Exhibition at Museum Vandalorum in Värnamo, April 18 – June 21, 2015
Director Ruben Östlund and producer Kalle Boman are among the leading filmmakers in Sweden. At Vandalorum they collaborated for the first time in an exhibition context. Östlund’s celebrated movies Play (2011) and Force Majeure (Turist, 2014) explore themes such as our inabilities to help and ask for help. In his movie The Square (premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017), which this exhibition was a study for, he wants to investigate the trust or lack of trust that we feel for each other. He asks where the state’s responsibility ends and where the individual’s begins.
In the exhibition project The Square, Östlund and Boman wanted to do a practical test of what would happen if every town had a free-zone in the town center – a symbolic square as self-evident as a crosswalk. In the square we have equal obligations and equal rights. Anyone can go there when s/he needs help – and the passerby is obliged to try to help. In connection with the opening of the exhibition at Vandalorum, the first permanent Square was inaugurated in the town center of Värnamo.
Östlund and Boman often develop their ideas in dialogue with others. The exhibition at Vandalorum was an invitation to all visitors to participate in this dialogue. As an example, the first thing that met the visitors was a question – do you trust or don’t you trust your fellow citizens? Your answer decided which way you were allowed to enter the exhibition. If you chose that you feel trust, you were asked to put your wallet and cell phone on an unattended podium, and experience the exhibition without it.
The exhibition also included conversations with other artists, from those who made handprints in the cave of El Castillo in Spain some 40,000 years ago, via Garry Winogrand who photographed New York’s hectic street-life in the mid 1900s, to contemporary artist Malin Holmberg who created a monumental floor painting of the super-continent Pangaea.
 | Kalle Boman (b. 1943) |
 | Ruben Östlund (b.1974) |