Work for Public Market Square

Anders Hergum. Work for Public Market Square, 2025

The great orbs of the unsaid continue to float through the air. But it is time for a new problem, the horizontal has said to the vertical. Then the moon, once so obsessed with waning, finally waxed.

Anne Boyer, The Undying (2019)

This expanded artistic inquiry takes its point of departure in Anders Hergum’s practice, where questions of space, construction, and temporality are explored through sculpture, installation, and photography at the intersection of fine art and architecture. Hergum’s work is marked by an acute awareness of the social and poetic dimensions of the built environment: construction as language, material as a carrier of ideas, and space as a site of collaboration. In Reclaim the Framework and Horizontal Progression, presented in the exhibition Underneath the Pavingstone, a conception of the act of building emerges as an open and reversible process. Modular structures made from reclaimed materials establish an architectural logic that resists dominance and permanence in favour of spatial cooperation.

With the new artwork, Work for Public Market Square, Hergum takes the above position as a framing device to examine what it means to work with public art within an exhibition context—not as representation or ornamentation, but as a practice that operates in, through, and beyond public space. The exhibition’s temporal limits become a provisional node within a broader spatial and institutional investigation. The project tests how the exhibition’s temporary form can itself be understood as a public sphere, and how the work might continue to operate after the exhibition ends: as method, idea, or mutable physical structure.

At its core, the project probes the scope of artistic agency in relation to the systems that regulate art’s visibility and spatial existence. Hergum’s work demonstrates how building can be understood as a critical and generative language, in which joining, dismantling, and reclaiming function as forms of knowledge production. When the modular logic of Reclaim the Framework is carried forward—as a displacement—the project becomes an inquiry into the ontology of the artwork: how form, function, and duration are renegotiated in relation to the spaces the work enters.

Continuing outward from the konsthall into new sites becomes a way of testing the elasticity of the artwork. By allowing building to persist as both a physical and conceptual act, the project explores the possibility of art functioning as a form of thinking in matter—a construction that is simultaneously gesture and resonance.

Within this framework Work for Public Market Square, installed on the façade of the kunsthalle, generationally aligns with both David Hammons’s Day’s End – in its effort to trace the contours of a spatial absence– and with Charlotte Posenenske’s Vierkantrohre Serie D, where modular logic and utilitarian materials generate open structures for social and spatial negotiation. Central to the work is also the formative power of dialogue, between artist and curator; between artist, site, and material, and how this dialogue can take the form of an architectural metaphor that continues to operate even after the exhibition’s framework has dissolved.

The new work functions as a material poster or noticeboard for something approaching: a banner whose proportions and placement hint at what is unfolding behind the façade. Through its duality—both fixed and in a state of dissolution—the work allows the konsthall itself to emerge as subject: the brick, the building, Klas Anshelm’s architecture. As a structural sketch of the konsthall, it offers an intimation of what awaits inside, while its gradual loosening carries a promise of continued movement.

Karin Bähler Lavér