Index Foundation

In February 2026, Index Teen Advisory Board members Dylan Murray, Kiara Eifert, Elin Karlsson, Tiffany Olafson and Moa Zhang had a conversation with Index directors Marti Manen and Isabella Tjäder reflecting on the work leading up to the publication ”Reaching Out: A Book on Agency, Care, Identity, and…” In this conversation, they share the experiences, methods, andquestions that shaped the book, s...

In September 2025, two hours before the opening of Claudia Pagès Rabal’s exhibition at Index, Claudia engaged in a conversation about her practice with Index’s co-directors, Marti Manen and Isabella Tjäder. Topics such as language and performance in art, the problematic notion of truth, evidence and traces, extended time, the gaze of the camera, paper production, and the actof putting language int...

In the closing week of her exhibition SHOCK VALUE (August 2025), Madeleine Andersson, joined by her longtime collaborator Mandus Ridefelt, invited a wide range of artists, curators and theorists to explore a reimagined relationship between art and science. In this podcast, you will hear Andersson and Ridefelt as they met on the day before the symposium to discuss stupidity, moving between fields o...

In February 2025, as part of the program for the exhibition “Call It Museum”, Giovanna Esposito Yussif was at Index to talk about the Museum of Impossible Forms. From a very specific context in Helsinki, the Museum of Impossible Forms defines a community of practice, balancing between relevance and urgency. Giovanna Esposito Yussif -Director of the Museumo of Impossible Forms- talks about decoloni...

In March 6th 2025, as a part of the exhibition CALL IT MUSEUM, Index invited Hawaf collective to present their project Sahab Museum. Since 2021 they’ve gathered around the idea of creating a community in order to build a museum in Gaza – the Sahab Imaginary Museum. Hawaf collective is a multidisciplinary collective composed of four founding members and at Index two of the members, artists Salman N...

A couple of years after the series of talks Diares, Notes and Sketches was held at Index, Jonatan Habib Engqvist (co-editor of Ord&Bild) and Isabella Tjäder (co-director of Index) met to remember and talk about this series of conversations organized having Jonas Mekas as starting point for a multiple dialogue on artistic, poetic, editorial and cinematic practices.   The series Diaries Notes an...

For the centennial of poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index teamed up with arts and culture magazine Ord&Bild to host a three-part screening series showing Mekas' experimental diary film Walden from 1968. The program used Walden as a point of departure to look at Mekas' important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for the arts.  This podcast presents the third...

For the centennial of poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index teamed up with arts and culture magazine Ord&Bild to host a three-part screening series showing Mekas' experimental diary film Walden from 1968. The program used Walden as a point of departure to look at Mekas' important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for the arts.  This is the second session in t...

For the centennial of poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index teamed up with arts and culture magazine Ord&Bild to host a three-part screening series showing Mekas' experimental diary film Walden from 1968. The program used Walden as a point of departure to look at Mekas' important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for the arts.  This podcast features the first...

In September 2024, the exhibition 1000 Villages with Massinissa Selmani was opened at Index. A couple of days after the opening, the exhibition became the context for this talk between Natasha Marie Llorens (curator of the exhibition), Massinissa Selmani (artist), and Khaled Bouzidi (director of Rhizome in Algiers). The talk was part of September Sessions, the contemporary art festival organized b...

ITAB members talk with artist Josefin Arnell about sound and image, artistic production, silence in museums and what it means to listen to Wagner while doing your dishes. The members of Index Teen Advisory Board met Josefin Arnell in front of an audience at Index to talk about their own experiences relating to art, sharing thoughts and ideas regarding film production and the importance of sound an...

Over the past year, the Index Teen Advisory Board has been focusing on sound as a means of distribution, communication and understanding, relating to the institution. Through workshops with Emma Dominguez, Rut-Karin Zettergren, Moa Franzén, Lisen Pousette and Joe Rowley, along with a meeting with the teen advisory boards of Praksis and Publics, the 2023-24 advisory board has come to think about th...

At Index, in February 2024, at the opening of Josefin Arnell’s exhibition CRYBABY, the artist was in conversation with the Index team, in a discussion about film and art practices, processes, and methodologies, how to work with reality and fiction. The exhibition at Index presents 8 films by Josefin Arnell to be watched at short distance.   In this conversation, now presented here as a podcast, Jo...

In February 2024 Index had a conversation with Sandi Hilal about heritage, refugee camps, society, war, Gaza and destruction.  Sandi Hilal runs - together with Alessandro Petti- DAAR, the research practice that received the Golden Lion at the architecture Venice Biennale in 2023. Part of their practice has been focused on the conditions in Palestine and the prolonged temporality represented by the...

In September of 2023, Index opened the exhibition “Catti Brandelius: MISS UNIVERSUM". it presents an exhaustive approach to what Catti Brandelius' alter ego Miss Universum meant during the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s. The show creates a documentary setting and a platform to observe Brandelius' work from contemporary perspectives. Archive material, posters, objects, p...

In June 2023, curators Maria Lind, Jan-Erik Lundström and Erik Sandberg met at Index to talk about curatorial practice in the Nordic countries, with special focus on the work done by Jan-Erik Lundström at Moderna Museet and its photographic department, at Bild Museet in Umeå and the Sami Center for Contemporary Art in Karasjok. Periphery and center, curatorial ethics, cartography and how to observ...

On 20 April, 2023, in the context of Index’s Focus on Feminisms, the artists Marianna Feher and Stacey de Voe presented DUAL ACT: a collaborative project built together with a number of  female protagonists, collecting narratives and reviving two historical anti-fascist women’s organizations: Antifašistički Front Žena in former Yugoslavia and Mujeres Libres in Spain. Mixing historical facts with f...

How do we know - Institutional listening and young agency in the arts is a publication co-produced by the teen advisory boards of Index, the Oslo based art catalyst Praksis and Helsinki based Publics. The publication features texts, interviews and design proposals that the boards have developed in correspondence with each other and through collaborations with a number of artists. This publication...

In the exhibition THE TIDAL ZONE, at Index until the 12th of February 2023, the artist Kajsa Dahlberg offers a series of connections between the individual and the collective, between structures and bodies, reception, and perception. The show navigates through different approaches to the intricate relationship between images, objects and subjects. In the podcast you're about to hear...

In November 2022, Index presented a ten-day exhibition, FILMS AGAINST CAPITALISM, which featured five video projects including sculptural video works, that all sprang from research conducted by the artist Melanie Gilligan during her PhD studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In the conversation Melanie Gilligan teams up with Marti Manen, director at Index, and Petra Bauer, Head of Dep...

The 59th edition of the Venice Biennale presented in 2022, for the first time in its long history, a majority of women artists. The main exhibition, curated by the Italian and New York based Cecilia Alemani, offered continuous dialogues in time, a specific sensuality and many readings beyond traditional history writing. Anne Klontz and Marti Manen from Index team talk with Cecilia Alemani about th...

In June 2022 – the exhibition with Linnea Hansander installed and running – previous Index interns Melike Sökmen and Pilar Borrajo met with director Marti Manen in the archive-tool storage-photocopy room behind the exhibition space at Index to talk about exhibition practices, text production and critical positions. Melike Sökmen and Pilar Borrajo were active at Index during the exhibitions with Pa...

Aural Exhibitions, a series of sound only exhibitions produced by Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation.  The exhibition has traditionally been understood as a physical space, a place where objects are included. Over time, there has been an increase in desire to escape from these spaces and to jump directly to the immaterial; temporality and the subjective experience has defined its...

The poem becomes the format for the Aural Exhibition The Darkness That Rests on Black Nothingness , curated by Mmabatho Thobejane who is inspired by the words of Dionne Brand and the images of David Hammons. Mmabatho Thobejane is a Stockholm-based curator dedicated among other things to creating spaces for music and sound, merging them together as a form of resistance. “The Aural Exhibitions” are...

The Aural Exhibition titled “Seeing Through” by the writer, activist and sometime curator Lucy Lippard is a collage, weaving together visions and relationships from different times in her life that she experienced around her…. As Lucy describes “…collage has been an obsession and a medium for me. The Dada and surrealist idea of juxtaposition of unlikes as the source of a new reality probably under...