A new location does not endanger Iaspis

A number of artists and others have protested against plans to transfer the Arts Grants Committee, including Iaspis, its international section, from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts to other premises in Stockholm. This concern arises out of a misunderstanding, namely the mistaken supposition that such a relocation would change Iaspis’s activities or that Iaspis is dependent on interaction with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. But Iaspis’s activities will not be changed. Iaspis has nothing to do with the Royal Academy of Fine Arts but, as part of the Arts Grants Committee, is simply a tenant in the Academy building.

What is Iaspis? The Arts Grants Committee includes the  Board of the Visual Arts Fund, which awards fellowships and grants for pictorial art and design. The Fund has shaped international cultural exchange in this field under the heading Iaspis, which covers grants for international cultural exchange to individual pictorial artists and designers, foreign studio residencies for Swedish artists, a studio platform in Stockholm with satellites in Umeå, Gothenburg and Malmö, and a public programme which among other things includes seminars and exhibitions. Iaspis’s strength and its great success in internationalising Swedish pictorial art and design consist in the interplay between all its various parts. Iaspis, then, is part of the administration of the Arts Grants Committee/Visual Arts Fund, and ultimate responsibility for activities rests with these governing bodies.

The Arts Grants Committee has now been allotted new tasks by the Government, including a wider remit concerning international cultural exchange for artists in different forms of art. This calls for larger premises, but the Royal Academy of Fine Arts has made clear that it has no possibility of meeting such a need. We will therefore have to relocate, and of course we will find good, centrally located premises which also meet Iaspis’s requirements. No one can readily believe that the success of Iaspis’s international activities has been due to its premises being located at Tegelbacken, or that its good reputation is due to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts being its landlord.

Carl Tham

Chairman of the Board of the Arts Grants Committee

Sune Nordgren

Chairman of the Board of the Visual Arts Fund