SPÅNGA.- In March 1968 the play Viet Nam Discourse premiered in Frankfurt, a performance that would shake the foundations of the western theatre world. The drama was written by the Potsdam-born and Stockholm-based author, filmmaker, and artist Peter Weiss (1916–82) who was one of the most influential German writers of the postwar period.

For the project Viet Nam Discourse Stockholm, the Berlin-based artists and researchers Marion von Osten and Peter Spillmann from CPKC have revisited the drama's complex production history as well as the political and cultural context in which the play was created. Their ongoing research takes the shape of an virtual archive of radical politics of the 1960s and how it became a part of film, theatre, and art. At the core of Viet Nam Discourse Stockholm stands the importance that tricontinental liberation and solidarity movements had for the emergence of the New Left in Europe and the emergence of radical political art in the 1960s and 1970s.

During the summer Viet Nam Discourse Stockholm at Tensta konsthall is creating a platform for conversations, interpretations, and readings about and of the entangled histories of art practice and solidarity movements. The play's legendary set design by Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss will be presented in the form of sketches, photographs, texts, and testimonies. The film documentation of the play's premier in Frankfurt 1968 and of the Russell Tribunal held in Stockholm in 1967 by film maker Staffan Lamm will be on view, as well as private and press photographs from trips to Vietnam, demonstrations, and meetings.

As part of the project, a summer course in collaboration with the University of Dance and Circus (DOCH) will be organized. The choreographers Stina Nyberg and Nadja Hjorton and invited guest teachers will examine the historical material in relation to contemporary contexts, examining transnational meetings between art, solidarity and choreography. The goal is to put on parts of Viet Nam Discourse in Sweden for the first time ever.

Future Flourish by Ingela Ihrman
As part of Tensta Museum Continues
In Ingela Ihrman's peculiar sculptures, plants adopt human characteristics and new mythologies grow in the shrubbery. Ihrman is interested in how humans interact with other species. What social significance do animals and plants have in our lives? What stories are created around troublesome species, around vermin and weeds?

Ihrman describes her perspective as ethno-biological, which means that the focus is not on nature itself but rather on how humans use and perceive it. The limits of norms and the action spaces of larger bodies are examined. Out of this, a loving relationship with clumsy existences and overgrown habitats develops. In the exhibition Future Flourish, we meet the hairy sculpture The Giant Hogweed and the sculptural costume the Stegocephalia from Bjuv. The performance Giant Otter Giving Birth will take place at the opening and at the finissage.

Ingela Ihrman is based in Malmö. Her practice moves freely between performance art, installations, and writing and is characterized by humoristic and tactile handicrafts.