ISOTOP

The “ISOTOP” exhibition took place from April 27 to 29, 2018 in Stockholm in the reactor hall R1, where once Sweden’s first atomic reactor stood. The project is based on a collaboration between Stockholm and the University of Design Karlsruhe (HfG).
Over a period of two semesters, a group of students from Susanne Kriemann and Friederike Schäfers’ seminar “Untitled (Archive)” worked with the photo archive of the former nuclear research center in Karlsruhe. Today it is located at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). At the same time in Stockholm, the seminar “ISOTOP” by Björn Larsson and Lina Selander took place, in which students researched the history, context and the political landscape of the Swedish nuclear.
In the two seminars, the locations of which are linked by the common time frame and a political and ecological urgency, artistic methods were developed that enabled a critical dialogue with other forms of knowledge - the humanities and the natural sciences. References to historical material were also presented. The students managed to create a space in which important questions can be asked of art itself: what knowledge does art create and how this understanding relates to other forms of knowledge.
The exhibition presented different approaches to the natural and cultural - yet difficult to represent - phenomenon of nuclear power, which exceeds human imagination in its temporality.