Metod
Sanna Helena Berger
March 14 - April 15, 2025
Mousse Magazine
Sanna Helena Berger is a long-time internet friend of Max’s, since 2016 or so, through the usual comments and
likes and what have you. In 2018, she participated in the legendary Index 19, a wednesday night bar-slash-art-
program at Index - The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation run by Max, Joanna Nordin and the director Axel
Wieder. Looking back at photos from that time in preparation for this show, we find various characters from the
scene swinging beers and swinging from the ceiling, thinking to ourselves that these pictures can come in handy in many different ways in the future. We talk a lot about documentation. The stern black-and-white analogue
photographs of minimalist sculptures and their shadows. The documentation of art-as-art,“from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions”. The yellow and speedy swishy-swooshy analogue cum. digital
pictures from the 90s, often from openings and with lots of people and dogs in them, where all exhibitions look like
the kind of exhibitions you’d see in the movies. These days, even when artists have the power to present themselves
in pictures of their own choice and in their own channels, most of them try to mimic the commercial aesthetics of
a gallery, smiling in front of their artwork in a highly edited head-shot taken by their professional photographer
friend. What’s with that?
Our pictures often look kinda swishy-swooshy. We’d rather spend the money on the artist and nice drinks and art is
supposed to be experienced irl anyway. Katarina is getting better at taking nice pictures of the gallery. It’s about
getting to know the angles. We took most pictures with disposable cameras until we understood how expensive it was to develop the film. Antics’ lighting is a salad of spotlights with various Kelvin. We spoke briefly about
exchanging them for cold fluorescent tubes but have now come to like the lighting for what it is. Last time we met
Axel Wieder was when Katarina did a residency in Norway in 2023 and we went to his house for dinner. Other sites
during that trip were Fantofts stavkyrka and the Grieg museum. Joanna is now the director at Bonniers konsthall,
located in the same block as we picked up the Dan Graham for our first show.
Anyway, since Index 19, Sanna and Max have bounced attempts to meet again back and forth but Sanna is based
in Berlin. When searching our inboxes, Max sent Katarina an email on Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 11:12 AM saying“Vi
borde visa henne Puss Max Ronnersjö” and here we are. What followed was a chain of 90+ emails and video calls
arranged around our daughters’ bedtimes. Sanna writes the long ones and we reply with the short ones – now
a document over the morphology of ideas that lead to the constellation made from Billy shelving units that you
can witness in the main room. There is also a small coin in the wall. Before Sanna’s arrival in Stockholm, we drove
around and sourced the shelves from various parts of town. They have a nice range of shades of white-going-on-
yellow. Some of them, the ones with the glass doors, must be over 45 years old, Sanna says. The older ones are
much sturdier and better than the newer ones, that are more like cardboard. The Lightbulb Conspiracy can thus be
applied to shelves. One email from Sanna contains a quote from Jean Baudrillard:
“At one extreme, the strictly practical object acquires a social status: this is the case with the machine. At the
opposite extreme, the pure object devoid of any function or completely abstracted from its use, takes on a strictly
subjective status: it becomes part of a collection. It ceases to be a carpet, a table, a compass or a knick-knack and
becomes an object in the sense in which a collector will say‘a beautiful object’rather than specifying it, for example
as ’a beautiful statuette’. An object no longer specified by its function is defined by the subject. Our ordinary
environment is always ambiguous: functionality is forever collapsing into subjectivity.”
It seems to be of great importance though we never had the time to form groups and discuss the System of
Objects in detail, the bourgeoisie and their pastels and Jean’s favourite three words“by way of ”. Sanna wanted to
know more about Antics in order for her to conjure up her future show. One condition is that we show artists that
we think will be interesting to talk about art with. Another one is to contribute to the scene by showing artists that
would otherwise not have been shown in Stockholm. A third is transparency. As Antics is a tool to access knowledge
about art and the art world, not available if you only look at these things from the artist’s point of view. We make a
point of sharing this knowledge (whenever we find the time for it). The four most common questions we receive are:
How much is the rent? How did you get this space? What have you sold? Is this Cecilia Hillström Gallery?
An assumption is therefore that people are more interested in how a show came about than the artist’s footnotes.
That’s how the format for our exhibition texts crystallised, starting off with the text for Anders Edström’s Paints
series. To mimic his dead-pan process, we wrote an equally dead-pan text describing this process in detail, including
which camera he used, a holy grail of knowledge to some and a strange series of numbers and letters to others. The
week leading up to the opening of a show, we collect notes in a document and the evening before (but most often in
the morning of) the opening we stitch it all together into a text about the exhibition – an exhibition text. We hope
that this can give the texts a certain sincerity and urgency, hot off the press with little to no editing. For the Gunvor
Nelson show, no text at all came out of this machine. Katarina wanted to write it the night before the show but our
daughter caught a fever and we spent the entire day leading up to the opening in the emergency room.
Also interlaced with the conception of Antics were animated conversations at the dinner table about Conceptual
Art, in the now and in the then. The points raised were then brought into the gallery and projected at pretty
much everyone who crossed our path, forcing them to sit down over a cup of black coffee in stolen Iittala Teema
mugs by the Piet Hein + Bruno Mathsson table in the first room and share their version of whatever happened to
Conceptual Art and Who’s Afraid Of It? Our first show was a tribute to our fairy godfather Dan Graham, perhaps
to set the tone for what was to come. A collector lent us a model for a pavilion and a few weeks after the opening
of the show we added our own Dan Graham print. We made our first issue of Kärlet, an art-philosophical journal
and sort of love letter to Dan. Katarina wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay titled Why Have There Been No
Great Swedish Conceptual Artists? - A Think Piece, riffing off a perceived lack of conceptual thinking (a
tautology) about art in Swedish art history as well as Dan’s magazine works.
We liked the idea of putting the office in the front room to demonstrate our honesty and to reference Michael Asher.
It’s until this day hard to say if the attempts made by Michael Asher and his peers to turn the system upside-down
and inside-out were ever successful or will ever be considered successful, whatever a successful artwork is. Maybe he didn’t think so either. Maybe he was just curious to see what would happen. Statistically, most people probably
won’t have much to say about Conceptual Art. Others don’t think about much else. Why is it that a plockepinn of
IKEA shelving, or some strings of yarn can move someone to tears, but others not? And as an opposite, why is it
that some that are met with realistic oil paintings of Folkhemmet catch the Stendahl Syndrome while others feel
indifferent? A text that tries to grasp this conundrum is Why Does Fred Sandback’s Work Make Me Cry?
by Andrea Fraser that highlights the sentimental side of Conceptual Art through Fred Sandback’s sculptures. You
should read it. We saw them, his sculptures, when we visited the DIA Beacon in 2023. We saw Senga Nengudi’s large
sheet of bubble wrap on the floor. It was fantastic. We “saw” Stanley Brouwn’s empty room with but a small wall
text reading:
how empty is this space?
all the planets, thus including planet earth, are in a constant“shower”
of cosmic rays.
in this space, just as in every building on earth, it is also a case of
“raining cosmic rays”.
walking consciously through the invisible cosmic rays in this space
confirms, intensifies the presence of this space.
stanley brown 1970/2009
We saw The Columbia “C” by the Harlem River on our way back home to Bed Stuy. But a strong art experience is
hard to curate according to a trip Upstate, though we were lucky that day that the planets aligned. There used to be
a mysterious furniture business on the opposite side of our street in Blackeberg with a system of objects in constant
circulation. Each day we were met by the sight of Billy’s (Billies?) and other second-third-forth-hand furniture
in various constellations, beautiful because they had just landed where they fell. It would be impossible to make
sculptures as effortlessly perfect. We could only take pictures of them, waiting for a great idea of what to do with
with the pictures to strike us.