Tensta Museum

Documenting a project that turned a suburb of Stockholm into a museum that produced concrete images of a Sweden where divides are intensifying.

This book documents and discusses Tensta konsthall's experimental multiyear project “Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden” that ran from 2013–18 in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and beyond. Tensta is dominated by a late modernist housing estate, built on old farmland with traces from both the Iron Age and the Viking era, where today nearly 20,000 people live, a majority with a trans-local backgrounds. More than fifty artists, architects, performers, sociologists, cultural geographers, philosophers, and others contributed artworks, research projects, seminars, guided walks, workshops and much more, reporting on the past and present of Tensta, creating a “museum.”

The project produced concrete images of what can be described as the New Sweden—a place with people of vastly different backgrounds, where economic and social divides are intensifying. Tensta Museum also engaged with the concept of cultural heritage and the complicated matter of how it is used in Sweden and elsewhere.

Contributors

Action Archive, Adam Tensta, Ahmet Ögut, Babi Badalov, Carl Larsson, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Emily Fahlén, Erik Stenberg, Irene Molina, the Kurdish Association, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mekonen Tekeste, Meron Mangasha, Petra Bauer, Ricardo-Osvaldo Alvarado, Spånga Local Heritage Association, Tarek Atoui, the Tensta Hjulsta Women's Center, Tensta Library, Beatrice von Bismarck, Boris Buden, Christina Zetterlund

Copublished with Tensta konsthall

Maria Lind is Director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and former Director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. In 2010, Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press.