Hinsegin list eða pólitísk barátta?

by Sólveig Eir Stewart | Miðvikudagur.11.2018 | Viðtöl

Hinsegin list eða pólitísk barátta?

Frá árinu 2015 hefur sýningarrýmið Gallerí 78 verið rekið í samvinnu við Samtökin ’78 í Suðurgötu 3. Gallerí 78 heldur að meðaltali 6 sýningar á ári sem eiga það sameiginlegt að kynna aðeins list eftir hinsegin listafólk. Blaðamaður artzine kíkti í heimsókn til að ræða starfsemina við sýningarstjórana Ásdísi Óladóttur og Yndu Gestsson.

Vettvangur fyrir hinsegin sýnileika

Yndu hafði lengi dreymt um að opna sýningarrými á Íslandi sem helgað væri hinsegin list. Þegar hún sneri aftur til landsins eftir doktorsnám í safna- og listfræði á Englandi leitaði hún til listfræðinemans og ljóðskáldsins Ásdísar Óladóttur og bar hugmyndir sínar undir hana.

Sýningarstýrurnar Ynda Gestsson og Ásdís Óladóttir

„Ég vissi að Ásdís var í listfræði við Háskóla Íslands og að hún þekkti vel til hinsegin listafólks hér á landi,“ útskýrir Ynda. „Strax í upphafi tók Ásdís þátt í því að móta stefnuna, með því að benda mér á listafólk sem gæti sýnt í galleríinu. Þekking hennar og reynsla voru mjög mikilvægir þættir í að koma þessu í gang.“

„Það var ákveðið að koma á skipulagðri sýningarstarfsemi hér í Suðurgötu 3, vegna þess að húsnæðið býður upp á svo margt,“ bætir Ásdís við. „Gluggarnir eru stórir og hleypa ljósinu inn – svo er aðgengið mjög gott vegna þess að við erum á jarðhæð. Myndlistin sést því vel utanfrá.“

Ynda og Ásdís segja það mikilvægan þátt í starfsemi samtakanna að hafa hinsegin list sýnilega. Fyrir þeim er myndlist uppbyggjandi leið til að miðla bæði þekkingu og reynslu hinsegin fólks innan og utan hinsegin samfélagsins.

Listafólk og nöfn á verkum frá vinstri til hægri: Stiofan O’Ceallaigh, Decisions-Decisions 2016, Khalil Rasheed 2018, West Without Title 2018, Jez Dolan, More Joy 2018, Rosanne Robertson, DESTROY-DUCHAMP 2018

„Það er hægt að vera listamanneskja á þeim forsendum að vera hinsegin og deila persónulegri og félagslegri reynslu sinni með listunnendum, ,“ upplýsir Ynda. „Þetta skipti mjög miklu máli þegar AIDS faraldurinn kom upp. Það var margt hinsegin listafólk sem tókst á við þessa erfiðu reynslu með list sinni. Þar mætti til dæmis nefna Nemes verkefnið sem hófst árið 1987: risastórt bútasaumsteppi til minningar um þá sem hafa látist úr AIDS í Bandaríkjunum. Á teppinu eru nöfn þeirra sem létust ásamt minningarorðum. Þetta framtak hafði gífurleg áhrif á sýnileika hinsegin fólks og hinsegin listar, að ógleymdum sársaukanum.”

Að staðsetja sig fyrir utan svigann

Hinsegin list snýst ekki bara um harm, heldur líka gleði og sigra sem taka á sig form í margs konar miðlum. Aðspurðar um hvað geri list hinsegin svöruðu þær að það væri í raun skilgreiningaratriði.

„Það eru nokkrar leiðir til að skilgreina hinsegin list. Þær helstu eru að allt hinsegin fólk sem býr til myndlist geri hinsegin list – burtséð frá því hvort það sé að tala út frá hinsegin reynslu eða mála myndir af Esjunni,“ útskýrir Ynda. „Hin skilgreiningin er að til þess að hægt sé að tala um hinsegin list, þá verði listin að fjalla um það sem snertir reynsluheim hinsegin fólks.“

Qasim Riza Shaheen. Left to right, When you left I dyed in my favourite colour 2010, Left to right, I cried till I turned my bath water blue 2010, Left to right I loved you at 01.13 2010, Left to right Old-habits die hard 2010

Gallerí 78 hefur verið gagnrýnt fyrir að sýna eingöngu hinsegin list og fólk hefur tekið því sem útilokun. En Ynda og Ásdís segja rekstur gallerísins byggja á pólitískri formúlu og orðræðuhefð sem hefur margsinnis virkað, en það er aðferðafræði feminista sem felst í því að taka hóp út fyrir sviga og gera hann sýnilegan á sínum eigin forsendum. Sem dæmi mætti nefna Gallerí Langbrók og og önnur sýningarými sem sýndu aðeins myndlist eftir konur og voru rekin af kvennréttindakonum.

Ynda og Ásdís segja hinsegin baráttu vera pólitíska baráttu og hinsegin list að nokkru leyti vera það líka. Markmið gallerísins er því ekki að stimpla fólk fyrir að vera eitt eða annað, heldur að hafa stað þar sem hinsegin list er í brennidepli. Barátta transfólks fyrir sýnileika birtist t.a.m. í sýningum gallerísins og á sú umræða mikið erindi – sérstaklega um þessar mundir, þegar transfólk þarf hvað mest á viðurkenningu að halda. Núverandi ástand í heiminum gefur ennþá meiri ástæðu til að reka gallerí af þessu tagi, til að vinna á móti feðraveldinu og því kerfi sem elur á fordómum í garð hinsegin fólks. „Enn þann dag í dag er fólk drepið fyrir það að vera hinsegin,“ segir Ynda. “Til dæmis féllu hátt í 400 trans manneskjur fyrir hendi morðingja árið 2017 fyrir utan samkynneigða sem hafa látið lífið vegna stjórnmálaástandsins í heiminum.“

10 leiðbeiningar (fyrir hinsegin listafólk)

Sýningin sem er í gangi um þessar mundir í Gallerí 78 ber heitið Tíu leiðbeiningar (fyrir hinsegin listafólk). Ynda og Ásdís stýrðu sýningunni ásamt breska myndlistarmanninum Jez Dolan – en sýningin samanstendur af verkum eftir tólf breskar listamanneskjur (Joseph Cotgrave, Jez Dolan, Garth Gratrix, Cheryl Martin, Joshua Val Martin, Stiofan O’Ceillaigh, Richard Porter, Rosanne Robertson, Qasim Riza Shaheen, Debbie Sharp, Khalil Rasheed West og Phil Sayers). Þetta er í fyrsta skipti sem hópur af erlendum hinsegin listamanneskjum er fenginn til að sýna á Íslandi og markar sýningin því stór tímamót í kynningu á verkum hinsegin myndlistafólks.

Joshua Val Martin, Ten Directions (for-queer-artists) 2018

Sýningin byggir á hugmyndum Marcel Duchamp um leiðbeiningarverk, sem urðu að þekktu listform með tilkomu Fluxus hópsins, m.a. Yoko Ono. Listafólkið leikur sér með leiðbeiningarhugtakið og túlkar það á marga mismunandi vegu. Á sýningunni eru bæði teikningar og ljósmyndir sem miðla upplifunum til áhorfandans, sem eru bæði fjölbreyttar og persónulegar. Myndirnar eru hengdar upp þannig að þær eru afmiðjaðar til að undistrika jaðarsetningu hinsegin fólks.

Til þessa hefur galleríið einbeitt sér að íslenskri hinsegin myndlist, en með sýningunni vilja Ynda og Ásdís hefja samtal, og leggja grunn að sýningum íslensks hinsegin listafólks erlendis.

Sýningarnar sem haldnar hafa verið í Gallerí 78 hafa oft á tíðum verið margbreytilegar og spennandi. Listamenn á borð við Hrafnkel Sigurðsson, Sigmar Stórholt, Öldu Villiljós og Logn Draumland hafa sýnt þar, en næst (15. desember) mun Skaði Þórðardóttir sýna verk sín.

Sólveig Eir Stewart

Aðalmynd með grein: Verk Debbie Sharp, Queer Instructions 2018
Ljósmyndir: Birtar með leyfi Gallery 78

Sýningin 10 leiðbeindingar (fyrir hinsegin listafólk) mun standa opin til 8. desember í Gallerý 78.
Opnunartímar eru frá 13:00 til 16:00 alla virka daga. Öll velkomin.

Sara Riel: art as a state of meditative unconscious

by Daría Sól Andrews | Laugardagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Sara Riel: art as a state of meditative unconscious

Automatic, Sara Riel´s exhibition at Kling og Bang, presents intuitive drawings and perplexing forms that cleverly imbue elements of the uncanny and spontaneous creation. Riel´s practice is based in Surrealism; she trains herself into a state of drawing that is characterized by improvisation and a release of control so as to liberate the subconscious. In Riel’s drawings we follow the thread of her imagination as it flows through her pen and onto paper.

Sara Riel follows in the steps of artists like Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst, pioneers of surrealism and automatism. These artists attempted to access the psyche at the purest level through art. Andre Másson first translated techniques of automatic writing to painting, and much like Másson and Miró, Automatic progresses from drawing into the painting medium. The exhibition consists of drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and performance work, and is quite based in this historical influence.

Riel´s hand moves randomly as artworks are created through intuition and accidental mark making. Take Stundir á staðnum/Moments in situ; the shapes are delicate and vaguely representational. I can make out noses, the inside of an ear, faces, birds, flowers, snails, if I really look for it. But maybe my brain is just playing tricks on me, searching for and creating something recognizable in order to make sense of it for myself. In these terms the rational mind is seen as an oppressive system against creation. Creating without intent is very much fighting against human nature. Another way to describe it is self-censorship, as if your conscious and logical thinking blocks a discovery about the true self. This artistic method is then in a way a rebellion, against norms and status quo, against predetermined ways of thinking and creating.
However, can a drawing, and are Riel’s, ever fully free from the conscious and from purpose? Riel says she throws away any drawings where she starts to notice her conscious presence taking over. How does one know when they have reached a truly authentic state of meditative unconscious? Her works are somewhere between sense and nonsense, but exactly that, in between. Elements register as visually pleasing and grounded in forms we can at least attempt to make sense of. Unconscious and conscious creation necessarily feed off each other, but Riel seems to enter into some realm beyond. She taps into a trance like state as she draws and paints without any preconceived notions of the end product, and so too can the viewer tap into such a state as well in looking.

A paper scroll, Stundir með litum og grafít-hreyfing/Moments with colors and graphite-hreyfing, unrolls onto the ground, revealing a colorfully flowing form with motion and direction. The textures of brushstroke reference to the painterly method, but the work feels otherwise quite natural and earthly: a waterfall cascading to the earth below, the waves of the sea, a cloud formation ascending to the heavens. A small stairway hints at the artist’s continued presence with the object. Imagine Riel standing at this stairway, unfurling the scroll, paintbrush in hand. Like nature itself, the piece is never still or constant. Next to it, Stundir með fimm litum og grafít/Moments with five colors and graphite suggests something human, but also quite foreign. We can’t place it, and that’s disconcerting in a way, this inability to place. The drawings seem to take the form of something from a dream, somewhere between the realm of the tangibly real and pure fantasy.
On the floor, a glass sculpture, Stund með pensla pennum og lazer- hringur/Moment with brush pens og lazer – circle. Moving over it, we peer into what registers as an endless abyss of glass, like looking into a wishing well. Formations are carved into the top layer, extending deep and down into the reflecting layers past our vision. This descending effect has a quickness of motion to it, as if caught moving at light speed. The shapes form a reflective halo around our faces, murky and shaded, shimmering, confusing.

In Stundir með blá-grá-grænum litum, ögn af appelsínugulum og grafít/Moments with Blue-grey-green colors, dash of orange and graphite, blue toned drawings register as marine or cloud formations, wisps of foamy waves. A large glass etched panel, Stundir með pensla pennum og laser- fljótandi, fljúgandi/Moments with brush pen and lazer-floating/flying, reflects onto the wall behind it. In the etchings we can almost make out forms of the body, but not quite. Next to this work are two larger framed ink drawings, Stundir með pensla pennum og heitum og köldum litum/Moments with brush pens and warm and cold colors, presenting repeating iterations of earthly green forms. They reference to all sorts of things natural: Tree trunks? Oysters? Fungus? The piece is intricately detailed yet without purpose. Our brain grasps at straws as we try to orient the shapes in something we know.

As viewers, we are stuck in this mind set of rational thinking, of orienting these forms as representations. Otherwise, if we free them from any purpose or meaning as they were meant as, they feel almost unsettling. So, the viewer makes associations to things we know, places we’ve visited, things we’ve dreamt of. The works become personal and real to our individual experience. Automatic is then more so a commentary on our own inner selves than on Riel herself. That we make something out of these forms points to our conscious’ need to form and categorize. Why this constant need for meaning? Why can we not accept an object as something unknown, uncategorizable?
In a black box room is a video and projecting sculpture work: Stund með 0.3 teiknipenna og laser- þyrping/Moment with 0.3 fineliner and lazer-cluster and Stundir á staðnum/Moments in situ. Three etched glass panels are reflected with light from a projection box, which slowly brightens and dims. A second sea-green colored reflection occurs, muddled and murky. Our own reflections interrupt the piece, changing its form. The video presents footage taken from below a projection box as Sara draws. At moments the action in the video stops as she switches out pieces of paper. We see then only the adjusting zoom of the camera on the projection box as it tries to orient itself, zooming the lens in and out. This orienting action of the lens is precisely how the viewer interacts with this exhibition. Constantly adjusting and repositioning, we attempt to orient ourselves in something we can’t quite understand, but desperately want to.
Our personal viewpoints very much inform and create meaning in these works, it is not prescribed or predetermined to us. Automatic is a diary of sorts, revealing inner parts of Riel’s subconscious as well as of ourselves. Through a spontaneous, artistic creation Riel creates pieces that are beautifully open to experience. References to Sigmund Freud are abound, and the associations we make in these drawings almost feel like a Rorshach test as psychological allusions of our inner thoughts are revealed. But there is an accessibility and simpleness to Riel’s methods, a meditative mindset that any of us can access. If we seize the moment the tools are presented to us. To follow her on this journey, accessing a state of freedom from logical thinking, brings us to question our own modes of thinking. This is ultimately what successful art should do, cause us to think, question, and reevaluate. Automatic is then a notable exploration into an artist’s search for an ultimately pure and free creation.

Sara Riel is recognized for her impressive public commission wall paintings. Her latest work To the Ocean, located on the Fishing Industry Building close to Harpa, has become a well known outdoor installation in Reykjavik’s urban landscape. Riel studied art at Fjölbrautaskólinn in Breiðholt and then at the Iceland Academy of the Arts from 2000-2001. She attended the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin from 2001-2005, and the Mesiterschuler in Berlin from 2005-2006.

„Automatic“ is running until November the 25th at Kling & Bang

Daría Sól Andrews

Photo credits: Lilja Birgisdóttir, Daría Sól Andrews, Ana Victoria Bruno

Inclusive Nation: Cycle Music and Art Festival 2018

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Þriðjudagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Inclusive Nation: Cycle Music and Art Festival 2018

This year’s edition of Cycle Music and Art Festival is titled Inclusive Nation, and it aims to place the festival in a larger context, looking at what is happening in the rest of the world and reflecting on how countries and individuals deal with issues like immigration, integration and cohabitation of different cultures. Iceland has been isolated for many years, and just recently started to be a dream destination for migrants who choose Iceland for its nature’s stunning beauty and for the country’s welfare.

Sanna Magdalena Mörtudóttir of the Socialist Party, the youngest city council member and the first black woman in the Icelandic council ever, took part at the panel discussion Inclusive Flow at Iðno, and she unlighted how the homogeneous population of Icelanders is now facing a change: immigration is growing and cultures are getting mixed, the typical Icelander with blue eyes and blonde hair is no longer representative of the whole nation. However, Iceland had never really started any conversation about diversity, because it had never had to face this situation before. Cycle is taking place at the right moment: as immigration grows, racism starts to pop up here and there. About a month ago local newspapers reported an investigation about immigrants working in Iceland, showing to the Icelandic population a silent exploitation happening in front of our eyes.

Melania Ubaldo has been working on her personal experiences as victim of slight racism for quite a long time. The work consists of a huge collage of different canvas, assembled together through a long process, creating a dissonant unique piece in which the diverse parts find a kind of harmony despite their diversity. The bits of canvas sewed together are topped with a sentence written in quick movement “Is there any Icelander working here?”, a question the artist got asked while working, as she wasn’t Icelandic enough just because of her Filipino’s somatic features. Her work is part of the show Exclusively Inclusive, and it hangs on the wall of the Gerðasafn, just next to the reception, to contextualize the work in a physical place which recalls the one where the incident happened.

Meriç Algün, born and raised in Istanbul but educated in Sweden, lives between Turkey and Sweden, a living in the in-between condition which led her to explore concepts as identity and belonging. She contributed to Cycle with a series of billboards spread around the public spaces which report questions people got asked in the visa application forms to enter a foreign country. Questions like “Are you and your partner living in a genuine and stable partnership?” arise reflections about the travelers’ identity value, especially in the airports, places where privacy is suspended and the individuals are invasively checked and questioned, diminished, simplified to fit in a pre-established grid which will determine a person’s adequacy to enter the country. Airports fall under the definition of non places a category Marc Augé created to refer to those anonymous places of transition where the human beings just pass by without building any kind of emotional interaction with the surroundings, so that it doesn’t matter if you are entering France or Norway, in any case you’ll be asked “Do you speak english?”. This question also deculturalizes and reduces the values of the hosting country, affecting the experience people would get from it, emphasizing they are allowed to enter the country just as tourists, they are expecting to act as tourists, to have a touristic experience of the country, they are under control.

Melania Ubaldo, Er einhver íslendingur að vinna hér? (2018)

Meriç Algün, Billboards (2012)

Ragnheiður Getsdóttir, Who created the timeline? (2016) and Meriç Algün, Billboards (2012)

Magnús Sigurðarsson, Requiem for a Whale

Childish Gambino, ZEF – This Is France (2018), Falz – This Is Nigeria (2018), Fox – This Is Turkey (2018)

Magnús Sigurðarsson, Icelandic Parroty

Inclusive Nation aims to open up a discussion about our approach to the otherness. If we look up for the world “nation” in the dictionary we will find “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory.”, a definition which underlines the importance of descent, history, culture, all characteristics which can be inherited and can determine a person’s belonging to a certain nation. That definition could, on one hand, sound kind of problematic nowadays when people move abroad so often, and, want it or not, they bring their motherland’s culture with them. On the other hand, exclusiveness is a logical consequence of the existence of borders, countries need to be exclusive in order to define themselves and their population. We ourselves are defined by a process of exclusion: we build our identity by excluding what we are not. The main venue of Cycle, Gerðasafn, hosts the show “Exclusively Inclusive” which, by playing with the words, invites us to reflect about those two important concepts: can we a nation be inclusive while maintaining its identity? If yes, how? At what point exclusiveness becomes racism? And so on.

This year Iceland celebrates the centenary of its independence and sovereignty, and its relation with Denmark as well as the impact of its colonial history are taken into account in the festival. The work of Sara Lou Kramer, Norröna Voyage, on show at Gerðasafn, developed from a theory which says that around the 16th century the Danish colonists collected all of the silver goods from Iceland and brought it to Denmark, where they melted the silver and probably used it to make the three lions which are nowadays in the “Knights’ Hall” at Rosenborg Castle. Kramer has been traveling from Denmark to Iceland on the Norröna ferry, she documented her journey and edited the material to make a video of the three silver lions returning back to Iceland and melting again on the Icelandic land.

Standing right next to Norröna Voyage, Bryndis Björnsdóttir’s installation De Arm started with an act of reappropriation: the artist picked a splinter off a plantation master’s chair from the Danish West-Indies colonies, which was exhibited in a historical show in Copenhagen. The colonists used to withdraw the sulphur from Iceland to make gunpowder, an extremely important resource to maintain their colonies under control and to conquer more territories, and Björnsdóttir unified these two symbols of the colonial time – the wooden splinter and the sulphur – in a match. A third element closes the conceptual circle of the installation: a rope on the floor. During the opening ropes were ignited just outside of the museum: the performance invites the viewer to reflect on the double usage of gunpowder presented in slow matches, a bivalent element which, on one hand, ensure that the explosion will take place and, on the other hand, guarantees a safe time frame between the ignition and the explosion.

Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir’s work The Little MareSausage is an ironic sculpture of a sausage with an elegant fish tail, sitting on a rolled hot-dog bread. The piece is placed in the Tjörnin pond, and it has been broadly discussed, dividing the inhabitants of the capital in two groups: those who love it and those who criticise its phallic shape. The statue is a sort of new creature which merges the Danish iconic The Little Mermaid sculpture and one of the more famous Icelandic dish: the hot-dog. The work provokes in the viewer reflections about the particular connections arising from coloniser-colonised relationships, cultural exchanges, appropriations, revisitations and new developments are unavoidable, interactions which influence the identities of the involved nations and individuals, determining cultural contaminations which will soften the borders between the countries. But if the Icelandic history and culture is tied to the Danish one, does this make Icelanders a bit Danish and Danish a bit Icelanders? After all, a nation is “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture […] ”

Bryndís Björnsdóttir, De Arm (2018)

Bryndís Björnsdóttir, De Arm (2018)

Sara Lou Kramer, Norröna Voyage

Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir, The Little MareSausage (2018)

Jeannette Ehlers, Black Matter

The definition of “nation” given by the dictionary mentions also the role of language in delimiting a culture, and in fact the first problem the team of Cycle (the curator Jonatan Habib Engqvist, the artistic director Gudný Gudmundsdóttir, the co-artistic director Tinna Thorsteinsdóttir and the co-curator and researcher Sara S. Öldudóttir) had to face was the lack of an Icelandic word corresponding to “inclusive”, so that in Icelandic the festival is called Þjóð meðal þjóða (A nation among nations). This led them to reflect upon the role of language in terms of defining the nature of a country and of enlighting peculiarities of a given culture. Ludwing Wittgenstein states in the Philosophical Investigation that the meaning of a word lays in the use of the word itself, and in order to grasp its meaning in any given context we need to look at the non-linguistic activities in which a given group of people engages. These activities plus the specific use of language of the community create a “form of life”. Our understanding of the world is therefore shaped by our language, since it is the means by which we represent the information we get from our experiences. Language became a sort of red thread in this edition of the festival, because of its qualities of being both the consequence of the development of a culture and, in some way, the cause of a population’s understanding of the world.

The piece Mother Tongues and Father Throats by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, which is part of the show Exclusively Inclusive, reflects on the “khhhhhhh” sound that is used in many Arabic languages but does not exist in most of the Northern European ones. The work presents a diagram of the mouth where different letters from Middle East alphabets are placed to indicate which part of the mouth is used to pronounce them. The piece is also a tapestry, it hang to the wall and it goes down to the floor forming a sort of soft bench for the viewers to sit and rest. The “khhhhhhh” is usually perceived as an abstruse sound from non-Arabic people, it sounds primitive and strange as it’s not completely understood, but the piece combines this sound with a space for people to relax and to feel comfortable in, attempting to modify the perception of that sound and of linguistic in general, which is usually seen as a tough subject to the exclusive competence of academics. During the opening of the Cycle Bendik Giske performed playing his saxophone while walking around the exhibition. He goes beyond the classical way of playing the instrument by incorporating sounds of the mechanics and his own breath. At some point he stood on the work Mother Tongues and Gather Throats and created an interesting and intense interaction between the particular way he uses his mouth and his throat to produce a wide range of sounds and the mouth and throat diagram behind him.

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir have collaborated on the work “Sounds of Doubt”, a piece which investigates the possible connections between the sounds of a certain language/country and the local culture, asking through their work if such a connection exists. A microphone placed in the room detects the sounds from the surroundings and passes the information to a projector which creates a visualisation of the sounds we produce, while models of the seabed surrounding Iceland are scattered in the space. One of these models in particular has been made by merging the submerged peaks and the sound waves of the Icelandic national anthem, showing the similarities of their profiles and shapes. A video work presents the culmination of a process started during Cycle 2017 when through Sounds of Doubts – Workshop groups of artists worked with participants from different Nordic Countries. The aim was to unveil the influences of natural and cultural environments on the participants’ behaviour. The video shows alternately an interview with two Greenlandic ladies, holding inflatable balls depicting the planets of the solar system, and recordings from starships traveling through the universe. Sounds of Doubts creates a parallelism between our existence in the world as highly evolved creatures, with our cultural and knowledge luggage, and the universe invisible structures, primordial forces moving by nature’s laws which constitutes the starting point of it all. There is a flux of life which unifies everything existing in the universe, which we can’t avoid because we are part of a wholeness. We tend to forget where we come from, blinded by idea that we are some kind of superior beings just because we can build tools and we have technologies, but we just assemble or transform preexisting items. As Aristotle’s theory of act and potency says, every substance existing in nature has already the potentiality to become the actual objects in which they develop / are developed by the human beings. We are, indeed “[…] such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”, and here is where inclusiveness becomes a matter of accepting and embracing the wholeness we are part of.

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir have been working together as an artist and a musician, bringing together different experiences and points of view to create a multi-sensorial work which communicates through different media and through different languages. Cycle, in fact, embraces the idea of language in a comprehensive way, languages are not just about spoken or written communication, they are also about the individual’s different ways of expression: the festival brings together visual art, music, design, poetry and even architecture, artists are encouraged to maintain the characteristics of their own art, but also to open conversations and to work across the borders of nations and arts.

Slavs and Tatars, Mother Tongues & Father Throats (2012)

Bendik Giske

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir, Sounds of Doubts, (2017 – 2018)

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir, Sounds of Doubts (2017 – 2018)

Exclusively Inclusive, installation view

The Circle Flute

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, In Search of Magic

Pinar Öğrenci, A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us (2017)

The Circle Flute is the perfect example of a borderline object placed on the edge between art and design. It has been designed by Brynjar Sigurðarsson and Veronika Sedlmair to explore and expand the possibilities of a normal flute: the instrument combines four flutes to form a one big and circular instrument which needs four people to be played and it’s able to produce a wider interaction of sounds than a simple flute. The work opens up to a collaborative use of the object, four people need to coordinate their movements and their actions since the Circle Flute is a combination of four curved flutes attached to form a single instrument. The Circle Flute is thought to be played for one listener who is supposed to stay in the middle of the instrument to get an immersive experience of the music, embraced by the flute and its sounds.

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson’s contribution to the festival fits into this process of unification of different forms of art. They started the project In Search for Magic in May 2017 with a group of musicians and composers, bringing together people with different approaches to music to compose songs on the Proposal for a new Constitution for the Republic of Iceland written in 2011 which was approved by the Icelandic population through a referendum in 2012 but hasn’t been approved by the parliament yet. The idea behind the constitution is to give voice to the people, the constitution has in fact been created through a collaborative project, people would bring new ideas and would discuss them together, everyone was welcome to contribute to the drafting of the constitution. In Search for Magic moves toward the same direction, the project is rooted in a collaborative effort which engages with the public, in fact viewers were invited to take a look at the workshop when musicians and composers were working, and to actually take part in the work by reading a sentence from the constitution which was recorded and will be edited in a single recording which will literally unify the individuals’ voices. The project embodies the utopia of a different world in which people take actively part in the building of their future, and the borders between artists and non-artists are torn down.

The artworks presented in the show Exclusively Inclusive and in the public spaces stay true to their nature of artworks even when the subject is placed in a social/political context. The video work by Pınar Öğrenci, A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us, reflects about the terrible journey people from the Middle East have to go through to reach Europe’s lands, the piece is based on the story of a professional musicians from Iraq who was forced by human traffickers to leave behind his oud in order to fit more people in the ship. Despite the strong thematic, the video treats the episode in a highly delicate way, it does not show violence, but it communicates through poetic and emotional images, addressing the story to our humanity. Art doesn’t need to become a cold documentary about political and social situation in the world, there are many ways to tell stories, and art needs to keep its own touch.

Manifesta 12 in Palermo has been dealing with similar issues, but the biennial consists of mostly video works documenting the immigrants’ life in Italy or their original culture, a format which tends to repeat itself and does not fit such a big exhibition. Moreover, the works are often reduced at pure documentation, the glimpse of art and creativity is hidden somewhere behind technology, the message keeps repeating itself in each video, progressively losing its emotional impact on the viewers. Exclusively inclusive, instead, takes the opposite approach: the selected works do deal with tough themes, but the re-elaboration of the material made from the artists, the multiple collaborations which bring to multimedia outcomes, the way artists address their works to different senses to get the viewer/listener/smeller totally involved, all these qualities manage to give a new conformation to those images to which we are so inured, a comprehensive experience which talks to us on a new level.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credits: Ana Victoria Bruno, Anita Björk, Leifur Wilberg

Website: www.cycle.is

Come Rain or Shine by the International Young Female Artist Club

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Laugardagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Come Rain or Shine by the International Young Female Artist Club

Human beings have always had a peculiar love-hate relationship with the weather. Our existence on earth is possible thanks to the atmosphere, the set of layers of gases surrounding our planet, and the first of these layers, the troposphere, the one closest to earth, is associated with the weather, since here is where most of the clouds we see in the sky are. When human beings weren’t in possession of any tool to protect themselves from the weather conditions, they used to just adapt to the external climate, but through the centuries we developed specific techniques: we discovered the fire which kept us warm, we sewed clothes, we built houses, we invented umbrellas, and time after time our relationship with the weather changed, storms ceased to be feared, uncontrollable and destructive forces of nature, because we learnt how to deal with them. We became more and more independent from the weather, and we are now able to carry on with our lives despite the meteorological conditions. But we went too far, we lost all respect for the weather and for nature, our anthropocentrism took over and we forgot how we used to live in connection with nature.

We only just recently started to think about the way our presence in the world influences the weather: we are around 7.5 billions individuals and we can’t pretend anymore we are not a factor in the environmental changes happening on planet earth. We need to acknowledge that such a large population has a huge impact on nature, the earth itself is begging us to review our behaviour toward nature: destructive natural phenomenons are becoming more and more frequent, signs of warning are everywhere.

The philosopher Timothy Morton claims that the humankind urges to rethink its approach to non-human entities, such as animals, plants, and nature in general. He states we need to reconsider the effects produced by our intrusive existence on earth, we need to find a new balance to re-establish a healthy relationship with the planet and the its other inhabitants, and in order to achieve this, we need to get over our anthropocentric view.

The show Come Rain or Shine moves toward this direction: the artists collective IYFAC (International Young Female Artist Club) aims to awake the viewers’ conscience by showing them how deeply we are connected to the weather. The works by Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir and Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir reference to a time in which the meteorological conditions used to have an active role in our daily life, when we used to interpret the future by looking at the sky, to use stones to navigate the sea, a time in which we used to respect nature and to live in symbiosis with it.

Sturludóttir created the series Placing a Ranke in a Field with Its Teeth Toward the Sky which is a sort of calendar reporting traditional knowledge connected to specific days and to the weather. For instance, the 9th of March is the Knight day, and “The weather on this day predicts the weather for the next 7 weeks”. This work reflects about the way the inhabitants of a place find a logic in the way the weather changes, and, time after time, deduce general rules from what they see. This folkloristic knowledge affirms our deep connection with the atmospheric changes: we wouldn’t have bothered to try to understand the way weather works if it hadn’t been important for us. Alongside this calendar the artist presents pictures which catch the consequences of the weather on persons and object: the sunshine softly getting across the curtain and projecting a light into the room, a mounting pole of a windsock bent from the wind, a wrist with a mark from a watch, elements which are witnesses to certain meteorological conditions.

Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir hung a long yellow drape from the ceiling of Hafnaborg all the way the floor downstairs, creating a “golden waterfall” which embodies a ray of sunshine. The light and soft material and its warm colour reflect our perception of the sunlight: a peaceful, joyful and embracing immaterial entity which gently warms up our bodies and our states. This site specific installation has been thought in relations to a particular architectural element present in the space: a little circular window on the top of a wall functions as a natural clock: by looking at the way the sunlight come through it we can deduct the height of the sun, and so the time.
Leifsdóttir contributes to the show with another beautiful and poetic work: the installation Polarity is constituted by two videos of close ups of hands turning the pages of the book The Sorrow Gondola by Tomas Tranströmer and placing on them an Icelandic spar, a transparent local stone through which everything looks double. This stone has been used by the vikings to navigate the seas, the properties of the stone allowed them to individuate the position of the sun despite it was hidden behind layers of clouds.

The artists Steinunn Lilja Emilsdóttir and Halla Birgisdóttir decided to work on the individual’s inner and intimate connection with the weather, a precious and unique relationship each of us develops with our surroundings.

Steinunn Lilja Emilsdóttir’s work It’s escalating deals with extreme natural phenomena, she transformed pictures of natural disasters such as desertification, the melting of icebergs, forest fires, tornadoes, and realaborated them into abstract and geometrical collages, associating each of them to a personal thoughts about the dramatic event portrayed. Her work aims to have an aesthetic impact on the viewer: within the frames the images are deconstructed in a style which resembles the Neoplasticism Art of Piet Mondrian, breaking the connection with reality and focusing on a subjective representation, a personal understanding of these tragedies. The sentences the artist wrote underneath each piece emphasise the belonging of the images to the her personal sphere, letting us get a glimpse inside her thoughts and inviting us to reflect on how those dramatic events are understood by us.

Halla Birgisdóttir’s work highs/lows occupies a long wall of the room filling it with drawings topped with short sentences, sometimes just single words, which express feelings, states, thoughts of the characters portrayed. Her work adopts the guises of a sort of comic stripe with no narrative: the characters appear just once, the words do not conform to comics’ dialogs, but they are captions of inner states or thoughts. The only element these drawings share with each others is the role of the weather which arouses emotional responses in the characters. Birgisdóttir portrays men, women, human beings caught in intimate moments, she explores the many ways in which the weather still influences our inner selves by illustrating our inner weather forecast.

Sigrún Hlín Sigurðardóttir works within the contemporaneity, she sees clothes as a meeting point between the weather and the human beings, layers of fabrics which create an intermediate bridge between us and the natural elements. For the show Come Rain or Shine she created a huge winter jacket, which, despite its big dimensions, gives an impression of lightness: it is made out of fluffy plastic material stuffed into a semitransparent fabric, and hangs from the ceiling as it was floating in the air, suspended in the space, resembling a cloud formation standing in the sky. Winter jackets, as well as many of our clothes, have an inherent contradiction: they are made to protect us from the weather, but the synthetic material they are made of, plus the consumerism affecting the contemporary society, transforms jackets into a non recyclable waste in a short time, contributing to the increasing of pollution. We protect ourselves from the weather by using something which damages our planet and, consequently, affects the weather, so that we will need to shelter ourselves into more layers, and the history repeats itself over and over.

The curator Marta Sigríður Pétursdóttir has been able to coordinate a show where the pieces by the five artists work together: each of them apports a personal research to shape a comprehensive overview of the environmental problem the world is facing, sending out a clear message.

We are part of something bigger, and, as Timothy Morton says, the whole is not bigger than its part, but instead it is smaller: a hand it’s made of five fingers, countless muscles and nerves, but it’s just one hand, which sounds extremely reductive. If we endeavour to invert the course of the progressive destruction of planet earth individually, we may achieve some results, but first we need to realize how important the weather is for our lives, and the show Come Rain or Shine has this first step covered.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photos by: Ana Victoria Bruno