This article concerns the international touring exhibition Art contre/against Apartheid originating in France and which reached Lunds konsthall, Sweden in 1984 and was to tour the world for ten years. The aim with this exhibition was to raise awareness of the apartheid regime, cause international protest and ultimately remove the repressive political system. Using histoire croisée as a method this article investigates the different interests and stake-holders in the exhibition at Lunds konsthall, including the critique of the exhibition as resting on white supremacy. The purpose of the article is to locate the different intersections regarding international art, international politics and local history manifested through this exhibition.

The project Exhibiting Art in a European Periphery? International Art in Sweden during the Cold War aimed to investigate international exhibitions in Sweden during the postwar period from circa 1945 to the end of the 1980s. The main objective was to find information beyond preconceived ideas of what is important, interesting, or simply good art. In this article, we present our method for searching through the archives and some of the findings and insights generated.

”Den lilla scenen såg ut som ett slagfält efter en vild fest: en sönderslagen fiol, massor med karameller och konfetti, svart tusch i stora pölar och sjöar av vatten, som allt detta flöt omkring i.”

Utgångspunkten för denna publikation är en nyfikenhet på det som utspelade sig i Lunds konsthall mellan 1965 och 1967, när en del av den internationella och experimentella konstscenen, då med säte i Paris, dök upp i staden Lund.

“The small stage looked like a battlefield after a wild party: a smashed violin, lots of sweets and confetti, large puddles of black ink and lakes of water, in which all this was floating around.”

The starting point for this publication is sheer curiosity about what happened at Lunds konsthall between 1965 and 1967, when part of the experimental international art scene centered in Paris, showed up in the city of Lund.

This article chronicles the French critic Pierre Restany and his 1967 exhibition Superlund at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden. Throughout his life and work Restany travelled the globe and engaged in local art scenes, often described as peripheries. But when did Lund, a town in southern Sweden, become the periphery, and with reference to which centre? When Restany engaged with the so-called peripheries in order to escape the art scene in Paris, he also brought with him Paris as a symbolic centre. This article explores how the critic and his exhibition conflate the dichotomy in art historiography between centre and periphery in the intersection between place, people and art.