Artists’ Organising in Times of Upheaval (2026-2027)

Building upon the success of last year’s collaboration between the Public Art Agency Sweden and CAPIm on the 2025 Contemporary Art Days (Samtidskonstdagarna), this year we are cooperating on a series of online seminars that consider how artists and artists’ organisations navigate policy change and wider instabilities in government agendas for culture. The series will look at various national contexts in Europe where there are recent concrete examples of political upheaval that change, or at the very least appear to change, policy conditions and impact the autonomy and arm’s length principles of the arts field.  

Co-programmed by Public Art Agency and CAPIm, with invited national and international colleagues from the Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, the series is an opportunity to explore the strategies used by artists’ organisations to navigate radical change in state policy contexts.  

We will consider cases where there are dramatic reversals and upheavals in cultural politics – for example where ‘right’ gives way to ‘left’, or where ‘liberal’ gives way to ‘illiberal’, or where ethnonationalists gain or lose influence in the policy process. In these different settings, we consider the different strategies used by artists to navigate the changing policy conditions, to retain artistic agency and to achieve cultural resilience. The goal is both to learn from the experince of others and to enhance the dialogue between Swedish artists and artists’ organisations and international peers.

Each session takes place online from 10:00-12:00:  

• Friday 27 March Learning from Hungary  

• Friday 10 Apr Learning from Slovakia 

• Wednesday 13 May Learning from Poland 

• Friday 5 June Learning from Slovenia 

• Friday 4 Sept Learning from Netherlands 

Particiation is free, however, booking is recommended. Book here. 

This initiative is both a research process and a sectoral educational initiative based on peer-learning. The research agenda is essentially a matter of exploring how the sector understands and imagines its role in the policy process now and in the future, and ties into a strand of research on organisational imaginaries that was initiated by CAPIm in May 2025 and emerging from the Researching Imaginaries intensive. The educational aapproach is one of enabling via principles of horizontality and inter-organisational peer learning within the sector rather than ‘top-down’ steering. 

The series is designed to prepare the ground for the Contemporary Art Days summit in Uppsala in October 2026. This event is organized in collaboration with the Public Art Agency as part of its assignment to strengthen art organization in Sweden. In recent years, the summit has gradually moved from a presentation-based conference type format to a dialogue-based one. The new seminar series is an extension of this approach. The goal is to enable networking and collaboration among artists and a artists’ organisations in Sweden around issues arising through the engagement of artists and arts organizations with the policy processes that inform and condition contemporary art production. This seminar series emerges from, and contributes to, an ongoing research strand looking at organisational imaginaries and processes of organisational change in the art field.