TID
Cecilia Edefalk
November 21 - December 20, 2025
Photos by Viktor Fordell
We’re writing this in the car on our way to install Cecilia’s show. It’s 9:30 on Tuesday, November 18th. We’re
meeting Cecilia and Sara there at 10. Sofia Curman is making a film about Cecilia, and Max helped out with a
projection last night for a sequence in the film. He came home late because we needed the media player for the video
work. Max started stretching canvases for Cecilia a couple of years ago—probably early 2023, around the same
time he met Katarina—and now works with her regularly. Katarina also visits once in a while, doing what she
loves most: scanning documents.
Apart from her Självporträtt med Pistol, Cecilia’s photographs seldom take center stage in the lore that surrounds
her. The photographs she took around the same time that these word paintings were made are so good—like the
stuff she made with her friends in their Mejan studios. It’s such a thrill to talk to Cecilia about that time. Who were
her friends? What bars did she go to? What artists were important to her and her peers? With all the photographs’
youthful energy, you can tell she was already herself. Since Antics’ conception, we’ve talked about wanting to show
her early photography. However, since Cecilia is represented by Galerie Nordenhake here in Stockholm, as well as
Gladstone and carlier | gebauer, doing a solo show at another Stockholm gallery is not a given.
Then Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening, run by Anna Hesselbom and Sara Walker, came along and suggested we do
the release for this year’s member’s edition together. Sara Walker, Max, Katarina, and Cecilia (Anna couldn’t make
it) all met in Cecilia’s studio in September, where the release event quickly developed into an exhibition. Max was
the technician at Nordenhake for a long time and still often pops by on different errands and to pet Margareta’s dog
Isa. Max exhibited Ben Loveless’ wooden spoons at an AW. We call them now and then for advice on consignments
and whatnot. Finally, the stars aligned to facilitate this kind of collaboration.
Tid’s core is a series of word paintings that Cecilia made in 1983, when she was still at Mejan. They were never kept
secret; they are just “earlier works” spread out among friends, early collectors, and in Cecilia’s home. Cecilia had
also found stacks of sketch material—words on bits of paper—from which she’d selected the words that ended up as paintings. She got the idea to make a video work that revisits the process behind the words, filming herself
going through notes made in 1983 in 2025. We filmed it on Max’s phone there and then, saying we could do a more
prepared shot another time. In the end, we used this first footage, as it contained an energy that would be hard to
re-stage. We’re showing it here on a monitor that we’ve found and kept for the right occasion. It only sends a black-
and-white signal, but it looked good this way. It adds a kind of artificial layer of “the past,” which is a trope that is
fun to play around with in this context, as the video is surrounded by works made at very different times in Cecilia’s
life and career.
That same session started the inevitable conversations about how these works would come across to a 2025 audience.
Sovjet then, Sovjet now. They could look like classic conceptual text-art, but they’re not, strictly speaking. Cecilia
selected words that are so dense with meaning that they might be perceived as just as empty—surfaces to project
yourself onto. Or to say aloud to yourself until it becomes just a motion of the mouth and the mind, more mantra
than manifesto. Conceptual Art with a capital C could be said to let the artist’s idea be the machine that makes the
art, and/or to be the idea that appears for the viewer in their mind’s eye. Look at Cecilia’s word paintings and then
close your eyes, and see their negative image appear on your eyelids. Somehow, this message appearing as both word
and image perfectly connects the dry, analytical branch of Conceptual Art with the wet, Zen-Buddhist or romantic
ditos.
However, they weren’t made in the late ’60s but in the early ’80s, where a “post-” must be added to the “conceptual,”
and thus a layer of self-awareness. For the occasion of an exhibition in 2025, these “signs” are paired with other
types of word-based works. Ceci est une reproduction makes a direct reference to the aesthetics of linguistic art.
There is humor to it, though it’s hard to pin down exactly how it operates, nor would this humor ever be successful
without the honesty and immediacy that Cecilia is able to charge every single work with. We think about other
series of pictures and paintings of Cecilia’s and the tenderness and urgency that emerges when you repeat an image
or revisit a motif over and over again, until it’s time to let go.
Around the same time the word paintings were made, the Pictures Generation, as defined by Douglas Crimp, was
happening Over There. We’re curious to know the correlation—how many handshakes apart the post-modernists
in Stockholm and New York were at the time. Were the common denominators just in the air, or actively discussed
over the phone? We trace the morphology of the meaning of the word appropriation from its emergence until now.
Many artists, like Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, worked in advertising, learning the trade and the aesthetic
they’d use to critique the emergence of this same trade in the Information Age. Cecilia also started out with
typography. This show gives us the opportunity to revisit these things while actually getting to hold in our hands
artworks that were made during that time.
We got the idea to do a talk at the gallery about the art scene in the ’80s, which will act as a closing event for Tid
but also lead us toward the next group show, described below. We’ll organize this sometime in January, but we
haven’t announced it to the public yet.
At the opening of Annika Eriksson’s show for September Sessions, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen asked Max if
we’d become a space for hire—a comment as smug as it was poignant. As Antics had mysteriously drifted toward a
logistical and financial meltdown, we decided not to squeeze out more shows for a good while. If friends asked, there
was momentum, and we liked the idea, we said yes. Doing shows with friends has become a way to make time for
hanging out in between full-time jobs and taking care of Rosa. Art is a form of socialization. Meanwhile, we’ve been
saving up for a group show, aiming for the vernissage in mid-February, with the working title New Pictures, New
Sculpture.
How artworks and art work is valued is of continuous interest to us, and we use Antics as a space to investigate
this. An exhibition that suggests alternative views on what an artistic practice can or must be has long been in
the making, and spontaneously developed into a kind of “picture show.” Art Club2000, Anders Edström, Mona
Varichon, Kai Yoshiura, Ingrid Blix, and Tony Karlsson Savci are confirmed to take part so far, hopefully with
a contribution by Teen Advisory Board and a screening of video works by some of the exhibiting artists as a
closing event. This constellation is a mix between previously exhibited artists, our immediate friend circle, and
international artists that we’ve admired from afar. After that, we’ll do a solo show with Damian de Arteaga, a
painter and Max’s dad’s ex-colleague at ATG.
Once Tid is installed, Viktor Fordell will come and document it. Katarina normally takes the pictures, but this time
SAK sponsored a “real” photographer. On Friday, we’ll buy drinks and ice, print this text and the work list, set up
the first room as a nice environment for all of SAK’s members to come collect their artwork, prop the door open
with the fire extinguisher, and see who shows up.