STOCKHOLM.- A Larger World is Moderna Museet’s project to make the museum's activities and collection more relevant through works that create links to cultural contexts other than those that have formerly prevailed at the museum. Daniel Birnbaum, director, and Ann-Sofi Noring, co-director, report on previous exhibitions and acquisitions and those planned for 2018.

In recent years, Moderna Museet has increasingly been looking beyond the Western metropolises, with regard to exhibitions, lectures and other activities. The artists who participated in group exhibitions such as After Babel (2015) and Manipulate the World (2017) come from six continents. A number of solo shows lately have featured prominent artists from Argentina, Benin, Colombia, Cyprus, Iran, Lebanon, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey. Next season, our exhibitions will clearly reflect the ambition to be an open museum in a larger world. 2018 starts with a solo presentation of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, which opens in early February. This is followed in spring by Concrete Matters, a major exhibition of many of the most important Latin American modernists, and Art et Liberté, an exposé of the surrealist movement that emerged in Egypt in 1938-48.

In this way, Moderna Museet’s programme expands beyond the Western perspective that has been characteristic of European art institutions for so many years. But has this made a sufficient impact on the collection? No. Therefore, we have asked for SEK 10 million in government funding for acquisitions of non-European and non-US art. With our project A Larger World, we seek to implement the national cultural policy in a meaningful way, and to develop the national collection in the direction that our times and the arts sector deserves. The first step was eight chairs by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, followed by the acquisition of works by a further twelve artists in the same spirit.

Georges Adéagbo, Benin, The Birth of Stockholm, 2014
Georges Adéagbo’s artistic approach is to explore how the viewer’s cultural framework charges objects and events with meaning. In The Birth of Stockholm he “translates” the Sun Dog Painting in Stockholm Cathedral in the Old Town into a wood relief that he commissioned from an artist in Cotonou, his home town in Benin. It is presented in a gigantic installation, together with a mass of other images and objects bought at flea markets in Stockholm or found in the street.

Etel Adnan, Lebanon, Sans titre, four works, 1973-2014
Politics, aesthetics and war often feature in the works of the author and professor of philosophy Etel Adnan, along with a critique against intolerance. These four paintings are abstract images of shapes that also appear as landscapes with light and shadow as defining elements. They were shown in Madhat Kakei’s Abstract Cabinet at Moderna Museet in 2015, and Adnan also in the Museum’s exhibition After Babel in 2015.

Tala Madani, Iran/USA, Morris Men, 2012
Tala Madani deals with a complex and fragile masculinity in a society where women are seemingly absent. She explores how human phenomena express the zeitgeist, and presents her interpretations in bizarre drawings, paintings and animations that oscillate between abstraction and figuration.

Gabriel Orozco, Mexico, Untitled, six works, 1994-2017
Gabriel Orozco has paved the way for a new form of conceptualism in a Latin American context. The six works by Orozco consist of circles, semi-circles and quarter-circles, in patterns resembling diagrams, painted on “low” materials such as plastic film, photocopies, or airline tickets. The recurring circles in his notebooks are a kind of exercise in concentration that sometimes turns into paintings.

Akram Zaatari, Lebanon, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, 2013
The video work Letter to a Refusing Pilot by Akram Zaatari relates to an event he often heard about as a young man, about an Israeli fighter pilot who was ordered to bomb a Lebanese target, but refused. Zaatari is interested in subjective historiography, where photographic documentation, letters, diaries, films and sound recordings are his materials.

Meriç Algün, Turkey/Sweden, Ö (The Mutual Letter), 2011, Becoming European, 2012
Meriç Algün has made several works that discuss identity, cultures, languages and bureaucracies. In the drawn triptych Becoming European, dates have been stamped in columns, signifying the artist’s EU arrival and departure dates. They are printed in different colours, representing the status she was given by the Migration Agency, for instance, “temporary residence permit” or “pending”. Ö (The Mutual Letter) is a dictionary and an audio work based on 1,270 words that are pronounced differently in Swedish and Turkish despite having the same spelling and meaning.

Kader Attia, France/Algeria, Open Your Eyes, 2010
The act of repairing is central to Kader Attia’s artistic practice. Having grown up in French suburbs and in Algeria, he now lives between Western European Christian traditions and North African Muslim contexts, a complexity that is revealed in his work. The portraits in Open Your Eyes are from various army museums around the world and show soldiers whose bodies and faces were mutilated in the First World War and were then stitched back together.

Rivane Neuenschwander, Brazil, Word/World, 2001
Rivane Neuenschwander has, among many other projects, explored communication channels and contrasts between organisational systems. In Word/World (a collaboration with Cao Guimarães), ants are filmed as they drag and carry small pieces of paper as material for building their hill. The pieces of paper are inscribed with either of two words from the human language: word or world. By using a strong magnifying glass, viewers are able to share the ants’ perspective.

Atsuko Tanaka, Japan, Sakuhin (Work), 1955/2011
Atsuko Tanaka is one of Japan’s most unique and experimental modern artists. In 1955, she joined the radical Osaka-based Gutai group, which combined performance, painting and explorations of chance, time and space. The replica of Tanaka’s installation is a sharp cerise rayon fabric that is kept in perpetual motion by an electric table fan on the floor.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Thailand, nine works, 2000-2013
Moderna Museet’s collection now includes both paintings, sculptures and installations by the thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who was born in Argentina. The paintings are part of a project series with the collective title Fear Eats the Soul, referring to a movie by Fassbinder. One of the installations is a simple house designed by the artist and built in Stockholm. After being exhibited, the house was rebuilt in northern Thailand, where Tiravanija has access to a plot of land and a rice paddy, a place arranged as an enactment of a social situation, where friends and colleagues can come and stay.

Adrián Villar Rojas, Argentina, Los Teatros de Saturno III, from the series Fantasma (Ghost), 2014 and from the series Pedazos de las personas que amamos (Pieces of the People We Love), 2007.
A museum is based on the concept of classifying and preserving objects, but Adrián Villar Rojas’ works in organic materials can grow, change and decompose. Los Teatros de Saturno III is a large collection of remarkable objects – a sneaker, a melon peel filled with plaster, a chicken bone –in a state of metamorphosis that rebuts the notion of the finished work. Villar Rojas travels constantly with his team of assistants; he has compared his practice to a virus that lives in and off the art scene.

Haegue Yang, South Korea, Swedish Villa, 2012
Haegue Yang’s work is a sculptural installation consisting of metal Venetian blinds in yellow and blue arranged with electric cords and shining opaque light bulbs. The blinds are a reference to the boundary between private and public, and to their purpose in Korea, where hand-woven bamboo blinds were used for hundreds of years to protect women from being seen and allowing them to peek out. The home was traditionally the women’s domain, while the world outside was a male sphere.