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.