User:Mathildans/sandbox

SUPERMARKET - Stockholm Independent Art Fair is an annual international art fair for artist-run galleries and other artist's initiatives, sited in Stockholm, Sweden since 2007. It has exhibited hundreds of artists from more than 50 different countries since the start.

Supermarket is a platform for artists' initiatives from all over the world with the goal to create opportunities for new networks in the Swedish and international art scene. The audience are Swedish and international artists, gallerists, collectors, museum directors, curators and anyone interested in contemporary art.

Management
Three artists – Pontus Raud, Andreas Ribbung and Meggi Sandell – act as creative directors, and together with a small team they work all year round, but the project team grows as the event approaches. A big team of volunteers whom are mostly art and art theory students works during the fair week.

By adopting the format of an art fair, Supermarket creates the framework for a large international exhibition where the participating galleries finance and produce their own contributions. The fair is financed with 50% municipal and national support, 25% participation fees and 25% entrance fees, in addition to a large number of unpaid work hours. The participation fee is kept at a low level in order to include interesting exhibitors who work on a not-for-profit basis and/or are un-funded.

History
Supermarket started on a small scale as MINIMARKET in 2006 at Konstnärshuset (The Artists' House)– an art nouveau palace owned by the Swedish Artists’ Associations - SKF. The artists’ initiatives in Stockholm got together to play around with the concept of an art fair in reaction to a new commercial art fair called Market. The following year, with international presence, it became Supermarket. Through the years, Supermarket has grown to become an important platform for artist-run initiatives, a branch of the art scene often lacking representation in the high-end art world. The fair has taken place in several venues around Stockholm, from a run-down industrial space to a high-end hotel. The current location is Svarta Huset (The Black Box) next to Konstfack (The University College of Arts, Crafts and Design). Supermarket has grown each year and is now offering around 65 spaces within the fair. A big challenge as it's grown has been to find sufficiently large spaces.

Venues

 * 2006-2007, Konstnärshuset (The Artists' House).
 * 2008, Enskilda Galleriet, a 1500 m2 industrial space in central Stockholm.
 * 2009, Clarion Hotel Stockholm.
 * 2010-2014, Kulturhuset (The Culture House).
 * 2015- Svarta Huset (The Black Box).

International presence
Supermarket is an international meeting point for contemporary art, bringing together artists from all over the world. Since the start Supermarket has exhibited many hundreds of artists from xx countries. During the fair the artists get the opportunity to network through a meetings programme where they sign up for moderated meetings around a specific topic connecting the grouped artists. It has led up to international collaborations, residencies and exchanges outside of Supermarket (t ex???).

The aim to connect artist-run initiatives led to the creation of the network AIM (Artists Initiatives' Meetings) in 2011, consisting of 11 partners from different countries, holding meetings all year around to develop these goals.

Supermarket Art Magazine
The first issue of SUPERMARKET Art Magazine was released in 2011, merging with the already existing catalogue. Through the years the magazine has presented a set of themes, also subject to the seminar programme, since the start being: Art of the Future (2009), Documentation/Non-Documentation (2010), The Absent Hub (2011), Waiting Room for Eternity (2012), Happiness (2013), Difference(s) (2014) and Representation (2015). The theme for 2016 will be the 10 year anniversary of Supermarket.

Side programme
Since 2010 Supermarket has held a side programme called TALKS presenting seminars, debates and lectures, screenings, performances and presentations on relevant topics for the artist-run art scene. Since 2012 the performance part has been organized as Red Spot performance stage. Some collaborators through the years has been Riksutställningar (The Swedish Exhibition Agency), SVT Forum (National Swedish television channel), Fylkingen (Stockholm's long established experimental performative arts venue) and Stoff (international theatre festival).

Funders and partners

 * Stockholms stad, Stockholms kulturförvaltning.
 * Svenska Institutet (Swedish Institute).
 * Statens Kulturråd.
 * Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme.
 * iaspis (International artist's studio program in Sweden).

Media coverage and reception
Stockholm Art Week is an initiative that's listing and promoting several art events and happening during an April week, including Supermarket. This has increased the comparison between Supermarket and Market Art Fair, though its been more or less presents since 2006. It is said that visiting the two fairs is like traveling through different art worlds. It has a lot to do with Market being the fair for commercial galleries, while Supermarket is non-commercial. They've also been said to compliment one another. Supermarket has been described as the more energetic and alternative Stockholm fair, for example, in a recent article, writer John Gayer talks about Supermarket: "The great thing about Supermarket is that it presents art that is about as far away as one can get from what is shown in museums. As The Art Newspaper reported just a couple of weeks before this year’s edition of Supermarket opened, artists from 5 galleries dominate museum shows in the USA. So, at a time when Louise Bourgeois’ spiders seem to function as a veritable ‘golden arches’ of the art world, it’s refreshing to see art that is energetic, unpredictable, contemplative, imperfect, thought provoking, striving to takes risks, disparate, enlightening, bordering on the absurd, honest, intelligent, densely arrayed and – well, when it’s all added up – a lot of fun."