SSE X Magasin III - a film program

Borderland – where outer and inner meet. A film program 2023

The works selected come from widely different contexts and mindsets; but all connect to a type of borderland, whether interpersonal or interhuman. An outer borderland can refer to a zone surrounding a dividing line drawn between people, such a state border or a sociocultural demarcation. Similarly, an inner borderland can refer to the space occupied by an individual between mental or spiritual states. Many times, outer and inner borderlands coincide or induce one another. The film program provides examples of transitions from one state to another, as well as accounts of oscillating or stagnating in between. Most of the works speak of inner and outer experiences of security and vulnerability, often in the very borderland between these. Several works show that borders not only separate, but in many ways connect. Such connecting borderland might be a physical meeting place for otherwise unassimilated sociocultural groups, or a coastline embedding the individual within a wider world.

Curator: Sofia Ringstedt, Magasin III

2023 marked ten years since the art program – SSE Art Initiative – at Stockholm School of Economics was born. In the spring of 2013, a series of video works from Magasin III's collection was shown in the atrium of the school. Magasin III is a Stockholm-based museum for contemporary art.

The video works and the conversations that started around them among the school's students and faculty became the start of Art Initiative – a comprehensive project in which contemporary art is embedded in the academic environment to make the school even more knowledge-intense. 

Art Initiative has continuously screened video art at the school in the last ten years, as well as ensuring that the institution's ever-growing permanent collection of contemporary art can serve as stimulus and food for thought in teaching, research and social interaction.

During these ten years, SSE has also created an educational mission, FREE, whose goal is that students who graduate from us are Fact-Based, Reflective, Empathetic and Entrepreneurial. The Art Initiative – and the art – play an important role in supporting this mission.

The collaboration between SSE and Magasin III is a flashback to and follow-up of Magasin <3 Handelshögskolan (2013), the film program that kicked off Art Initiative. Both programs are born out of a shared belief in art's ability to challenge and expand our perspectives on the world, as well as the importance of experiencing art in a school for future economic leaders.

– It was Magasin III that gave us the kick to start Art Initiative. It feels solemn to summarize Art Initiative's first ten years by once again collaborating with such an ambitious and knowledge-based place as Magasin III. I look forward to our students experiencing and developing from the new-old video program, says Lars Strannegård, President at the Stockholm School of Economics, who ten years ago then began the collaboration with Magasin III.