Seaslug Art Guide
Slugging our way through Stockholms Art Scene
We started working on Seaslug Art Guide in September 2021 when we had all just moved to Stockholm. Laus Østergaard and I moved here to study at the Curating Art Program at Stockholm University, and Ali Razzak to work as a data scientist and bioinformatician at SciLifeLab at Karolinska Institutet. Despite our different backgrounds—I myself came from Art History and art consultancy in Denmark, Laus Østergaard from a BFA at Bergen Art Academy, and Ali Razzak working with data science in the medical fields—we all had an interest in art and exhibitions.
Laus and I spent a lot of time trying to find a place that would help us navigate Stockholm's art scene. We were looking for platforms that we knew from Denmark. The things we found were interesting initiatives, but some had closed down a couple of years prior, and some only had information from the bigger institutions but lacked information about the artist-run scene. We wanted a full overview, and since it did not exist, we decided to make it ourselves.
Luckily, Laus met Ali not long after. This was also the day he discovered his lactose intolerance but that’s just a side note. He immediately showed interest in becoming a part of the project, and we had our initial meetings in October 2021. Hard work, beers, laughs, online meetings due to Covid-19, and endless group chats led us to our first website launch, which took place at Reimersholme Hotel in March 2022. We were so happy to see so many friends, artists, and people from the art scene who came and celebrated with us. This only made us more excited about working together with the platform.
After our launch, we started working more systematically. Ali was fixing and upgrading the website, while Laus and I divided the responsibility for the website and Instagram into weeks. Things were running smoothly. Our friend and peer, Jeanette Gunnarsson, joined our group and provided crucial help and advice for our Instagram. We would still have biweekly meetings with beer and dreams of what the platform could look like in the future while balancing full-time jobs and studies, art projects, love affairs, and the things that occur in life.
I must admit, it was and still is a lot of work. Instagram is a very narrow platform that does not allow for changes or mistakes. The algorithm is definitely not in our favor since it often prioritizes images of people, and we only post art projects. A couple of shadow bans also happened when we posted paintings or sculptures that had some sort of nudity. But we kept up the spirit and were constantly encouraged by our followers and people in the art scene. We would go to a lot of openings to meet people, and most people welcomed us with open arms, thanking us for the work and for filling the gap. "I check Seaslug every week to see what not to miss" is a sentence we often hear.
Time passed, and at the beginning of 2023, Laus and I chose to make Seaslug Art Guide our curatorial project through our education. This decision gave us a budget, which allowed us to remake the website and reflect and invest in how the platform could look in the future. We wanted to keep the platform non-hierarchical and also liked the freedom of being independent. Fanny Bylund joined the group and has been invaluable with advice on how the website should function, and our communication as well. We love that Seaslug Art Guide is a collective practice.
In March 2023, we arranged a physical gallery tour when all the galleries around Hudiksvallsgatan had openings. We met in front of ODEM Atelier, where we waited outside the gates for people to meet with us. We had 6 people join the tour. Navigating the different galleries together with people from both within and outside the art world was a super valuable experience for us—by physically being in the art space as a group and through multiple conversations, we were confronted with the many social codes that exist in the art world but can be hard to disseminate.
If you are reading this, it means that you have found our newest addition to Seaslug Art Guide: our blog. The blog idea came after many conversations about us as an art guide. We want to create a platform that deals with different aspects of navigating Stockholm’s art scene. Laus came up with the idea of creating a glossary that would include words, situations, and general phrasings used in the art world. I decided to write this text—a way for us to be more clear about our process. We also want to include other voices on the blog, so we decided that part of our budget would go to commission blog contributions. In the future, blog posts from different cultural workers in the field will appear. We hope that the blog will expand, and we will continue to invite practitioners to contribute. Stay tuned!
The thing that we were always excited about with Seaslug Art Guide was working collectively and meeting people. In the beginning, we kept our faces out of the platform. We did not want it to be about us but just about the art and the service we provided. However, after having worked on it for a while, we realized that including our own voices and faces in the project only generated positive response. We started introducing ourselves to people and spreading the word of the platform. We still believe that most of our followers come from word of mouth and recommendations. The relaunch of our website, the launch of the blog, and the creation of an association called for a celebration. In true Seaslug Art Guide style, we wanted to host an event. We discussed what we wished for in art events and decided to host what we sometimes miss in the Stockholm art scene: an event with drinks, friends and colleagues, performance, and a lot of dancing. We invited Aske Thiberg, Kulturprofilerna, dirtbagsandcakes, and DJ P-Drum to contribute to our party, which took place on the 9th of June 2023 at Glada Sprutan. A huge thanks to everyone who came and celebrated with us.
It is no secret that Laus moved to Malmö, I moved to Copenhagen. Ali, Fanny, and Jeanette are staying in Stockholm, but for all of us, the party was a chance to celebrate the achievements we have made with Seaslug Art Guide so far and to insist on the importance of its existence. Our dream is that it will live on, we will continue working remotely, and hopefully, we will get new members interested in continuing the work we do in Stockholm.
We owe a big thank you to our amazing supporters, friends, followers, and colleagues. We could not have done it without you.
If you are interested in contributing to our blog, please do not hesitate to contact us via email at contact@seaslug.se or slide into our DMs on Instagram.
Written by Katinka Saarnak