KONSTFACK DEGREE EXHIBITION

Konstfack, Stockholm, Sweden, 2022

 

→ Master's and Art Teacher's Education

→ Master CRAFT!

 

Curated by CuratorLab

Visual Identity by Benedetta Crippa

 

About the Master’s Degree Exhibition

 

Inspired by feminist writer Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, we invite the audience to a reorientation of the school’s architectural, institutional and social premises. The entrance to Konstfack is changed for a week and a “Dialogical Space” is created for conversation, performativity and exchange in its center. The exhibition manifests a continuous negotiation between the individual, the collective and the institution.

 

About CRAFT!

 

After two years of study, dialogue, creation and dreaming, eighteen students graduate from CRAFT! 2022. In their practices, the graduate students approach materiality as a way to question and bend fixed constructions connected to our built environment and everyday life. The affective side of the objects has been freed from the limitations of functionality, as it was formulated in a functionalist 20th century. Material worlds, which extend beyond representation, are explored by focusing on softer, ephemeral and performative aspects.

 

As an art form, handicrafts are unique because the material often takes precedence. Materials, and their mysterious and incomprehensible qualities, can be explored and poeticized. Arts and crafts also help us understand how and why we relate to materials and it makes room for conversations about more complex topics such as identity, anxiety and relationships with non-human actors. It can also be a medium for healing or spirituality.

 

We are reminded that materials can be neglected and often regarded as objects for use and consumption. How can we as artists, teachers, lovers and parents think about these objects? How can we learn to listen, pay attention, reflect and welcome an awareness of what is happening around us and within us? The answer may be to think through materials.

 

Text by Lauren Johnson

& Lovro Japundžić, CuratorLab