Artist Andjeas Ejiksson's Unstaged Play 1985 Examines Sweden's 1985 Banking Revolution and Bureaucratic Power

Artist Andjeas Ejiksson created 1985 (2011), a play commissioned by Lisa Rosendahl of the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (Iaspis) that examines a pivotal 21 November 1985 meeting of the Central Bank of Sweden's board. The meeting, held at a villa near Stockholm, led to credit market deregulation endorsed by Olof Palme's Social Democratic government, fundamentally reshaping Sweden's economic and political landscape. Ejiksson's work features characters from that board meeting and was conceived for performance at the original villa location. Despite being commissioned, the play was unexpectedly removed from Iaspis's approved project agenda in 2013 by a high-ranking bureaucrat from the Arts Grants Committee, Iaspis's parent organization under the Ministry of Culture. The article explores how bureaucratic power has shifted from parliamentary democracy to public and private administrators, particularly through mechanisms like reviews, assessments, and controls that dominate sectors including contemporary art. This bureaucratic logic creates an 'imaginary rationality' where assessments often replace political responsibility without producing meaningful organizational change. The work remains unstaged, highlighting tensions between artistic expression and state-controlled cultural funding mechanisms.