Berättelsen om Magasin III

Five Americans arrived in Stockholm in 1987. They did not disembark onto Swedish soil upon official invitation. Discounting the tax authorities, not many officials will have taken notice of the visitors. Certainly not the cultural public, for the travel seemed a merely private one. Yet the works arriving then and there, by Lynda Benglis, John Chamberlain, Joel Fisher, Mel Kendrick and Robert Terrien, came to stay. Few of them had been seen in the country or wider Nordic region ever before. They were subsequently joined by several hundred others. What has happened during the thirty years following the initial landing can be summarized in its most rudimentary form as follows: 110 exhibitions, 135 productions, 1100 works in more than 18000 objects.

Another group of five visitors are setting out on a very different trail in the summer of 2020. They are gathered in a vast, carefully lit entrée area and awaiting to be collected for a director’s tour behind the scenes at Magasin III. An institution then at the end of its self-imposed three-year long closure, giving breathing space to an introspective intermission. Closed to the public, and yet very much opening-up in new ways. The tour sets out from the main exhibition areas, straddling the major and minor spaces over two floors, curves around half opened wooden shipping crates where works of art are being handled by the chief technician, and finally crosses both the collection and the packing rooms to finish in the about to be completed new reference library. On show are several A-Z Wagon Stations by artist Andrea Zittel, originating from her utopian living structures in California. The compact and steely works are invitingly flipped open for probing glances into their curious insides. Zittel’s practice has the very American hands-on and individualist air about it that has been travelling with Magasin III from the very beginning.

These works themselves are travelers, for a brief check-up and revisit at the museum where they were shown and had inspired a major production in 2011, and now in transit from Magasin III’s art storage to Accelerator, the academically inclined exhibition space that was developed out of Magasin III’s involvement in the curating master’s program and is now permanently located on Stockholm University’s campus. The concept of a revisit has become crucial to Magasin III over the years, as the tour’s participants have opportunity to learn when hearing from the staff during their hour-long visit about the place’s understanding of an artistic hub, where artists are invited to show and produce, as a result frequently leaving works in the caring hands of the permanent collection, engage with other artists and contexts, and in many cases, revisit throughout their career to continue the dialogue. But on this occasion Magasin III is most of all looking at itself. Some of the larger halls’ entire wall space covered with printed documentation of over thirty years of exhibition making and projects, conversations, sketches, ideas, thoughts and memories of the visual, written and any other variety. The institution is taking a deep look into the rear-view mirror before choosing a new direction. Inviting the visitors along for the ride, as it should turn out, already constituted a first test run for a new modus operandi yet to be developed and refined.