Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Beth Laurin: Provisorium at Index – The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm, in Fall 2017, this book provides an extensive overview of the work of Swedish artist Beth Laurin (born 1935 in Stockholm). Since the 1960s, the artist has developed an impressive body of work which includes sculpture and objects, performance, drawing, sound, text, photography and video, often incorporating found things, personal materials, texts and newspaper clippings that are used with a resonance of associations and potential meanings. Her work has developed in correspondence with political movements, such as early feminism, but with a highly idiosyncratic approach that looks extremely contemporary until today. [publisher’s note]

With texts by Beth Laurin, Leif Elggren, Jaleh Mansoor, Axel Wieder, and Josefine Wikström. Designed by HIT.

In the artist’s book My sweet little lamb, Mladen Stilinović deals with the relationship between language and reality and the resulting identity constellations. In doing so, he makes reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language-games,” where the simple use of linguistic elements is always intertwined with actions to gauge their actual meaning. The artist employs quotations from Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” such as: “Everything we see could also be otherwise,” “Objects I can only name,” and “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” These sentences also relate to objects and actions that the artist witnessed on the street, such as a delivery van for meat with the image of a piglet printed on the outside and the accompanying slogan “My sweet little lamb.” Stilinović thereby questions the reality of what one sees in combination with its textual denotation in the sense of a “language-game.” This particular work refers to different religions and their eating customs in its specific naming of food.