Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, 14-16 February 2014
Part 5/5
Then I took a proper look at Qwerty’s booth while it was a bit quieter on Sunday morning. In the entrance to one side of the 3rd third floor, and popular too, it had always been too busy to see what the Real Estate Agency project was about. It was a fantastic exchange project “buying and selling houses, real estates and properties” by artists from the group, with the artists smartly dressed and talking the talk to make the deal of a lifetime. One of the agents (Indigo Richards) talked me through the portfolios and asked what I had to exchange/buy with. I offered one of my newspapers and told her about it. Then I asked to exchange with Jens Andersen’s property for an imaginary space – something new he would design in response to the newspaper. He drew me a simple platform made of planks on the imaginary scape pinned up in the booth and we closed the deal signing the contract, a photographed handshake and a shot of schnapps. I think the platform is the perfect space to read a newspaper from.
My last stop, schnapps fuelled, before heading to the airport was the TFHMF Award 2014 by the Tupajumi Foundation (NL) and HeavyMerryFinland; a crowd-funded award presenting the 6 shortlisted candidates. For SEK10 you could vote, for SEK20 you could vote and get a pencil and for SEK200 you could vote and get a tote bag. I knew already who I wanted to vote for, but was interested to know more about the project. The collaboration came about from both organisations meeting at a previous Supermarket and decided to put forward a joint venture. The model is simple: The Supermarket visitors vote for one of the shortlisted artists (from a longlist of 25) and donate the prize money. My vote with my almost last SEK20 was for Pia Sirén’s Cross-Section; a stacked retail cage/trolley filled with industrial materials like a geological cross-section and topped with synthetic grass. I thought for the context of Supermarket this was perfect. I hope she wins!
So, conclusively, getting detailed feedback on the newspaper proved quite challenging. The reaction seemed good – people laughing and taking it away is a big positive. But a more in depth peer review is needed. I did ask a few people if they would email me any further thoughts once they’d had a good look at it – a one liner or any type of review/crit to help me – so that may yet happen. Although other exhibitors were interested in my newspaper, it was hard to gain in depth feedback as they were often much more interested in talking about their own work, which is not surprising. It’s also quite a lot of content so anything beyond a surface evaluation on the spot is impractical in the art fair context. It was a good exercise to test the reception of it though and I feel I accomplished my objectives with some possible follow ups through new contacts and ideas to further evaluate it through peer networks.
I’m particularly thankful I got to spend all 4 days at the fair and go each day in shorter visits, rather than try to cram everything into 1 day or even 2. It gave me time to reflect and plan what to do in the visits I made after getting a feel for it and assessing the size, as well as spend a bit of time checking out the city and the Moderna Museet. So, big thanks to University of Huddersfield for part funding my trip!
