Scan Magazine | Special Theme | Scandinavian Culture – Sweden
Bildmuseet’s seven-floor purpose-built building with its eye-catching larch wood façade was designed by the Danish architecture firm Henning Larsen Architects as part of the new Arts Campus that saw the light of day five years ago. Photo: Johan Gunseus
A platform for world-class art and critical thinking A beacon of artistry and enlightenment right on the Ume River bank, Bildmuseet is a world-class contemporary art museum with strong local roots. The current exhibition, Perpetual Uncertainty, is as visually striking as it is philosophically brave and, as such, embodies what the museum is all about. By Linnea Dunne
Showing since October last year, Perpetual Uncertainty has been allowed to take up the entirety of Bildmuseet in Umeå. At the heart of it is a big, round table, a reconstruction of James Acord’s 1999 creation in his Hanford studio in response to the culture of silence around the clean-up of nuclear material after the creation of the first American atom bomb and test-runs of nuclear reactors. “Acord wasn’t against nuclear power, but he was insistent that ordinary people may have something to say and ideas worth hearing, so he wanted to facilitate roundtable discussions of 50 | Issue 98 | March 2017
representatives from the environmental movement, culture workers and the nuclear community to get together and just share thoughts,” says Sofia Johansson, project manager for the exhibition and curator at the museum. “The underlying thought is that we must be able to talk about difficult issues, even those that don’t have clear and easy answers.”
On nuclear culture That underlying thought is one shared by both Bildmuseet and Ele Carpenter, the British curator and teacher at Goldsmiths
University of London, who guest curated the exhibition. Having spent four years researching what she calls nuclear culture, Carpenter worked with artists and collectives from all over the world to explore what it means to be living in a world of nuclear power and radiation. The resulting exhibition deals with questions around our perception of memory and how we communicate around these issues presently as well as with future generations. “Some artists deal with very specific cases, such as Chernobyl, and some deal with the ethical issues involved in communicating around underground repositories that make certain places unsafe for hundreds of thousands of years,” Johansson explains. “One installation that resonates strongly with a lot of peo-