Four exhibitions in four weeks, hosted with Ver Sacrum: how our December ritual filled the darkest month with a pleasure garden, an unfinished story, a last breath and four dinners.

Slask is our answer to Swedish December: a yearly exhibition concept where the gallery turns into an art calendar, one new exhibition every week. The 2024 edition included a vernissage with Anna Ofelia Johansson on 4 December. For 2025 we opened it up with a call for creators, performers and dreamers, a shapeshifting concept to enlighten the darkness of December, and hosted the whole month together with Ver Sacrum.

Four exhibitions, four weeks. Øystein Magnussen opened with Eden-ish from 26 to 30 November: a reimagined pleasure garden in beeswax, foam mattress, porcelain, soap, tin and plaster, drawing on Renaissance notions of escapism with hidden grottoes, sensorial pathways and playful encounters. Alexandra Sternad followed with Fragments of the Unfinished, 3 to 7 December, revisiting a decade old encounter with a North Korean defector through fragmented video and sculptural elements, turning a lingering memory into an open search. Week three belonged to Liepa Mikaliunaite and her performance Angel’s Last Breath, which premiered late in the evening of 10 December, doors from 21:30 and the piece itself at 22:30.

The final week was MAT by Hannah Wikforss-Green and Svante Hallgren: four evenings where food and performance sat at the same table. A dinner in honor of Elis and Militza’s wedding anniversary. Hjärter Fem and Filip Jönsson hosting Dinner in Exile: Staycation in Hello Kitty City. An evening titled FOOD Was Once A Failed Restaurant, Soon MAT Will Be Too, with performances by Ragnhild Kvist, Albin Duvkär, David Bekic and Clara Cronhielm. And a last night where Arvida Byström hosted Tuffa Tider, medieval edition, together with Lo Hallén and showed a work by Jonas Lund.

Max Balanorcha drew the graphics for the month, and Emma Annell and Kajsa Frisk, among others, photographed it so the rest of us get to keep it. When we signed off in January we wrote till next year, and we meant it: Slask returns every December, and last time the open call went out in late October.