Artwork: Gemenskap (Turkens bänk)

Kadim Akca is the
serial entrepreneur who became known across the country when he released the
book Tänk som en turk om du vill lyckas i Sverige (Think like a Turk if
you want to succeed in Sweden) in 2010. In 2012, he thanked his home town of
Värnamo by funding a heated bronze sculpture, an artistic representation of the
park bench on which he slept rough when he first came to Värnamo in 1970.

Kadim Akca was born
in Turkey in 1951. In 1970 he came to Sweden and Värnamo on an alien’s
passport. He had spent five years at school, knew no Swedish, and ended up on a
park bench in Åbroparken. Thanks to the residents of the municipality, he was
given a fresh start and has since become a very successful entrepreneur,
working mainly in cleaning and property services.

The artwork ‘Gemenskap’
(Community), colloquially known as ‘Turkens bänk’ (The Turk’s Bench), is a
softly sculpted bench with an imprint of a person, as if someone had been
resting there and just got up and left. Behind the bench is a backrest in the
form of a free-standing relief depicting a landscape, a Turkish village by the
sea on the right and a Swedish landscape on the left. The whole bench is heated
to provide warmth all year round.

Annika Heed (born
1955) is the artist who made the sculpture. Annika trained at Konstfack
(University of Arts, Crafts and Design) and the Royal Institute of Art in
Stockholm and works as a sculptor and illustrator. The bench was cast at Herman
Bergman Konstgjuteri in Stockholm.

The ‘Gemenskap’ bench
is also a dance bench. Read more about Värnamo’s dance benches at varnamo.se.