Index is a non-commercial, publicly-funded contemporary art institution. It has been around since 1974, when it was known as the artist association Fotograficentrum. They are about to embark on the first large retrospective of controversial Swedish artist Sture Johannesson, and we asked it’s curators a few questions to figure out what’s going on.

Could you explain what Index is?
Since its establishment, Index has received an international reputation for
presenting young Swedish artists such as Johanna Billing, Goldin & Senneby
and Karl Larsson, and mid-career international artists like Eija-Liisa Ahtila,
Deimantas Narkevicius, Ceal Floyer, Matthew Buckingham, Harun Farocki
and Pierre Huyghe.

In parallel to disseminating these artists’ productions
internationally, Index has played an important role in introducing
an older generation of important artists such as Bas Jan Ader,
VALIE EXPORT, Susan Hiller, Adrian Piper and Mladen Stilinovic to Scandinavia. These
artists’ concern with questions of artistic and intellectual labour, feminist
issues, institutional critique, emancipatory political and social processes are
now indisputably paradigmatic for practitioners today.

What is the objective of the gallery?
As a non-commercial and publicly-funded contemporary art institution, Index’s
aim is to present and critically contextualise the work of artists, curators and
theorists whose methods of work resonate with those investigated by the
Foundation.

Tell us more about the forthcoming exhibitions at Index.
During the first part of 2013, Index explores the pervasive logic of feedback in
art and contemporary life. Feedback was used by modernist architects and
cybernetic theorists in the 1950s to plan systems adjusting to the changing
needs and realities of their users. Feedback works performatively: whether
a thing is understood correctly or incorrectly, from a scientific viewpoint
it has an effect (eg. the debate in 2003 around the Weapons of Mass
Destruction).

Similarly, social networking sites rely on the flow and feedback
of information so we, the users of these media, are necessary to make the
feedback loop work. We can say we live in a society of self-performance
in which we constantly present ourselves and excite the interest of others in
what we do. This principle is what puts in common our planned exhibitions in this part of the year: a mini retrospective of works produced between the early 60s and early 90s by the important Swedish artist Sture Johannesson, a pioneer in creating pictures with a certain political vain realized by the very first Apple computers in the early 70s, or the group exhibition “Counter- Production” which through the work of many international contemporary artists will address the notion of feedback from the angle of how digital media which are used by contemporary art, are organized or better, self-performed.

Why did you choose to present a retrospective of Sture Johannesson?
At the end of 1960s Johannesson extended this definition of media to include
hallucinogenic drugs. Cannabis and LSD were considered on a par with other
new media such as the TV and the computer, or the offset printing technique
that Johannesson used throughout the 1960s to realize his famous series of
posters titled “Danish Collection”.

His posters present a combination of visual effects obtained through saturated and excessive colours and degrading images. They combine a collage style inspired by the Dada avant-garde with the slogans and impact of contemporary advertising.

At the beginning of 70s he turned to realize “systems aesthetics” through some of the very first computers and decided to collaborate with a programmer from IBM Laboratories, Sten Kallin. Their computer-generated drawings present broken symmetries and hypnotic geometries derived from an attempt to find graphic equations and mathematical cracks in the system. Their outlines morph into multi-coloured fields reminiscent of video feedback, and are accompanied by quotations from artists, like Wassily Kandinsky or Sol LeWitt, who used pre-digital ‘systems aesthetics’.

What’s your view of the art scene in Stockholm in 2013 in general?
Producers of the contemporary art scene in Sweden – artists, institutions,
etcetera – are generally very knowledgeable about the various international art scenes or theories being discussed at present. Whether an institution may be labeled as mainstream or super-niche, there is always a savvy public for what it programs and this is very rewarding. We hope that experimentation can be finally valued more positively and not be simply opposed to art forms which are, formally-speaking, more aesthetically pleasing. We don’t see the one approach excluding the other.

What are your plans for the future?
The future has already began since Index is changing inside out. There are
many plans in the pipeline, some more utopian than others and we are all
working relentlessly towards the goals we set out for ourselves. We hope
many new publics will join us and accompany us in this exciting new journey
for Index and its many collaborators.