This essay explores how artwork in the public space can be analysed, conceptualized and described by bringing attention to site. Through an analysis of artworks in the yearly art exhibition of Fittja Open 2011, the essay draws attention to site-specific art and structures of power. The principal aim is to present not only the exhibition of Fittja Open 2011 but also other artwork in the public sphere in Fittja, a suburb to Stockholm. From this point of departure other interests evolve that concerns the "image" of Fittja. The analysis, based on research in art history, architecture, ethnology and philosophy as well as qualitative interviews, also focuses on understanding the role of site and the relations between art practice, institutions and site.

The result shows that there are problems with a ruptured interface between the artwork and site. The claim made throughout the thesis is that artwork in the public sphere of Fittja need to be sensitive to the conflicted issue of public space in order not to reproduce stereotypes. Despite the knowledge and insight about its local art situation, the study also points out certain insensibility on behalf of Botkyrka konsthall as regards social status and class.

This essay concerns dance as an exhibition object by examining the permanent exhibition at The Museum of Dance in Stockholm, Dansmuseet. Due to its dependence on the temporality and movement of the lived body, dance does not easily lend itself to being exhibited in a traditional exhibition display; and since the live dance performance itself is ostensibly absent at the exhibition display, other means of representation must be relied upon in order to evoke the exhibition visitors’ experiences of time and movement as well as the feeling of dance. Starting from a phenomenological first-person perspective, as an exhibition visitor, I present three ways in which such experiences may come about. The cross-section of the experience evoked and the means that trigger them are intermedial, spatial, and performative taking their departure in the visitor’s pre-understanding of dance.

The article discusses some basic elements of drawing, along with some equally basic behavior with respect to drawing. Considering one of the most repeated assumptions or stereotypes of the Western drawing discourse, namely that drawings are characterized, and cherished, by their potential for revelation, i.e. to disclose something beside them, something other than and prior to them, which may account for their appearance, I sketch an argument away from that assumption. To regard a drawing as revealing is to charge it or have it re-enact itself, although any attempt to ontologize drawing through a distinction between a previous act and a posthumous fact is too simplistic. By considering the ways in which drawing has been compared to painting and photography, how it relates to shadows and projection, I bring up a number of issues of relevance in coming to terms with drawing: lines and dots, signs and marks, figure and ground, space and erasure. Examples range from van Gogh and Rembrandt to Oldenburg, Michaux and Rauschenberg. Action drawing applies, most Importantly to Our interpretative activities faced with the drawing as a fact, although no clean temporal or conceptual cut exists between act and fact; the act is still there in the result.

This article looks at influential survey texts on world art history since c. 1980, and considers how they have dealt with the art nearest to them in time. I examine the terminology used, and problems of classification, periodization, and history writing at large. In order to describe how these texts struggle with the terms contemporary and postmodern, I focus on their treatment of conceptual art and two artists: Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman. The symbolic and economic consolidation of contemporary art during the last decade or so prompts me to establish a broader frame of understanding, linking it to constructions of the contemporary in the nineteenth century and to the idea of co-existing temporalities for art.

The public realm is a space of paradoxes. While on one hand it seems to be shrinking due to commercialization and to be losing its position as a forum where different agendas can meet, it can also be said to be expanding through social media and thus merge with traditional “private” areas.

The contributions in this volume range from philosophical and political takes on the idea of the public to texts that understandthe current situation from the point of view of the art scene. Thinkers such as Chantal Mouffe, Jürgen Habermas and Giorgio Agamben meet, for example, with local Swedish graffiti, the international digital world and multicultural New Delhi. All offer perspectives on what the public-and the private-realms might mean today.