the Skissernas Museum: The Fake, The False and the Fraudulent: coding and uncoding public monuments in contested spaces

1. Patrick Amsellem, Director Skissernas
2. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst
3. Alessandro Petti, professor in Architecture and Social Justice founder of DAAR
4. Johanna Bratel Artist

Moderator: Peter Lang Professor of Architectural Theory and History at the RIA.

In Partnership with R-Lab and the  Skissernas Museum.

 Link here to r-Lab web page on the Skissernas-Lund, and Johanna Bratel’s Malmö tour of significant and insignificant monuments.

Biographies:

Patrick Amsellem serves as the director of the Skissernas Museum, and was  Associate Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum. Formerly a curator at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden, Patrick organized the first Swedish exhibition of the work of Andreas Gursky and was part of the curatorial team that produced a major series of exhibitions under the leadership of Lars Nittve. He has written about art for Stockholm’s major newspaper Svenska Dagbladet and was also a critic for the Swedish daily newspaper Kvällposten and for Swedish Public Radio. Patrick has taught at New York University and is the author of several exhibition catalogues. He received a Ph.D. in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

JOHANNA GUSTAFSSON FÜRST is the WINNER OF THE SCULPTURE PRIZE 2017 14.11 – 17.12 2017 STOCKHOLM Gustafsson Fürst, lives and works in Stockholm. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (2003) from the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Stockholm and is active as a lecturer at Konstfack. Johanna Gustafsson Fürst is an artist that uses self-organized platforms, performances, texts, sculptures and site-specific installations to process how everyday life encounters political and social systems and how these merges into objects, surfaces and spaces that affects human relationships.

Alessandro Petti is an Italian architect, artist and educator based in Palestine. Petti’s more recent research interests and projects revolve around the formation of spatial forms for common uses and the critical analysis of its counter forces of expropriation and domination. Latest publication the co-authered book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg 2013). About DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) DAAR co-directors: Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. DAAR is an architectural studio and art residency programme based Palestine.

Johanna Bratel: co-founder of DIS/ORDER  (with Karin Andersson both landscape architects) DIS/ORDER  is an experimental and research based collective. The focus is on the “potential of urban spaces by questioning contemporary conventions about what a city is an can be. We have a norm critical perspective in our work and strive to make what is outside the norm visible, make space for more people and shine a light on unequal power structures in urban environments.

In the upcoming discussion in Lund, a co-sponsored production between the Skissernas Museum and r-Lab at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, we plan to assess how deception in the public sphere becomes an alternative version of truth. It seems wherever we go these days, physical history is misrepresented, whitewashed or dubiously erased.

When considering the subject for the Skissernas, whose collections of public art projects is unrivalled, the question that should be raised is when can  the fake be  “authentic”, when can the “false” be true,  and when is the fraudulent more convincing than the real thing? This is not so much the Benjaminian question on the original work of art in the in the age of  reproducibility, as almost everything today is simply untraceable to some myth of origin,  but rather if the 3D digital scan swished across the smart phone using some Google app depicting an artefact recently pulverised during a drone attack is in fact undisputedly real.