Petra Bauer & Rebecka Thor

Petra Bauer (b.1970, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. She is an artist and filmmaker currently doing a practice-based PhD at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Crafts, and Design, Stockholm, where she focuses on film as a political and collective act. She holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy (2003) and recent exhibitions include: the 56th Venice Biennale (2015); A Voice of One’s Own: On Women’s Fight for Suffrage and Human Recognition, Malmö Konstmuseum; Sisters! and other Films, Point Centre for Contemporary Art, Nicosia (2014); It’s Enough, PORTIZMIR3, the International Triennial of Contemporary Art, Izmir (2014); and Tensta Museum, Tensta Konsthall (2014).

Rebecka Thor (b. 1982, Sweden) lives and works in Stockholm. She is an editor, critic, and writer for various magazines and is currently writing a PhD in Aesthetics at Södertörn University, where her research focuses on the relation between images and commemoration, re-interpretations of archival materials, historicity, and art’s possibility to act politically. She received her MA from the New School of Social Research, New York and has held a research position at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

And all is yet to be done, 2015
Video, 10 min 54 sec
Courtesy of the artists; the Labour Movement Archives and Library, Sweden; and produced in collaboration with GIBCA.

Artist Petra Bauer and writer Rebecka Thor present a new installation And all is yet to be done. Their research begins with the spring of 1920, when a group of Swedish socialist women sets out on a journey to the newly founded communist Russia. They travel north, passing through Norway and Murmansk on their way to the International Women’s Congress in Moscow. While traveling they visit other women’s organizations. For them the revolutionary country in the East serves as an inspiration for what could be done at home. As they go they write a travelogue for the socialist magazine Red Voices and one of them, Kata Dalström, takes photographs and collects postcards. Some of the cards depict the horrors of life during the tsar rule, enforcing what has been accomplished since the revolution three years earlier.

It is a time of transformations, a time when everything seems possible, and yet in Sweden, a time when little has been achieved.

Following their lead, Bauer and Thor now revisit this specific time in order to imagine an alternative society.