Gallery 01:15

COUNTER-NARRATIVES

In the early 1970s, several Swedish artists used fiction as a means of exploring and critiquing contemporary society. In an era of increasing rationalisation and bureaucratisation, society came to be organised to a growing extent through systems, classifications and measurable objectives. Against this backdrop, artists such as Björn Lövin and Sten Eklund constructed alternative realities in the form of fictional environments and narratives that played with the language of bureaucracy and the methods by which science seeks to document reality. By imitating these attempts to systematise existence, they exposed the limitations of bureaucratic thinking.

During the same period, Peter Tillberg painted Will you be profitable, my friend? The painting depicts a school class sitting in orderly rows at their desks. The artist himself has described how the motif emerged from a personal experience of standing in front of a school class: “It was only when the painting was finished that I could see it as a more general expression – of Swedish bureaucracy, of folkhemmet, [the ‘people’s home’], of society’s demands on children and of the way we gradually suppress individual creativity. Only then could I give the painting its title.”