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

Mom’s balls: a show across generations

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Mánudagur.09.2018 | artzine in english

Mom’s balls: a show across generations

Artists, in order to carry this title, need to be recognized as such from the local and/or international art scene. Besides their creative practice, artists need their works to get out there and to be seen from the art community. They need to be active in the art world by showing their pieces in galleries and museums. It means that artists need to present themselves as artists in order to be recognized as such. But what if someone has artistic skills but does not have the possibility to develop self-promoting abilities and to show his/her works? What if this person lives in the Icelandic countryside in the mid-twentieth century? Probably he/she will never be recognized as an artist unless she is lucky enough to be Elín Jónsdóttir, mother of Ágústa Oddsdóttir and grandmother of Egill Sæbjörnsson.

The two artists see in their mother/grandmother an inspiration source for their works. Elín Jónsdóttir had a very creative and modern way of thinking; recycling was essential for her and she was really skilled in manual work. Everything was guaranteed a second life in the hands of Elín Jónsdóttir: old socks and clothes seams were unpicked and the threads reused to make blankets or floor mats. Nothing was thrown away in her house. Even fishing nets and Christmas ribbons were re-worked to become unique shopping bags. But Elín Jónsdóttir’s abilities shine the most in her tapestries: she used to dye the threads by herself, using extracts from plants and vegetables, to create an earthy colors scale. A beautiful tapestry in the bedroom at Neðri-Háls has a particular design composed of both geometrical shapes and figurative decorations, a multilayered work which shows her will to go beyond the reproduction of the visible world, re-elaborating it by mixing some elements from reality, others from a board game and abstract forms.

The exhibition Mom’s Balls is set in three different places: Neðri-Háls, which is the old farm where Ágústa Oddsdóttir grew up with her mother Elín Jónsdóttir, the Old City Library in downtown Reykjavik, and the bar of Hotel Holt.

Getting to Neðri-Háls has an important role in the general experience of the show. The farm is an hour drive from Reykjavik, a lovely trip into Kjos, in Hvalfjörður, and I was lucky enough to go there in one of the few sunny days of this moody Icelandic summer. The mountains coated with bright green grass were flowing through my left car window, the beautiful fiord was gleaming in the sunshine on my right. The little farm has been preserved as it used to appear back in time: the old furniture, the sweet curtains with little flowers, everything looks just like frozen in time. Ágústa Oddsdóttir was there, to warmly welcome the visitors with a cup of delicious coffee and some Icelandic cinnamon rolls. She kindly told me about her mother, describing her as a strong woman and an inspiring figure.

Ágústa Oddsdóttir used to be a sociology teacher when she realized that teaching didn’t suit her anymore, so she decided to go back to school and to join the Icelandic University of Art, willing to move towards art. The influence she got from her mother is visible in her works: she creates big balls made out of stripes cut from old and disused clothes collected through the years. These works refer to a very intimate realm, our clothes are very much connected with ourselves, they function just like a second skin, and they can also be used to communicate our way of being in the world. By cutting stripes from old clothes and wrapping them together to form a unit big object Ágústa Oddsdóttir puts together memories and stories from all the family members.

This conceptual traverse of time and generations is perceptible in her whole practice: some journals on show are visual elaborations of stories her mother had told her. When Elín Jónsdóttir had a nervous breakdown, Ágústa Oddsdóttir used to spend a lot of time with her and they would go for long walks in the nature to have a chat. Elín Jónsdóttir would tell her daughter stories from her past and Ágústa Oddsdóttir would listen carefully, and, once she was alone, she would illustrate her mother’s words and write them down. Elín Jónsdóttir didn’t know about these diaries, otherwise, she would have stopped telling her daughter about her past, because she would have felt used. Ágústa Oddsdóttir has been keeping the journals hidden for many years until recently when she decided to show them.

Those journals show the intimate relationship between the mother and her daughter with an interesting narrative dynamic: Elín Jónsdóttir’s stories have been filtered through the imagination of the Ágústa Oddsdóttir, creating a sort of collaboration between them. The stratification of time alongside with narration are the basis of her work, and they remind us of the importance of recording facts and people memories, but they also remind us that once, before the humans invented the writing form, we were all storytellers, and narration after narration the stories would change and transform little by little, gaining something new from every storyteller.

This narrative aspect is a strong presence also in Ágústa Oddsdóttir’s boxes body of work: she recycles boxes by creating on one side a blank surface with white painting, on which she draws scenes which recall a past childhood. Some boxes are shown side by side and they form a kind of comic strips where each of them represents a scene of a whole story.

Looking at the descent, we can see that Egill Sæbjörnsson has inherited the same interest in narrations, in time-traverses and, in some way, in recycling. His grandmother has been babysitting him for over ten years, spending many hours per day with him and during that time he has absorbed a lot from Elín Jónsdóttir’s values.

Egill Sæbjörnsson has worked around the idea of two trolls, Ugh and Boogar, borrowing the Icelandic traditional trolls and recontextualizing them into the contemporary world. He has developed the concept of troll: Ugh and Boogar are curious about everything, they are eager to learn and to create, they imitate Egill Sæbjörnsson because they want to understand how the human beings have developed. Egill Sæbjörnsson gave the trolls a new life through his work. He created a new narrative for them to exist in the contemporary world, a process which is reminiscent of his grandmother’s approach to recycling.

Ugh and Boogar were actually born as a private joke – two alter egos he created just to have fun – but then he developed their stories through his artworks making them almost real. At the Old City Library, there is also a video of Ágústa Oddsdóttir getting into her alter ego character named Guðmundur Jónasson, a bus driver, another art piece which was born just as a joke but that has been transformed in an actual artwork.

Egill Sæbjörnsson’s interest in narration and time-traverse can be seen also in his piece Afi minn for a honum Rauð, on show at the Old City Library in downtown Reykjavik. This work consist of a photographic series based on an old Icelandic children song from 1998, Egill Sæbjörnsson has been once again borrowing something from the past and re-elaborating it to create a new narration. The process is reminiscent of his mother’s journals as in both of the pieces, the original story is filtered by the artist’s imagination which produces a personal interpretation, a meeting point of different times and of understandings of the story itself.

Mom’s balls recontextualizes work by Elín Jónsdóttir, whose potential has been seen by the British-American art critic Karen Wright, curator of the show. Elín Jónsdóttir’s creations have finally been placed in that context to which she had never had the opportunity to access. But the presence of her works in the show enlightens that of Ágústa Oddsdóttir and Egill Sæbjörnsson: the dialog through the works reinforces the artwork themselves, empowering them with a new strength and giving us the key for a new understanding of their practices.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credit: Helga Óskarsdóttir

About connections and slowness

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Mánudagur.08.2018 | Umfjöllun

About connections and slowness

A look into the show Tunglið er spegill tímans and the artist book publishing ‘uns.

The show Tunglið er spegill tímans encloses the poetic and meticulous artistic research of Arild Tveito which proceeds with brilliant intuitions and smart connections, creating a constellation of ideas. At a first look the space of Harbinger seems quite empty, except for a table with three chairs, a book on display in a cabinet, and a few texts hung on the wall. The show is very minimal, but once we start reading the texts we get to know the unique universe created by Tveito: the conceptualism behind the exhibition unveils its nature and starts to fill up the space with an invisible network. On show there are clues of the connections through which the artist had sailed during his research, there is some kind of magical fascination in discovering how things are secretly linked and how many possibilities of being and of meaning are inherent in one single object, depending on how you look at it.

The idea for the show was born with the Scottish curator Gavin Morrison, a friend of Tveito, who invited him to collaborate for a printed edition titled Sunnudagur, 29. September, 1912, an Icelandic translation from English of a journal entry by David Pinsent, who visited Iceland with Ludwig Wittgenstein. David Pinsent wrote down their experience in a very synthetic diary, which skips completely any description of the landscape, revealing the pragmatics of the trip.

Draumkvæde illustrated by Gerhard Munthe, 1904. Courtesy of the artist Arild Tveito.

During his stay in Iceland, Arild discovered the poem Tunglið er spegill tímans by Matthías Johannessen which has been translated in Norwegian by Knut Ødegård. Contrasting David Pinsent’s journal, the poem is made out of beautiful and poetic descriptions of images that revolve around the idea of death. The poem has been published in a small bilingual edition by Dulheim, and can be purchased at Harbinger.  Similar poetical visions can be found in the book on display in the show Draumkvæde, illustrated by the Norwegian artist Gerhard Munthe in 1904. Draumkvæde recalls the medieval dream visions tradition, where “the dreamer is characteristically in some state of sinfulness or melancholy; the dream is then a response to the visionary’s reality; and the vision allows him to undergo an imaginational or spiritual development so that his perspective is changed after the dream experience” as Arild Tveito explaines.

Exhibition View.

The installation Pataphysical Constellation consists of three chairs and the table borrowed from the National Gallery of Iceland and brought to Harbinger for the show. The furniture was designed by Matte Halme of Lepofinn, Finland, back in the 1987, and its Finnish origins took Arild Tveito back to his time as a student in Nordic Art School of Karleby in Finland, where he attended some lessons from the Swedish artist Mats B (1951-2009), guest professor from the Vestrogotiska Patafysiska Institutet, who introduced the students to the imaginary science: the ‘pataphysics.

Exhibition View.

Tveito’s artistic research is very much influenced by the ‘pataphysicians: they follow a theory placed on the border between philosophy and science. The ‘pataphysics was born at the beginning of the last century from the brilliant mind of the French writer Alfred Jarry, and has collected many followers within the visual art field through the years. The ‘pataphysics “[…] is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics.” and “’Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. ‘Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one.” (Alfred Jarry 1996, p.21).  By doing that, ‘pataphysics opens a door to a new way of thinking about the world, a way ruled by creativity, which recalls the way a human brain works: jumping from one memory or thought to another, connecting them in unpredictable ways.

Footage of Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir reading from the poem Tunglið er spegill tímans by poet Matthías Johannessen. The reading was made on the last day of Arild Tveito exhibition 18. august (on Reykjavík culturnight).

Arild Tveito had also been influenced by Miguel Tamen’s book Friends of Interpretable Objects (2004), because “It re-anchors aesthetics in the object of attention even as it redefines the practice, processes, meaning, and uses of interpretation. Tamen’s concern is to show how inanimate objects take on life through their interpretation – notably, in our own culture, as they are collected and housed in museums. It is his claim that an object becomes interpretable only in the context of a ‘society of friends’.”

Tunglið er spegill tímans is part of the summer program Print in media, a space to be walked which has been organised by ‘uns, a project run by Guðrún Benónýsdóttir. ‘uns goes well beyond the organisation of shows and the publication of art books, even though it does both, it is above all a creative pot: working with artists, curators and writers, Guðrún brings together thinkers to open up enriching conversations.

The books are the outcome of long processes which involve many characters, summing up their personal approaches and points of view, in order to create multilayered shows and multifaceted objects which encourage never ending exploration.

On one hand the books are the result of a wide cooperation, while on the other hand they are very personal and intimate objects for the reader. Guðrún explores and stretches the concept of book, ‘uns is a revolutionary reaction to the always-on-the-rush contemporary world we are living in: the book is understood as a personal medium of art which follows the reader’s inner and physical rhythm. The publications of ‘uns are gateways through which you can connect to art wherever you are and whenever you have time, they are devices which open up to portable exhibitions. By having a book with you, you have the possibility to go back again and again to those concepts or those artworks when you need to, building up a closer connection with art and disclosing the multilayered meanings contained in the artist books.

The writer Milan Kundera suggests in his novel Slowness that slowing down is a way to remember, it is the condition in which we can stay connected with ourselves and with the world around us, while speeding is the better way to escape of forget something, because while running we can’t have a comprehensive view of where we are and what is happening around us. Milan Kundera has a good understanding of the contemporary world: he clearly sees how technology and the pushing pace of modern life is changing our way of communicating and of relating to the outside world. A similar reflection brought Guðrún to found ‘uns, since the art world is also affected by this collective acceleration, and sometimes decelerating is the key to reset a personal pace according to our inner needs.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo Credit: Guðrún Benónýsdóttir

Next Entries »