
Welcome to Rejmyre Art Lab’s spring exhibition
Exhibition period: April 18–May 18, 2025
Opening hours: Wednesday to Saturday 11:00-16:00
Opening: Good Friday, April 18, 13:00
Extra open days: 18 April 10.00–16.00, 4 May 11.00–16.00, 18 May 11.00–16.00
On the occasion of the major orienteering competition 10Mila organized in Finspång, Rejmyre Art Lab wants to draw attention to the role of the map in artistic practices through an exhibition in Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet in Rejmyre.
Maps tell us something about the unknown. They give us an idea of what we can expect from a place, what we need to bring with us, what shoes we should wear and what challenges we may encounter there. Someone has experienced this physical or mental terrain before us, and if we know how to read its markings, the unknown becomes less foreign. Creating a map can also be a way to better understand and sort through what we already know, and to communicate it to others.
How is a map created? Who is allowed to make it, and what stories are contained in it? Maps have always been more than just representations of geography – they are stories, systems, and tools for understanding the world. “Mapping” and working with different types of diagrams as an artistic practice has long been a trend in the art world. Re-orienteering explores the potential of the map as an artistic and philosophical object, a bridge between reality and imagination.
Through diagrams, cartographic experiments and new ways of visualizing spaces and ideas, the exhibition challenges our way of seeing and navigating the world. Visitors are invited to contribute to the exhibition by creating their own maps on site in the gallery and we will also encounter local maps from the archive of Rejmyres Historical Society .
The exhibition features works by Swedish artist Ida Rödén as well as works by Lithuanian artists Arnas Ansakaitis, Giedrė Godienė, Nikolaus Gansterer and Sandra Kazlauskaitė, whose works are included in the recently produced publication Atlas of Diagrammatic Imagination: Maps in Research, Art and Education by Lina Michelkevičė and Dr. Vytautas Michelkevičius. This book and other related publications will be available in the exhibition’s temporary library.
Rejmyre Art LAB’s Center for Peripheral Studies is a long-term, place-based, artistic research project. We come together to explore issues of vital concern through and with our varied artistic practices. We utilize an ensemble residency model to conduct this research, coming together to collectively think aspects of our complex existence in this place and time.
Our activities include a post-MFA fellowship program, an international artist residency program, public seminars, exhibitions in Konsthallen Engelska Magasinet, project studios in The Refuging Pavilion and an annual program of installations in and around the town of Rejmyre. Our installation program attempts to re-radicalize the notion of site-specificity through a commitment to a philosophy of embedded installation in which there is an element of co-inhabitation and inseparable dependence at play in the relationship between an artwork and our site. In this place designed largely for export, of its forests, quartz and craft labor, we ask the question, what is not for export?
Our mission is to create a platform for encounters between artists, contemporary art and the public, to test and develop new models for site-dependent artistic practice, to explore the role of the artist within society, especially within rural contexts, and to support artists’ practices at the intersection of contemporary art, craft and societal engagement.
As an artist-run organization, the purpose of our work together in Rejmyre has been to create a post-institutional teaching and learning space for ourselves, and others, to continue to grow, engage in sustained critique and explore topics of collective interest. Our research strands emerge from our time together and thus follow a loose associative line from one to the other.
Rejmyre Art LAB’s programming is born of a long-term engagement with and commitment to the town of Rejmyre in the Östergötland region of Sweden. Rejmyre is located amongst the forests and lakes two hours southwest of Stockholm. With a population of approximately 1000, Rejmyre is a small factory town centered around the Reijmyre Glasbruk, a glass factory founded in 1810 and still in operation. Why Rejmyre? As our co-director Sissi Westerberg says, without a drop of irony, Rejmyre is “as good a place as any.”
The Refuging Pavillion: The latest addition to Rejmyre Art Lab’s facilities, designed by Atelier Krisatoffer Tejlgaard and initiated by Daniel Pletz.
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