in 1999. In EDITORIAL THINKING, the editors of OEI, Cecilia Grönberg and Jonas (J) Magnusson, aesthetically present some editorial decisions behind the editions of the magazine.

As a satellite of the exhibition, EDITORIAL THINKING expands its space and mood to the showroom of the new publishing house Praun & Guermouche at Thorildsplan. Books by Praun & Guermouche (edited with artistic intuition) can be found presented at Index, while more information and material from the exhibition is shown at Praun & Guermouche.

Index would like to thank M HKA for loaning the collection of novels presented by The Book Lovers; Akademie Solitude Schloss for their support in the presentation of Alex Reynolds’ works, Mondriaan Fund for their support to The Book Lovers through its contribution scheme ‘Project Grants for Artists’ and Kulturrådet, Stockholms Stad, Region Stockholm and the Spanish Embassy in Stockholm for their generous support to Index.