Collecting For... The Private Museum: Magasin III

How did your experiences as a private collector influence the founding of Magasin III?

When Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art was founded in 1987, by the philanthropist Robert Weil and Emeritus director David Neuman, there was no collection. There wasn’t a hidden agenda to expose and exhibit a secret collection of contemporary art.

The institution started with a clean slate and invited artist friends to come to Stockholm and exhibit their innovative and experimental creative output. It was both utterly naïve and fantastically refreshing.

How does the exhibition programme and the museum collection at Magasin III interact? Does the museum primarily collect works that have been exhibited there, or is there a degree of separation?

We have a key part of our collection which we call 'Magasin III Productions.' Those works have exclusively been made in Sweden by the artists.

Now, 40 years after its inception, there is a substantial group of both international and Scandinavian artists that have worked alongside excellent technicians and craftsman to produce extraordinary works. This is the heart of the collection.

We have also abided by a practice to collect and promote artists early in their careers, as well as collecting work based on both interest and unconditional encouragement.

Many times, we start with an interest (collecting) and then follow the artist with an idea towards an eventual exhibition at our museum.

What sort of role does collecting play when it comes to building an alternative platform for contemporary art to the national museums?

We are totally privately funded, subsequently we don’t need to take into consideration a range of other parameters that the national museums do. We are of course affected by all positive changes within our societies.

With us, the dialogue might be slightly more connected to the artists, since we follow artists over extended periods of time and create sincere bonds between us.

Does Magasin III have more flexibility than national museums, when it comes to managing its collection?

Yes. We also have by-laws which allow us to de-acquisition works, but only for very specific reasons. This has only happened once since we were founded in 1987 – and it had to do with our acquisition fund and co-founding a new institution, Accelerator, at Stockholm University (http://www.acceleratorsu.art).

How did Magasin III’s work or focus change after the brief period of closure to the public from 2017 – 2020?

In the summer of 2017, we paused the public program, in order to rethink the institution for the future.

Magasin III had then existed for 30 years, having expanded from an exhibition space without a collection into a museum with an extensive and complex collection. In the process we found it important to go back and re-establish some of the initial core values and ideas that Magasin III was founded upon, such as being an alternative and a complement to other art institutions both locally and internationally.

In addition to exhibiting, producing, and collecting, what we have added since the reopening in the fall of 2020, is offering another kind of access to the institution. With a special focus on higher education programs within visual arts, art history, curating and other creative fields, we offer in-depth exploration and a hands-on understanding of what it means to curate, produce and collect.

With this model, we want to share the work that moves art from the mind of the artist into the world.

Could I ask you to talk a little bit about the opening of Magasin III’s 2nd space in Jaffa. Has that changed the way the museum approaches its collection, or its role in promoting international contemporary art in a specifically Swedish context?

The idea was to be able to expose and exhibit works from both our collection and specifically new installations from artists we are interested in and have supported for many years.

The satellite space opened in 2018 and is located in Jaffa, greater Tel Aviv, in a residential neighborhood which is predominately Arabic. It has been hugely successful in introducing contemporary art to the local community. We also have a bookstore with hundreds of artist books, which have been given to us on commission. The books are sold as a non-profit endeavour.

Lastly, we follow a practice from Stockholm; commissioning new works which specifically relate to the physical space – up to this point in time, participating artists have included: Polly Apfelbaum, Tal R, and Haim Steinbach, amongst others.