Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014
Part 1/5
With my rubbish newspapers hot of the press, I flew to Stockholm to begin distribution at Supermarket Art Fair with Paper Gallery. I got there in time for the preview and piled the papers up on the floor underneath the video loop which also included two of my videos Brown Paper Bag Box and Static. My two main objectives attending the fair were to obtain direct feedback on my newspaper and to network (the specific funding that paid for my flight and half of the accommodation was from the University of Huddersfield’s International Networking Fund). As the preview started to get busy, I soon realised that anyone picking up my newspaper was quickly scanning through it and taking it to read later as there was much to see, so I took a look around too.
The fair was housed in the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern across the length of the third floor and half of the fifth. Other floors had cinemas, a library and cafe bars and a restaurant. Paper Gallery was on the third floor opposite a Japanese gallery representing outsider art. The fair showcases artist-run initiatives; galleries, studio groups and some groups without a physical base, from various locations from Scandinavia and Europe as well as the US, Georgia, Albania, South Africa, Syria, Egypt, Australia and more. The variety of projects was impressive. Many took the standard gallery fair model and had samples of represented artists for sale (often as artist-run initiatives they were representing themselves). Others took more interactive approaches with some performances too.
I found the preview a bit odd. Maybe due to the day of travelling or maybe that I hadn’t been to a preview in absolutely ages! There were people coming to support their friends and lots of people with very cool glasses presumably local art crowd types. The preview wasn’t really made public and presumably invite only, but then everyone was permitted entrance (on the public opening days there was a charge of SEK120 for one day pass – roughly £12). The bar was extortionately priced and the exhibitors had their own booze that would be given out to important people. So nothing strange there. The exhibitors had mainly been around installing for the days prior to opening and had maybe had a chance to meet each other briefly, but I didn’t sense there was much interaction going on between them (yet). People seemed a bit apprehensive, standing by their respective booths waiting expectantly for visitors to look, talk and maybe buy. I don’t know any Swedish, or the other mainly Scandinavian languages being spoken, so it was difficult to eavesdrop what was being said. I did have a good chat with Simon and David at Paper Gallery and a quick chat with the artist studio group Atlantic House from Cape Town who had made a recycling documentary project specifically for the fair, but after a while I decided to come back on Friday afternoon with more energy.
