The entrance

In connection with the reopening of Magasin III, the needs of the new museum model gave rise to a minor renovation. The architecture studio DinellJohansson designed the space to accommodate both exhibitions and various types of program activities, such as artist talks and lectures. Just as the new museum model took over in an already existing institutional history, the same idea was also present in the redesign of the entrance. The architects’ work stemmed from an attitude towards reuse that was not only about preserving objects but also about preserving the artistic energy that exists in the already available. Building on an architecture became a deepening of the existing architectural idea, not a dispersion of it. Significant parts of Magasin III’s previous architecture, designed by John Robert Nilsson Arkitektkontor, were incorporated into the new design. A new entrance desk and serving station were created, designed by Michel Bussien, who took inspiration from the Austrian architect Adolf Loos’ marble works in his Villa Müller in Prague. The reference library, previously located in the entrance, now got its own room. Instead, space was made in the entrance for a discreet bookshop in the form of an angled shelving system with books and catalogs. Three seating furniture pieces were designed by invited artists to make the artist’s presence evident already in the museum entrance. The idea behind the environment was that it would form a link between now and then in the union between artist, architecture, and institution.

Benches

The three benches placed in the museum entrance were added in connection with the reopening of Magasin III and were intended for the museum’s visitors. With the idea of reuse and taking on objects with previous history, artists Carin Ellberg, Lap-See Lam, and Bella Rune were invited by museum director and chief curator Tessa Praun and curator Olga Krzeszowiec Malmsten to design an existing seating furniture each. The artists did not need to relate to each other’s designs, and the only requirement was that the museum’s visitors should be able to use the benches. The idea behind the initiative was to create common seating areas, and at the same time let the presence of art exist already in the entrance – a project that resulted in three benches in the borderland between furniture and artwork. The wooden sofas that form the frame were originally created for the performing arts project Concert Series 5 in 2000 at the Jewish Theater.

Carin Ellberg (b. 1959, Stockholm)
In her artistic practice, Carin Ellberg works with painting, drawing, and sculpture, exploring the boundaries between them. Her work is characterized by an organic and associative visual language, expressed through a variety of media. Motifs and details from paintings often recur in sculptures and installations – a connection that suggests Ellberg’s holistic approach to her work. Everything is fundamentally interconnected. In her sculptures, she often uses everyday and seemingly unassuming materials and objects, such as stones, round iron, glass, pantyhose, toys, and used clothes in combination with bookbinding glue.

Moderplantan och bänken (The Mother Plant and the Bench), 2020
When designing the bench, Carin Ellberg focused on the idea of reuse by linking one of her previous works, Moderplantan (1996), to the seating furniture. Ellberg kept the bench’s wooden structure exposed and let it unite with something that grows. Inspired by nerve pathways, fungal mycelia, and plants’ advanced ways of communicating with each other through underground root systems, Moderplantan branches out from the wall to the bench and a nearby pillar.

What if the older work sat on the wall behind the bench, like a plant? It could grow down, branch out, take over part of the bench, continue to grow over its immediate surroundings. It became a mother plant that forms new, reproduces itself. – Carin Ellberg

Lap-See Lam (b. 1990, Stockholm)
Lap-See Lam creates suggestive and magical narratives that take their starting point in the history of the Swedish Chinese restaurant – a phenomenon that constituted a large part of Sweden’s restaurant scene from the 1970s until the early 2000s. For Lam, whose family ran a Chinese restaurant in Stockholm, the context is highly personal. Through fictional stories set in recreated Chinese restaurant environments, questions about cultural identity, adaptation, and the role of the Chinese restaurant in Swedish cultural history are raised.

Bench (untitled), 2020
Lap-See Lam has covered the bench with a light fabric and placed a neon figure on it. It is like a body – a human representation – sitting there and exuding a kind of cold energy through the transparent glass. In her latest works, Lam has 3D-scanned several Chinese restaurants in Sweden to use the material in upcoming projects. In the process of bringing the scans together, she discovered that people who were in these environments left traces in the form of movements in the point cloud data. It could have been Lap-See Lam herself, the waiters, the chef, or the lunch guests. The figure is thus created by seconds of movement frozen in time. Lam sees it as a figure from previous generations, a materialized “skeleton of movement” – perhaps a ghost.

Like the Chinese restaurant environments, the bench from the Jewish theater carries its own history of guests. It is about memory-bearing places and the significance of objects for memory. Early in the design work, I decided not to redo the bench. It is what it is, and it felt important to respect that. Instead, the bench is covered with a light fabric and a red ribbon, as if in a quick transformation to a festive banquet. My work is about being able to hold on. It’s about time, memory, and transience. Here, the “skeleton of movement” gets to sit down as a guest, on a bench where previous guests have sat, and now hopefully, meets Magasin III’s future guests. – Lap-See Lam

Bella Rune (b. 1971, Stockholm)
Bella Rune creates sculptures with performative elements and experiments with various materials and techniques. Her practice is rooted in an interest in craftsmanship, history, and contemporary culture, and often engages with the place where it is created. The proximity to classical textile traditions, such as weaving, is a recurring theme in her works. Rune is also interested in how new digital media, such as AR (augmented reality), can be used to link physical reality with a virtual world.

Rocking the Love, 2020
Bella Rune was inspired by the history and aesthetics of the original wooden bench. In her reworking, she wanted to literally disrupt the structure of the bench row, resulting in a dismantled and reassembled seating furniture with opposite directions. In the rocking chair-like construction, which also alludes to the warp of a loom, the seated individuals need to relate to each other and jointly control the rhythm of the rocking. The ropes that form the seats are made from recycled PET bottles.

My impulses wanted to literally disrupt the seating and took off from thoughts about parallel tracks and intimate conversations. A love sofa, a swing, and a loom became models for a tribute to collaboration and conflict in the fabric of public discourse. Harbor, sea, and art history steered the course into the Klein blue color, recycled PET bottle rope with the extraterrestrial aunt hair of childhood. – Bella Rune

Unity Purtity Occasional, 2000 by Charles Long

Unity Purity Occasional was created by Charles Long in connection with the exhibition Siobhán Hapaska, Charles Long, Ernesto Neto at Magasin III. With Unity Purity Occasional, Long intended to create a context for a collective purification rite, a handwashing with antibacterial gel. According to the artist himself, the purification ritual aimed at both physical and spiritual cleansing. The work, which was created for a group exhibition in 2000, gained new relevance when it was installed twenty years later in the entrance of Magasin III, in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic.

Initially I had been quite compelled to create a work that made a sacred and communal act out of purifying the social body so that it could have safe physical contact. In the act of washing in public with a small group of people, it would simultaneously bring awareness to us of the sacredness of permeable boundaries; that we are here as separate beings in order to heal as one. To do this we first need to take care of our ‘viruses’, literally and figuratively. I believed this act was both spiritual and biological in the sense that we do not want to add harm in the process of connection. How could we cleanse our spirits and bodies so as to have safe union? The music, the hand gel, the glass and steel forms, and the bodies might reconstruct an ancient ritual we have been doing all along but also pointing to future ritual practices we will need and desire. – Charles Long

Read a longer interview with Charles Long from December 2020 here.