Stephen Willats: THISWAY

About

The project is based on workshops and interviews and will be presented at Index and further locations through the city.

For more than fifty years, British artist Stephen Willats has produced artworks that engage with social relations and the potential of art as a means to document and interact with people’s lives. Often working in social contexts that are not connected with art institutions, and collaborating with participants in an open-ended process, his practice can be seen as an early milestone in relation to a wider move in post-war art history, in which social relationships became the material or area of work for artistic interrogation.

For the exhibition in Stockholm, Willats worked with three participants from different parts of the city, producing photo collages as well as films. The discussion with participants centered on ways of how change plays out in people’s lives. Based on personal stories and images of objects and views with personal significance, the work is interested in the larger dynamic of transformation, in which the personal intersects with socioeconomic conditions. One person, a senior nurse, changed her career after significantly suffering from difficult working situations. Another participant escaped from Iraq to Sweden as a refugee and is re-establishing himself as an artist. The third person, having just finished school, is confronting a situation in which everything is possible. What the stories share is an interest in the moment in which social forces collide with desires for self-determination. New works are presented in the gallery space and the gardens surrounding Index, as well as in shop windows on Kungsholmen, Yas Café in Husby, the foyer of Moderna Museet, and through interventions in commercial advertising channels. In addition to the new works, collages and diagram drawings by Stephen Willats will be shown in the gallery.

THISWAY– functions as a model for how the material world is inhabited, structured through power relations, and in which different systems of meaning and counter-relations are created. Willats’ project draws vectors between different places, but also between different states of the public sphere in the contemporary city, in which change is a dominant characteristic. As in much of Willats earlier works, the models are based on concrete stories and interactions, and they offer a surface of reflection through which an audience, such as exhibition visitors and people encountering the work through its mediated forms, can relate to larger questions of social organization, engagement and self-empowerment.