“Public art does not exist. It is simply art in a more complex context.” This was artist Jonas Dahlberg’s response when invited to initiate a course on public art. The answer developed into Of Public Interest (OPI) Lab, a hub and laboratory that operates as a year-long advanced course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. We focus on and work with spaces referred to as public. Our foundation is the field of art and the different histories, discourses, formal and conceptual strategies that belong to it. However, we seek to engage in methods and approaches from multiple disciplines.

Whatever we do as practitioners, working with the public means engaging with complex, often polarized contexts, and it demands that we question what, where, how, why and with whom we do things.

We are now accepting applications for 2024/2025, to form a multidisciplinary group of 16 professional practitioners: artists, architects, landscape architects, curators, cultural producers and people from other relevant fields. People interested in actively contributing to a peer-to-peer environment where different languages, practices and ways of understanding place co-exist to form an art and architecture laboratory.

OPI Lab is led by the artist Jonas Dahlberg together with the curator and writer Jasmine Hinks.

To find out more and to apply please go to the direct link.