Conceptual art and craft have long been regarded as opposite ends of a spectrum between high and low within the arts—a division that today feels increasingly outdated.

The exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall focuses on the practices of contemporary artists. Several of the artists use materials, techniques, and references drawn from older traditions, which here create entry points into current discussions on consumption, production, and democracy. Many of the works on view take their starting point in collective labor and the transmission of knowledge, and they make visible a process that typically takes place in the studio but has here moved into the exhibition space.

The works in the exhibition New Materialism show how difficult it is to maintain a distinction between form and content, and how content also emerges from the material rather than merely being conveyed by it. The physical and the tactile are realities that we evidently neither want nor are able to disregard.

– Magnus af Petersens, Director and Curator

Some of the participating artists—such as Éva Mag, Lee Mingwei, Ellen Lesperance, and Theaster Gates—create works that evolve and change throughout the exhibition period, in collaboration with volunteer visitors, apprentices, and paid craftspeople. Here, participation is part of the work and a prerequisite for its realization.

Both Katrine Helmersson and Abdoulaye Konaté, as well as Francis Upritchard and Tonico Lemos Auad, have created artworks that relate to amulets—objects and materials with magical qualities. Here, one finds parallels to many new materialist ideas about material as something almost alive, in constant change and continuous becoming. It is a view of material that aligns with animism, the belief that nature is ensouled.

In the works of Andrea Büttner, Andreas Eriksson, Petrit Halilaj, Sheila Hicks, and Britta Marakatt-Labba, material serves as a point of departure for illuminating personal and collective memories and histories. This may concern the memory of the material itself—how a material has traveled between different countries or contexts and been shaped by different hands—or the memory of people, and how stories can be told, processed, and developed through techniques such as knitting, weaving, sewing, clay, and ceramics. Here, the sensual, tactile, and inherent qualities of the works are placed at the center.

Bild: Éva Mag, Embossment – point lace, 2018, textil i ram av konstnären (plexiglas, trä och aluminum), 91,5 x 121,5 x 5 cm.