Suddenly It Happens!
Artist Afrang Nordlöf Malekian’s work departs from the history of the lottery tickets and Public Art Agency Sweden’s print archive. He puts a selection of nine prints from the collection in dialogue with newly produced works in the form of lottery tickets, dream poems, sound works, and performances. In the performance and exhibition Suddenly It Happens!, the artist looks at the exploitation of people’s hopes and dreams in the capitalist system. The juxtaposition between lottery tickets and print archives is based on Grafikens Hus’ collaboration with the Penninglotteriet (State Lottery) between 1995 and 1998 when 75 print artworks were commissioned and reproduced in miniature on lottery tickets.
The Public Art Agency Sweden hosts an extensive archive of prints from 1960-1990. These were previously on display in schools, workplaces, and public offices, making them accessible to hundreds of thousands of people through everyday interactions. Print as an accessible art form has also enabled more people to have art in their homes – a way of “democratizing” art. Today, there is a growing number of prints in the Public Art Agency Swede’s archive – a consequence of the privatization of public services. There is simply far less wall space for displaying public art today.
Afrang Nordlöf Malekian selected prints in the archive that seem to convey dreams and longings for a non-capitalist world. The artist approaches the print collection as a place filled with hope for a different life, one that is far from increasing consumerism. For the artist, dreams of possible living conditions are found within the prints. They haunt the collection like ghosts, waiting to bloom in another existence beyond capitalism, where democracy flourishes.
Lotteries have always been a playground with people’s dreams and fantasies as game tiles. In the exhibition, the ideas of “luck” and “waiting” are seen as concepts of what is yet to come. As the artist writes in one of the poems: “what a beautiful dream about the day when it is our turn”. But do we really get happy when dreams come true? Or has society taught us that happiness is found in the consumption of dreams? Afrang Nordlöf Malekian portrays this through the work Grafiken lott (The Chance of the Graphics), where made-up lottery tickets play a key role in the exhibition and alludes to the promise of happiness: to realize a dream through winning the lottery, which in this case is illustrated as being able to have art in one’s home. In The Promise of Happiness (2010), theorist Sara Ahmed discusses the expectations of being happy by society. She describes this as a duty, where living one’s life is merely accommodating society’s acceptability. According to Ahmed, not choosing to be happy is an act of resistance.
Migrational perspectives permeate the artist’s work and are seen in the selection of prints from the archive as well as within the exhibition itself. He is interested in the stories of people who migrated to Sweden in the 60s and 90s, many with socialist aspirations. The print archive of the Public Art Agency Sweden is clearly influenced by Sweden’s socialist past, but the experiences and perspectives of migrants, especially the working class, are absent from the archive.
The philosopher Jacques Derrida coined the term “Hauntology” in his book Specters of Marx (1993), merging ontology, the study of being in general (what exists), and the concept of haunting. He argues that what exists yet is not allowed to be present will haunt and disturb as long as it is excluded. Derrida was also interested in the idea of the ghost as a being that, through its hauntings, is both present and absent simultaneously, disrupting time and space. Like Derrida, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian is interested in these disruptions and the idea that absence also means a strong and pulsating presence. This can be expressed as dreams that haunt us with a longing for a bygone era, in music from a migrant’s childhood, a former telecommunications office in Sundsvall, or the print archive of the Public Art Agency Sweden. The absent voices within the collection thus haunt the archive and, by extension, our collective history. This absence haunts the stories manifested by the graphics collection.
A ghost is haunting the archive—the ghost of anti-capitalists’ dreams.
In collaboration with Grafikens hus and Public Art Agency Sweden.
Curators: Macarena Dusant, Didem Yıldırım, Annika Enqvist
a line that promises something else
Giclée, 9 print sheets, 70x39 cm
Dream poems that the artist wrote in dialogue with nine prints from the Public Art Agency Print Collection. They voice migratory ghosts of socialism, akin to a lingering specter without a definite beginning or end. The artist has approached their creation through the logic of this specter – a state neither fully alive nor deceased. The characters within these poems serve as voices that haunt the archive, shedding light on the migrants who arrived to Sweden with their socialist dreams yet are conspicuously absent within the print collection.
The color in the works follows a gradient, from purple to pink, which portrays the passing of a ghost. Each print sheet constitutes a shade of this gradient.
The Chance of the Prints
Digital print, 18,5x7,1 cm, 300 pieces
In this work, Afrang Nordlöf Malekian draws inspiration from the lottery tickets that Grafikens hus produced in collaboration with Penninglotteriet (State Lottery) during the 1990s. Grafikens hus invited artists to decorate the lottery tickets with print-made artworks to make more art available to the masses. In The Chance of the Prints, the artist explores how printmaking was used in gambling. On the last day of the exhibition, a collection of specially produced lottery tickets awaits its turn at a dramatized lottery performance. In this performance, the audience is invited to gamble on a selection of prints from the Public Art Agency Print Archive, raising questions about the relationship between loss and gain when something public becomes private.
On the back of the work/lottery ticket, parts of the work Playing Kids (1970) by the artist Berta Hansson appears together with one of Afrang Nordlöf Malekian’s dream poems.
Suddenly It Happens!