BAGHUSET

In connection with the Stockholm Art Fair 1991, Stalke Out Of Space presented the project Baghuset. The initiative was conceived as an alternative to both the traditional gallery model and established institutional frameworks for exhibiting art.

Baghuset operated as an artist-run gallery and functioned as a platform for new and experimental artistic practices. The project brought together a group of artists with a shared interest in rethinking the relationship between artwork, context, and presentation, and was situated within the art fair without adopting a conventional booth format.

As part of Stalke Out Of Space, Baghuset formed part of a broader investigation into how the role of the gallery could shift from a fixed space to changing sites and situations. The project emphasized collaboration, temporality, and context-specificity as key elements and represents an early example of Stalke’s engagement with alternative exhibition formats at international art fairs.

Front cover of the exhibition catalogue, Baghuset Gallery, 1991.

Stalke Out Of Space

When Stalke Galleri began its activities in 1987, the idea was to create an alternative to the existing galleries and art institutions in Denmark. We wanted to convey contemporary and modern national and international art, to create contact and awareness across established boundaries.

Stalke Gallery quickly gained recognition for its communication efforts, becoming a concept, an institution.
The gallery has now reached a point where it is time to reconsider institutionalization and, consequently, to tear down the familiar and expected frameworks to highlight the central aspect of the communication process: the artistic expression

.

The project, which will run parallel to Stalke Galleri, is Stalke Out Of Space, with the intent to make the gallery institution so visible that it cannot be overlooked. The permanent gallery space is dissolved in favor of all other spaces with exhibition potential. These undefined spaces can range from traditional art spaces: Museums, Art Centers, and Galleries, to symbolic and alternative non-established art spaces: e.g., telecommunication and private businesses. Stalke Out Of Space thus moves as an institution from space to space, whereby the gallery institution's message is relocated in relation to the individual space, its significance, and its forum, as well as the current artist's use of it.

The relationship between gallery and artist necessitates an unconventional form of collaboration, as the aesthetic as well as the commercial frameworks for each exhibition must be built from scratch. The artists' work thus becomes part of the gallery's operation. And vice versa: The gallery institution becomes part of the exhibited art.

Our wish with the Stalke Out Of Space project is to create an alternative exhibition form – an alternative for both artists, audiences, and art mediators.

Sam Jedig
1990/91

Stalke Out Of Space

"An Alternative Exhibition Project"

The commercial gallery form, as we know it today, has existed for more than 100 years. The idea from the start was to present art to a paying audience from the better bourgeoisie in an environment that was a mixture of their parlors and museum exhibition spaces. Since then, both art and its audience have changed radically, and the gallery industry as a whole has responded accordingly. A significant shift occurred particularly in the 1960s and 1970s when the quality of galleries declined rapidly at the outset – and today, the new galleries that emerge are often completely traditional.

The galleries have, in a sense, failed both art and its audience. As a result, many artists have had to seek alternative exhibition opportunities – such as museums and other exhibition institutions, warehouses, farms, condemned buildings, gravel pits, etc. – with the significant drawback of having to give up professional promotion and dissemination. Either artists have had to adapt their art to the existing gallery format – with an even greater drawback in the form of artistic compromises.

Stalke Out Of Space is an attempt to consistently address the new situation of art and meet its need for both unconventional exhibition frameworks and professional promotion. Instead of art having to adapt to the presentation in the gallery's premises, an alternative exhibition project has been created outside the classical gallery space. This project is also used as a platform to secure better exhibition conditions for the individual artist and better exhibition frameworks for their art. The gallerist here becomes both promoter and ambassador for the artists.

As the first manifestation of this altered gallery format, Stalke Out Of Space participated at the Stockholm Art Fair in March 1991 with an installation by Baghuset artists (in a trade fair context, a very unusual and remarkable project).

Bent Petersen
1991

Bent Petersen was Editor of the art magazine North

Installation views from Stalke Out Of Space #1 at Stockholm Art Fair, 1991.

Olafur Eliasson at Stalke Out Of Space booth, Stockholm Art Fair, 1991.

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