Absolut Stockholm Label or life

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol have had a copy of a gigantic billboard build, the original of which they happened to see in New York. This billboard combines the genuinely Swedish but ideologically opposite labels IKEA and Absolut. The original, as the artists’ almost exact copy, presents a fully furnished home in a mind-boggling 90 degrees angle, with for example the stool Roy, the barrel Bibblo and the sofa Klippan projected straight out from the picture. The furnishing, in IKEA’s democratic and functional design, is placed on a wooden floor that has been sawn out in the characteristic form of an Absolut bottle.

The installation in the Vicarage points to the different meanings that has been generated from the artists transportation of the combination IKEA and Absolut, from the place of the billboard in New York to the original country of Sweden and the domain of contemporary art. Here the spectacular visual impression is charged with questions considerably more far-reaching than the original commercial message. In Liesbeth Biks and Jos van der Pols version the billboard can instead be viewed as a kind of springboard for questions about the opposites and complications that exist in the contemporary society’s relations to the modernist social project and its ideologies.

The extension of the installation in the Vicarage is the artist’s resolute inventory of how the modernist milieus of Stockholm look today, how the citizens use them and above all how they could be used. From the public’s perspective the work Absolut Stockholm draws attention towards the contemporary use of the social plan of modernism in a time and a city where its ideologies for long has been on the wane.

Along the subway lines Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol has chosen a number of modernism’s more or less forgotten places – environments that have been build in the modernist spirit but have no longer the same function in contemporary society. There the artists arrange different meetings and events for the public, free of charge. The events aim at, among other things, raising the public’s awareness of these slumbering meeting places and if possible, inspire to a resumed use of them.

Absolut Stockholm continues until January 28 2001.The plan include among other things a guided tour of the super modernistically decorated bar at the top of Wenner-Gren Centre and a film showing in Folkets Hus in the model community Årsta. To enable the public to find the right places at the right time the artists offer a map that is available in several public places in Stockholm and also on the homepage oe Moderna Museet. During the project it is supplied with new places, new events and information.