Swedish artist uses “unethical” cash to fund cultural scholarships

Hollender gives arms and tobacco profits to exhibition visitors

By Clemens Bomsdorf | From issue 197, December 2008
Published online 11 Dec 08 (News)

Pål Hollender and his installation Death Equalizer, 2006

MALMÖ. The Swedish performance artist and filmmaker Pål Hollender, who in 2003 invested SKr100,000 (around €11,000) in “unethical” companies, has distributed SKr32,500 (€3,235) in “scholarships” derived from the returns. The grants were awarded to visitors last month to “The Pål Hollender Foundation for Ethically or Aesthetically Offended Consumers of Culture” at Malmö Art Museum in southern Sweden.

He chose companies involved in what he called the “five main unethical industries”: arms manufacture (Lockheed Martin), tobacco (Swedish Match), alcohol, pornography and gambling. “My investments are [doing] better the worse the situation in the world [becomes]. Wars, drinking problems and so on lead to growing profits for the companies I invest in. But people do not understand that others get hurt to increase their fortunes,” Hollender told The Art Newspaper.

Hollender’s foundation is itself the work of art, which is owned by the Malmö museum. Physically it consists of 13 boxes, where visitors can post their applications for a scholarship. A text on the wall outlines the foundation’s constitution. The money the scholarship holders receive is intended “to promote insight or further education among cultural consumers with respect to what is commonly thought of as respectable culture”. Applicants must sign a declaration stating that they feel or have felt offended either ethically or aesthetically by culture.

Hollender decided only to name the businesses financing the scholarships, but not to illustrate the nature of their activities. “I could show pictures of a kid who lost his leg because of a cluster bomb, or people wearing pig masks while having group sex. Then visitors would probably be more aware of what they are involved in. By not doing so I underline the moral dilemma that we are in,” Hollender said.

One of his best known pieces is the 2001 documentary film Buy Bye Beauty, about how low wages in Latvia forced many women to sell their bodies, particularly to Swedish sex tourists. Hollender asked women in the Latvian capital, Riga, to have sex with him for money. If they agreed, they had sex on camera. When the film was screened on Swedish television it caused a diplomatic scandal, and the TV channel apologised to the Latvian people.

In Hollender’s 2006 installation Death Equalizer, members of the public were invited to sit in a fully functioning electric chair, set up so there was a one-in-3.5 billion chance per second of suffering a lethal shock.