IASPIS Open Studios – Autumn 2025
Friday 3 October, 1–8 PM
IASPIS, Maria Skolgata 83, Stockholm
This edition foregrounds practices of listening, walking, reading, and making as methods for producing situated knowledge across visual art, design, publishing, architecture and sound.
We open at 1:00 PM with a welcome by Mika Romanus, Director General, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, and an introduction by IASPIS Guest Curator Corina Oprea.
Across the afternoon: choreographic and sonic performances, conversations on image and machine vision, typography as world-making, the right to design, a collaborative workshop on club architectures and archives, guided urban walking, and performative publishing.
In the second part of the programme we welcome Momtaza Mehri–Poet-in-Residence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, columnist for Tate Etc, and author of Bad Diaspora Poems, winner of the 2023 Forward Prize (Best First Collection) and an Eric Gregory Prize; recipient of a Somerset Maugham Award and a Sky Arts Award, and shortlisted for the 2024 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year—shares from WHITE / THREAD, where the Mediterranean appears as both a sea of wonder and, for many, a space of terror and dispossession.
and
Elena Wolay—music journalist, lecturer, curator, and driving force behind Jazz Är Farligt—closes with a DJ set.
Some sessions have limited capacity—please arrive 10–15 minutes early for tickets. All conversations are in English.
Full timetable follows below.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Alisa Oleva · Anna Pehrsson · Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas (J) Magnusson (OEI) · Christopher West · Eva-Teréz Gölin · Linnea Dalstrand · Maria Toumazou · Nur Horsanalı · Space Black (Rayan Elnayal and Heba Tabidi) · MULU Office (Liu Chao-Tze and Zhou Junsheng)
GUESTS & COLLABORATORS
Brittanie Brown · Sara Walker · Edvard Scott · Elena Wolay · Joanna Zawieja · Katja Aglert · Louise Dahl · Momtaza Mehri · Onkar Kular ·Jan Verwoert
*****
FULL PROGRAMME
▪️1 PM — Welcome address by Mika Romanus, Director General, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee
and
Introduction to the day by Corina Oprea, IASPIS Guest Curator (Foyer)
CONVERSATIONS & PERFORMANCES
▪️1:10 PM — Performance: Mountainbuilding by Anna Pehrsson (Dance Studio)
Movements form mountains that meet the human body – a time perspective beyond our existence. An interface graspable by the human mind.
A live installation where choreography and sculpture meet in the space alongside video material. Dancers: Brittannie Brown, Louise Dahl
▪️1:30 PM — Conversation: Anna Pehrsson & Katja Aglert (Dance Studio)
Body, Landscape and Traces of Extraction — a reflective conversation on the body’s encounter with landscape, the material traces of extraction, and new ways of imagining relations between humans, objects, and ecology.
Guest Katja Aglert is an artist and Lecturer in Fine Art, Department of Fine Art, Konstfack, whose practice engages with landscape, history, and more-than-human perspectives.
▪️1:30 PM — Conversation: Eva-Teréz Gölin & Sara Walker (Studio 7)
Seeing Twice: On Image and Machine Vision — a conversation on the two-dimensional “reality” of machine vision and painting as a way of approaching the digital as material.
Guest Sara Walker is Director of the non-profit organization Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening (SAK), as well as a freelance writer, critic, and curator.
▪️2 PM — Conversation: Christopher West & Edvard Scott (Foyer)
Shaping Words and Worlds — a conversation on typography as a craft and as a narrative force, asking how design shapes meaning and influences the way we read the world.
Guest Edvard Scott is a graphic designer and educator whose work focuses on creative approaches to typography and design. He leads independent design initiatives and occasionally teaches at Beckmans College of Design.
▪️2:30 PM — Workshop: Space Black (Studio 4)
Presentation, discussion and collaborative drawing activity on alternative club spaces.
Space Black is the collaborative practice of Rayan Elnayal and Heba Tabidi, working with visual culture, architecture, and archives to explore Sudanese cultural memory and future imaginaries.
▪️3 PM —Maria Toumazou and Jan Verwoert (Sound Room – passing through the Dance Studio)
15 minutes concert for 8 people at a time
📌Please arrive 10 minutes early to collect your ticket in the Foyer — limited capacity.
Guest Jan Verwoert is a writer, critic, and educator whose essays explore contemporary art, cultural theory, and the politics of emotion.
▪️3:30 PM — Conversation: Nur Horsanalı & Onkar Kular (Studio 6)
Decentring Design
Drawing on their books on the idea of the right to design, Nur Horsanalı and Onkar Kular meet in a conversation about who – and what – gets to participate in design. They explore how design might include both human and more-than-human perspectives, becoming a tool for renegotiating power, creating new relations, and reimagining our shared futures.
Guest Onkar Kular is Professor of Design at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, whose work addresses cultural narratives, participation, and access in design.
▪️4 PM — Conversation: Alisa Oleva and Joanna Zawieja (Studio 5)
Walking Practices: Public Space as a Conversation — how walking becomes a method for sensing, mapping, and re-making public space, moving between choreography and urban strategy.
Guest Joanna Zawieja is an architect and strategist in the project group for the Swedish Holocaust Museum. She has long experience in urban development and public art in the city, including at Statens konstråd (Public Art Agency Sweden) and as an independent practitioner.
▪️4–5 PM — Fika (Kitchen & Lower Floor)
▪️4:30 PM — Adventures in Publishing & Readings in Space
A reading-viewing-talking situation by OEI (Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg), (Project Room)
OEI unfolds a series of publications in a talk highlighting some strata from 25 years of trying to forward the material and entangled agencies of reading, editing, publishing, and distributing.
▪️4:45 PM — Guided Walk: Alisa Oleva
Soft Mapping — a slow walk through the area around IASPIS, using all senses to discover unnoticed corners, sounds, and textures of the city.
📍Please arrive 10 minutes early to collect your ticket in the Foyer — limited capacity.
▪️5 PM — Maria Toumazou and Jan Verwoert (Sound Room – passing through the Dance Studio)
15 minutes concert for 8 people at a time
📍Please arrive 10 minutes early to collect your ticket in the Foyer — limited capacity.
▪️5:30 PM — Space Black Listening Session & Conversation with Elena Wolay (Foyer)
An active listening session where Space Black shares and mixes collections of Sudanese tracks and field recordings, accompanied by a display of research in progress and archival material on Sudanese performance spaces (projected or printed).
The listening blends into a conversation with guest Elena Wolay, music journalist, lecturer, and curator of concerts and exhibitions.
▪️6 PM — Guest Reading: Momtaza Mehri (Foyer)
Guest poet and essayist Momtaza Mehri shares WHITE / THREAD, a hybrid work of autotheory and poetry devoted to the Mediterranean Sea as an incubator of both terror and wonder. Her writing moves between history, politics, and intimacy, tracing the afterlives of migration and memory.
“Personal history is interwoven with the sea’s maritime flows, cultural convergences and political ruptures. Exile, expat, immigrant, returnee, tourist, alien, runaway, flâneur — the Mediterranean is a playground for some, an agony for others. It has welcomed and rejected my family. I have made a neighbour of its waters.
Daily encounters rub against each other: second homes in Provence, Libyan slave markets, tourists, knickknack sellers, gap-year kids, pilgrims, big-city escapees, artists seeking sun-bleached self-destruction, domestic workers, smugglers, Claude McKay’s dockers, James Baldwin’s poems written in Istanbul, Italo Calvino’s Venice, C.P. Cavafy’s Alexandria, my mother’s Naples, my father’s student years in Beirut, my own rooftop view in Tunis. A Europe hobbled by economic decline and jingoistic spectres. An Africa restless with its youth’s frustrated dreams. The Horn’s decades-long heartbreaks. Sicily touching Carthage. Arab Springs. Long winters. Longer afternoons on wind-licked beaches.
Each thread tugs on another. WHITE / THREAD is a project of coastal collectivity.”
▪️6:45 PM — Performance: Anna Pehrsson (Dance Studio)
Mountainbuilding — second performance with dancers Louise Dahl and Anna Pehrsson.
▪️6:45–8 PM — DJ: Elena Wolay (Foyer)
Guest Elena Wolay is a music journalist, lecturer, and curator of concerts and exhibitions. Since 2011, she has run the platform Jazz Är Farligt and has been described as one of the driving forces of Sweden’s alternative music scene. She currently works as a music and literature officer for the City of Malmö.
Her recent curatorial projects include Sun Ra at Mellanrummet, Malmö Konsthall (2021), two major presentations of Åke Hodell — at Malmö Konsthall (2022) and 220 Volt Buddha at Kalmar konstmuseum (2022) — and participation as an artist in the group exhibition File under Freedom at Bergen Kunsthall (2022). She also curated the music programme at Uppsala Art Museum (2022–2023).
Wolay’s work is deeply rooted in music that often touches the unexpected, the raw, and the cross-disciplinary.
Drinks and snacks served.
Throughout the Day
Installations & Reading Rooms:
OEI transforms the Project Room into an expanded reading room
Maria Toumazou invites you into a minimal reading room in the Sound Room, passing through the Dance Studio — a quiet space for reflection and encounter with her artist bookworks.
Workshop: Floorplane by MULU Office (Studio 1) — exploring the IASPIS floorplan as a starting point for collaborative making
Installation: Textile work by Linnea Dalstrand (Foyer).
OEI (Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg) – A Layered Love #2 (A passage grave exploded, visually and verbally reconstructed), (Studio 9)
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Alisa Oleva · Anna Pehrsson · Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas (J) Magnusson (OEI) · Christopher West · Eva-Teréz Gölin · Linnea Dalstrand · Maria Toumazou · Nur Horsanalı · Space Black (Rayan Elnayal and Heba Tabidi) · MULU Office (Liu Chao-Tze and Zhou Junsheng)
GUESTS & COLLABORATORS
Brittanie Brown · Sara Walker · Edvard Scott · Elena Wolay · Joanna Zawieja · Katja Aglert · Louise Dahl · Momtaza Mehri · Onkar Kular ·Jan Verwoert
All conversations are in English.
Guest Curator: Corina Oprea
Graphic design (poster): Aron Kullander-Östling with typeface developed by Christopher West
Graphic design (programme brochure): MULU Office (Liu Chao-Tze and Zhou Junsheng)
Also check out other Arts events in Stockholm, Literary Art events in Stockholm, Music events in Stockholm.
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