Johan Tirén
Johan Tirén Swedish artist based in Stockholm. He is educated at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and received his MFA from Malmö Art Academy.
With a simple graphic sign, Stockholm-based Johan Tirén will require the visitors to Terms of Belonging to take off their shoes. Footwear is a symbol of class, gender, and in some contexts, religious belief, but the ceremony surrounding them may forge other, accidental communities. The work has an aggressive and authoritative edge, which is exercised for a seemingly arbitrary outcome—the removal of shoes. The work functions similarly to a Brechtian distanciation device, pushing the audience to question the conventions of art spaces, and of the domestic sphere where codes around shoes are most evident.
Also included in the exhibition is a series of posters, Epilogues, which are based on reworked texts from the new Regional Plan for the city of Stockholm as well as older reports that were produced by the same ministry. By combining facts about the city and suggestions for the future with tools for visualizing statistics, he undermines the ideology produced by the city's the urban planners. By rewriting suggestions for the future society found in the material and juxtaposing this with images of statistic models, emptied of its original content, it becomes clear that the planning process in fact is a production of ideology.

