In 2009, BAC initiated the long term project On the Conditions of Production. The aim of the project is to establish a framework at BAC for hosting a range of different enquiries into the contemporary conditions for art production, made in collaboration with Swedish and international artists, curators and writers.

On the Conditions of Production will not follow a predetermined structural framework, but will define itself through the activities of its participants. A key feature of the project is to invite a smaller number of artists and cultural practitioners to engage long term with the emergent subject matter, as well as a wider circle of occasional guests, collaborators and partnering organisations. The project will include various phases of visibility and opaqueness articulated through different forms of research and presentation in accordance with the activities of its participants. Each part of the project will be conceived together with different partners.

The starting point for the project is both the changing Swedish and international contemporary art landscape, and BAC:s own history as an organisation for the production and mediation of contemporary art and its current phase of redefinition. At the centre of the enquiry lies the question of the effects of the increasingly dissolving boundaries between positions that historically have been seen as separate – such as public institutions and private interest, commerce and critique, process and product, artist and curator, and author and audience.

The aim of the project is to use BAC:s current phase of redevelopment as an opening to provide a platform for engaging with and thinking beyond the current frameworks for contemporary art production. The goal is to theoretically and practically test new ways of formulating the relationship between artistic process, art institution and society.

The project was inaugurated with a public event in October 2009. A research group consisting of Kajsa Dahlberg, Kim Einarsson, Michele Masucci, Mattin, Lisa Rosendahl and Fredrik Svensk has been formed. The research group will host a workshop at IASPIS in Stockholm in November 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition Image at Work produced by XPO September.