Ólafur Elíasson Opens a Retrospective at the Tate Modern, Activates a Participatory Togetherness

by Daría Sól Andrews | Laugardagur.08.2019 | artzine in english

Ólafur Elíasson Opens a Retrospective at the Tate Modern, Activates a Participatory Togetherness

Ólafur Elíasson’s In Real Life at the Tate Modern presents a deeply moving collection of work that encompasses a full range of emotion, medium and perception into one intensely thought proving experience. Nodding to Elíasson’s 2003 The Weather Project at the Tate, In Real Life combines a sensory interaction of people, experience, time, and space. The exhibition is totally and fully immersive, both inside and beyond the exhibition walls. Historically, Elíasson’s practice has revealed a deep and curious examination of light and environment in both an intricately scientific exploration and a delicately artistic unpacking, and In Real Life pays homage to just how massively prolific his career has been. Elíasson’s works prompt us to examine how we think about nature and perception, encouraging us to navigate our environments in new, playful ways. In a moment of temporary interaction, viewers become one in intimate experience, uniquely together. Around forty works spanning over three decades draw the viewer to ponder: how do we acknowledge others, our environment, and our own senses? And what necessary implications for action does this have in a world wrought with climate disaster?

The word experience is key: entering the exhibition, the interaction begins immediately upon stepping into the elevator. The viewer exits into monochromatic light, people mill around in black and white, bathed in yellow. In a way Elíasson here forces our perceptions to be reduced, rather than expanded, to something more minimal – literally black and white. Perhaps the artist is urging us to see the world as it is, without our obliviously rose-tinted glasses. This subtle action orients us into a curated emotional mindset before we enter the exhibition space.

In the first gallery is Model Room (2003) a large, room sized box of intricate curiosities, orbs and containers of different materials, sizes and levels. The work challenges our preconceptions of building and ways of architecturally using space. Next, the viewer enters into a large gallery presenting a combination of earlier works from the 1990s and alongside new creations. Yellow tones compliment green hues, earthly tones vibrate throughout. A massive wall is filled entirely with subtle green Scandinavian reindeer moss that creeps down to the floor. Guests are allowed to touch the installation, together; it is remarkably soft. As an Icelander I associate to home, summer, picking blueberries in the countryside.

Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Einar Thorsteinn, Model room, 2003. Wood table with steel legs, mixed media models, maquettes, prototypes. Dimension variable. Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Purchase 2015 funded by The Anna-Stina Malmborg and Gunnar Höglund Foundation. © 2003 Olafur Eliasson.

Olafur Eliasson, Moss wall, 1994. Reindeer moss, wood, wire. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 1994 Olafur Eliasson

A reflected pane of window light mimics the outlines of some recognizable urban structure. Made from negative space, the work imitates a natural phenomenon, a reality, like the title of this show suggests. Four long trays of chemical yellow water line the floor, as if in some sort of photosynthesis or development process. The water sloshes back and forth in a synchronized movement, a quiet reference to the ocean’s waves. A window mimicking the rain – the mechanical imitating reality, quite masterfully. Outside is an artificial waterfall built out of scaffolding; Waterfall (2019) of the few new works in the exhibition, again brings together the mechanical and the natural in an imitating replica. These works suggest to the growingly blurred lines between man-made and organic.

Another of Elíasson’s new works, a black orb entitled Your Planetary Window (2019) playfully disrupts our sense of depth perception in a mirroring illusion. It is not until we encounter the other side of this orb in a separate room that the game of this work is revealed. The face of the viewer on the opposite side is plastered across the orb, like a fish eye lens. The work functions as a one way mirror to another person’s interactions with the piece, the minutiae of the person and their experience on full display. As private participants, we interact together in this work, unknowingly at first, in an element of voyeurism.

Following, in a black room, a soft misting of rain falls to the ground, a dim spotlight highlighting it. The room is warm and damp, fresh, the sound is soothing, taking us to a quite specific place, personal to each. This is Beauty (1993) and it is, quite simply, beautiful; pristine, quiet, intimate. The movement of the rain captured in the colorful light is bodily and emotional, physical. We want to grab it, but feel only it’s wet ethereal touch. The drops crystallize on the ground in a mirroring effect. It is seamless, continuous.

Olafur Eliasson, Waterfall, 2019. Scaffolding, water, wood, plastic sheet, aluminium, pump, hose. Height 11 metres, diameter 12 metres. Courtesy the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. Installation view: Tate Modern, London. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.
© 2019 Olafur Eliasson.

Olafur Eliasson, Beauty, 1993. Spotlight, water, nozzles, wood, hose, pump. Dimensions variable. Installation view at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2015. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles. © 1993 Olafur Eliasson

Throughout this exhibition there is a warmth and happiness, a curiosity in exploration. We interact together, yet separately, as one participant. Elíasson captures an essentialness of group and simultaneously individual experience. For example, in Din blinde passager (Your blind passenger) (2010). Viewers enter into a 39 meter long room filled with fog and a soft yellow, monochromatic light that gradually turns white blue. Visibility extends only see a few feet in front, and the rest dissolves into a soft fuzz as your eyes work to adjust. People disappear and reappear, come in and out of focus. You are together, yet in solitude. And still, there is a calm serenity to this fog, like one is entering into the rays of the sun, welcoming a dewy unknown. You don’t know where your next step leads, but you walk forward, trusting, enveloped. Alone in the fog, something in me pauses. I rest here in this abyss of nothing, of sound and perception and smell, knowing that I am not, in fact, alone.

After, the viewer encounters another familiarly perplexing work of Elíasson’s, Big Bang Fountain (2014). Entering into a pitch black room, interactors are guided by the sounds of water splashing and crashing in a black abyss. At few second intervals a bright strobe flashes, showing for a split second an image in light of a drop of water. The drop is static yet in movement, imprinted into the interactor’s mind as glowing after image. Just outside, a circular shadow screen projects an image of a wisp of light that rainbows in color in an ethereal, otherworldly fashion. This object of light feels familiar but I can’t place it. DNA? The Milky Way? As people walk behind and around it the shape changes and morphs with shadows, mystically mesmerizing viewers.

Next, a kaleidoscope series; for example one life size creation that visitors can walk through like a shimmering black hole. One kaleidoscope piece reflects the viewer, the sky, the earth, and the city in endlessly repeating iterations. This coning of mirrored repetitions into one conflated object forces a cognitive shift as we perplex at new perspectives. As Elíasson explains in a wall text “kaleidoscopes offer more than just a playful visual experience. Multiple reflections fracture and reconfigure what you see. You are offered different perspectives at once, and understand your position in new ways. You might let go of the sense of being in command of space, and instead enjoy a kind of uncertainty.”

Olafur Eliasson, Your spiral view, 2002. Stainless-steel mirror, steel320 x 320 x 800 cm. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Boros Collection, Berlin. © 2002 Olafur Eliasson

Elíasson’s spectacularly comprehensive exhibition ends with a large educational center, the Expanded Studio, that encourages a focus on climate change and our environment, alongside a background into his studio practice and its connection to these social issues. This is a space to play and create and experience together in an extension of the galleries. Here Elíasson presents a continuing effort to invoke a change in consciousness, a sensitivity to our planet and ourselves, a reawakening of a sense of agency and proactiveness in all of us. In profound fashion, the overwhelmingness of this exhibition is educational in such a subtle way, bringing us together, without the viewer quite even being consciously aware of it. It is beautifully all encompassing, yet simultaneously simple and distinct in its message, awakening us.

Yet, perhaps some of this social commentary could be turned back around onto Elíasson himself, and his own studio practices. While projects like Green Light, Ice Watch, Riverbed, the solar-powered lamp initiative Little Sun, and his eco-friendly restaurant endeavors are all commendably environmentally oriented, to what extent does the Ólafur Elíasson Studio promote self-directed sustainability? For example, what is the environmental footprint of shipping blocks of glacial ice from Nordic environments across the globe, of transporting a massive wall of Scandinavian moss to London? What carbon footprint do his studio staff leave on the earth, with the endless air travel of Elíasson, his 90 people on staff, and his artworks and installations. Elíasson actively works with the World Health Organisation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and policy makers and UN officials across Europe in the interests of climate change and renewable energy, such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda to fight against institutionalization and the slow progress of climate change efforts. Elíasson is certainly no self-proclaimed pioneer of zero-waste, fully sustainable practices, and he must have a self-awareness to this, but the irony can still be pointed out. Perhaps this is part of the point, to turn this critical eye to ourselves and the never-ending possibility to do more amidst the seeming impossibility of living a truly sustainable and zero-waste lifestyle. Like Elíasson stated in an interview with Wired Magazine in 2015, “I am very respectful of the people who are knowledgeable, and I say, ‘I don’t have an answer to the challenge, but I have a tool — it’s called creativity’ As an artist, I think I can co-produce answers.“ Perhaps through pondering this dichotomy, we can bring our own daily actions into some self-critique as well.

Daria Sol Andrews

Articles for Reference:

Dazed Digital 2018: https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/39096/1/artist-olafur-eliasson-little-sun-diamond-environmental-crisis-art

The Art Newspaper 2017: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/olafur-eliasson-there-is-ultimately-no-space-in-which-art-cannot-work

Art Territory 2017: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/olafur-eliasson-the-return-of-the-sun-king/

The Telegraph 2016: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/olafur-eliasson-the-return-of-the-sun-king/

Wired 2015: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/olafur-eliasson-the-return-of-the-sun-king/

It´s Nice That 2015: https://www.itsnicethat.com/features/its-ok-to-disagree-the-divisive-work-of-artist-olafur-eliasson

The Guardian 2015: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/21/olafur-eliasson-i-am-not-special-interview-tree-of-codes-ballet-manchester

ArtReview 2014: https://artreview.com/features/december_2014_feature_olafur_eliasson

Cover picture: Olafur Eliasson, Eine Beschreibung einer Reflexion, oder aber eine angenehme Übung zu deren Eigenschaften (A description of a reflection or, a pleasant exercise on its qualities), 1995. Spotlight, mirrors, projection foil, motor, tripod. Dimensions variable. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2019. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Boros Collection, Berlin. © 1995 Olafur Eliasson.

The exhibition In Real Life is on view at Tate Modern in London until January the 5th, 2020: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/olafur-eliasson

A Mirrored Detritus and the Camouflaged Body : B. Ingrid Olson at i8 Gallery

by Daría Sól Andrews | Þriðjudagur.07.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

A Mirrored Detritus and the Camouflaged Body : B. Ingrid Olson at i8 Gallery

I8 recently added B. Ingrid Olson (b.1987) to their roster of represented artists, a Chicago based artist whose intriguing practice can be placed somewhat ambiguously along an undefined axis of photography and sculpture. Olson´s exhibition at i8, Fingered Eyed, her first solo exhibition in Iceland, is compelling in its refined execution. Each of Olson´s pieces are intricately woven in a subtly connected thematic, bordering a limbo between a raw sterility that is contrasted by the warm, fleshy presence of the human body. Fingered Eyed is stark and directed, with a unique precision of vision that is wholly satisfying.

This exhibition works with an open and permeable vocabulary of sculpture, photography, a theatrical staging, and a focused detail on physical material. As Olson essentializes, a “bodily image contained by spatial cavities, or concavities.” At first glance, her sculptural photographs suggest something like papier mache, digitally distorted after the fact, the compositions so complex and confused. In fact, the meticulous moments are staged by the hand of the artist, captured at the blink of an eye, or rather at the close of a camera shutter. Crafted with a precise calculation, each photograph contains a different aim, a different intuition of gesture as she expands and contracts the body and its mirrored proximities.

Installation view Fingered Eyed at i8 Gallery.

Olson unpacks the process for me: “the work that appears to be primarily sculptural comes out of a series of forms that are actually designed to create images by way of light and shadow cast over the protruding edges and inward curving surfaces. Overhead lighting works on their structure to relay a shadow-image of a minimal, absent body. Though these works are not at all photographic technically, their relationship to light (both artificial and natural sunlight) does function as a parallel metaphor for photography, which at its root is described as ‘drawing with light’. And conversely, the works that can be easily referred to as photographic are also equally sculptural in their activity, structure, and presence. The pictures capture performative sculpting of the body and space, with handmade props or found objects that work to camouflage or conflate the figure with its surrounding space. The printed images are then again bridged into the sculptural by way of their deep Plexiglas frames that extend far into their frontal airspace, forming a simultaneous barrier and open container.”

These photographic objects (plexiglass, dye sublimation print on aluminum, MDF) extend out from the wall, surgical yellow, pasty tones interrupting the sterile gallery space. She calls these three works ‘blinders’, working with an analogous relationship to interior architectural space. “The deep sides become wall-like, in that they cordon off the recessed image from full view when approached from an oblique angle. They put limitations on the completeness of vision and dictate how much and when the framed image can possibly be seen. The frames work to orient the viewer towards full-frontal, conscious looking.” It is only when we come to face the object that we encounter the work within. Because of their physical walls, we cannot fully experience the sculptural forms unless facing them head on, entering them, almost. It is in this that Olson allows us to be alone with the piece, carving out a space from which a work and an experience emerges from within the depths of an empty wall. An object, out of moment, for us to privately revel in.

Installation view Fingered Eyed at i8 Gallery.

The body is present throughout. Olson hides her face, but it is present. As she explains, “the body as ‘malleable construction’ has givens, but they can be adapted, changed, and altered. I think this quality of the lived-body is related to lived-architecture, in that there is the initial design of the space, versus the eventual built building that succumbs to time and changing circumstances. Bodies and buildings both need consistent upkeep and adaptation in order to fill certain changing roles, or needs. There is the given nature of things in the beginning—and then there is manipulated, altered, embodied experience.”

A finger over the lens. Mirrors smudged by bodily interaction. An oddly covered female crotch. Smaller sculptures dispersed along the floor and walls reference to knees, holes, body rolls, hips. A loose sculptural representation of an eye, also just barely noticeable in a photograph, imprints of kneeling, a place where two feet might once have stood. The gallery space is physically marked and molded by the body, the image taking a tactile form.

Each photograph, sculpture, and malleable form informs the other, Olson explains, in their difference in speed. “Images work with immediacy, quickly on the eye, whereas sculptural objects are much slower. The photographic images have a sense of simultaneous time inherent to them, inviting a mental jump to a past time and place. The sculptures are (questionably) ever-present, existing as objects to be encountered by the body, in the here-and-now. It is my hope that the sculptural will slow the photographic, and the photographic pieces will prod the sculptural components, causing them to shiver a bit.”

In the smaller sculpture works, the corporeal nature of craftlike fabrics, the delicateness of the cloth, for example, draws out a physical moment from the image. One sculpture is made out of light reflective paper, which she uses in her images as well to create shapes and distortion over her body. The photographic method is then brought out into an embodied form, into physical space, for us to engage and respond to.

When I ask B Ingrid from where she draws artistic influence, she tells me that she tries to “spend time with and approach things or ideas that I strongly dislike. Repulsion or anger is the opposite of attraction and affinity, so it only seems natural to try to find a point of entry into the uncomfortable or the unwanted so they can inform their opposites in some way, or at the very least so they create some itchiness by way of their difference.” And in fact, the harshness of this reflective paper, harnessing a sterile and extreme light, invokes a very specific and familiar feeling in the viewer. It is an uneasy feeling, an itchiness even, and we don’t quite know why. A prosthetic, surgical quality, invokes the naked, gritty, harsh lights of a hospital. Uncomfortably sickly tones and artificial body parts create a corporal form out of something mechanical. A shrine of the body, mixing physical and artificial, plastic and organic, natural and constructed. In this uneasiness we become distinctly aware of our own bodies, whether they are not quite surely still whole, amidst this chopping of others.

Installation view Fingered Eyed at i8 Gallery.

In closing, I notice that a quarter of sales from an offset print in the exhibition will be donated to the American Civil Liberties Union and to Stígamót Education and Counseling Center for Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Violence in Iceland. Perhaps this is part of the derived implication, in Olson’s focus on the body and the unwanted, that our bodies are threatened, of not being sacred, ravaged, torn apart, manipulated. An extra layer for private reflection is unveiled, a space for us to consider a safe place for our bodies, where we revel in their beauty, uninterrupted.

Olson’s aim from this exhibition? Put simply, “to slow an image down, to create, in its ideal outcome, an image that will contain multiple readings, or entry points—to make an image that will only reveal itself fully over a longer period of time.” And successfully achieved, in intriguing fashion.

Daría Sól Andrews

Fingered Eyed is on view at i8 Gallery until August 10th, 2019.

Cover photo: B. Ingrid Olson, Eye, Camera, Body, Room, (Horizontal), 2019.

Photo credits: Vigfús Birgirsson

Photographs courtesy of i8 Gallery.

Artist’s website: http://bingridolson.com

i8 Gallery: https://i8.is

Eygló Harðardóttir and Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson Take Home Awards at the Icelandic Art Prize

by Daría Sól Andrews | Laugardagur.03.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Eygló Harðardóttir and Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson Take Home Awards at the Icelandic Art Prize

“Time is money, it’s cliché, but it’s quite simple and true.” I’m sitting with Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson in his studio in downtown Reykjavík over coffee, as he builds shelves to house and protect 250 ceramic plate artworks coming from the Reykjavík Art Museum. He recently closed an exhibition there, entitled Manuscript, for which he won the Encouragement Award from the Iceland Art Center this past week. Winning alongside Leifur was Eygló Harðardóttir, who took home the prize of Artist of the Year. Her winning exhibition, Another Space, showed at Nýlistasafnið this past year. “It is like Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir has quite beautifully told me”, Leifur continues, speaking about a fellow nominee for Artist of the Year, “art is quite delicate, like a precious flower, you have to protect it and care for it, and programs like the Icelandic Art Prize do just that necessary work.”

The Icelandic Art Prize was established by the Icelandic Visual Arts Council in February 2018, awarding exhibitions that took place in the year 2017. Margrét Kristín Sigurðardóttir, the Chairman of the Icelandic Visual Arts Council since 2016, tells me that these awards are “intended to contribute to promoting Icelandic contemporary art, both in Iceland and abroad, as well to draw attention to what is well done in the field. The prize gives the opportunity to direct the spotlight at what is considered outstanding in Icelandic visual art each year.” Two recognitions are awarded, Artist of the Year, awarding 1 million ISK to an Icelandic artist who has shown outstanding work in Iceland, and the Encouragement Award, awarding 500.000 ISK to a young artist who has shown outstanding work publicly in Iceland.

“This recognition is quite precious, really, feeling that someone really is paying attention to my work, it is a really amazing feeling, but it is hard to describe,” Eygló tells me when I ask her what this award means to her. “When you work in art you sway between being insecure and paranoid, asking yourself ‘is what I’m doing working?’, all the while believing in the work and pepping yourself forward. Often there is a lot of silence around art in Iceland, so programs like this perhaps open up for a different way of thinking about art, artists, and exhibitions, and of critically comparing and talking about each other’s work. I think this program could have the affect that people visit exhibitions a bit differently, because when work is brought into comparison to another’s a certain suspense begins to build.”

Leifur similarly recognizes the important effect awards like these have in awakening a necessary conversation around art in our community. “You are very vulnerable, and ego is of course some element to this. It is in our nature to search for some sort of feedback. Like the name of the prize says, it motivates me forward, and it awakens a conversation and an interest, which is a beautiful thing.” He explains to me that his exhibition, Manuscript, was really a process of baring himself bare to the world.

“I am also awake to the fact that it’s all contextual,” Eygló reveals to me. “This year my exhibition was in the right climate for this moment, but perhaps it may not have been last year or next year. So you can’t really say that some one thing is best, artist, or art, or otherwise. This really matters to me. Criticism here in Iceland has so often been about good or bad. Even if there is only one prize, it’s not always about better or worse, but about opening up communication and critically comparing and talking to one another about art.”

Margrét explains to me that the public submitted proposals for nomination of the two prizes, and that she was quite pleased by the large response of submittals. The jury then decides together who is nominated in each respective category. “The members of the jury are people with extensive knowledge in the field of art, representatives from the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SÍM), the Icelandic Academy of Arts, the Visual Art Council, the Icelandic Art Theory Association and from art museum directors in Iceland. During the decision process, each member of the jury presents their views on each artist and his work. If the jury is not unanimous we vote, the artist who receives the majority of votes is then nominated.” Margrét has been the head of the jury of the Icelandic Art Prize since it was established, and was joined this year by Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson from the Art Theory Association, Sigurður Guðjónsson from the Icelandic Academy of Arts, Jóhann Ludwig Torfason from SÍM and Hanna Styrmisdóttir from art museum directors in Iceland.

When discussing the future of this program, Margrét is optimistic about its continuing growth and evolvement, hoping to expand the categories as the art scene in Iceland continues to expand and flourish. “It is important that each year we pay attention to the visual art scene in Iceland and celebrate what is outstanding. The awards should attract deserved attention to Icelandic visual art.” Like Leifur emphasizes, the grant and awards process is a critical and necessary element to working in the arts, and he is hopeful that programs like these will only continue to grow over the years. “This program is such a good addition the professional art scene here in Iceland. The grant process is so necessary and essential, and it is so important that these opportunities for artists are growing to the point where it is almost hard to keep track. It’s such a positive.”

Like Margrét emphasizes to me, these types of programs give necessary recognition and motivation to outstanding artists in Iceland. “As the aim of the Icelandic Art Prize is to honor and promote outstanding Icelandic contemporary art and encourage new artistic creations I hope it will give the nominated and awarded artists great opportunities. They deserve to get attention and hopefully it will encourage them to keep on their good work. I think it is important that the prize has established itself and that it will be desirable to receive the awards.” This prize then functions as an important and valuable tool that she hopes will be a growing part of the art scene in Iceland in the future.

“There is always this question, what comes next”, Leifur laughs as I probe him about what the future holds for his artistic practice. “I’m a little shy about it. It’s a clap on the back but at the same time a kick in the butt. It equates to fire, kindling to keep my ideas flowing and developing. It’s a hard question, it hasn’t quite registered in me yet, but it’s amazing, and I want to say how thankful I am.” Like Eygló reiterates, the financial aspect of this award does not go unnoticed or under appreciated. As an artist, “a million ISK can stretch out as some months of salary, and I’m very pleased with that, to be able to go work somewhere and only on my art.” Leifur similarly emphasizes that this award gives him a moment to breath and develop his next projects. “For me it really comes down to time, the classic time is money, money is time dilemma. Now I can focus on the time aspect of this equation and take a moment to transition, to reorganize both physically and mentally, and to place myself mentally in the next project.”

Next on the horizon for these two remarkable artists? Eygló tells me she has three exhibitions planned in Northern Iceland over the next year, all at artist-run spaces, an important element to her. “I respect these types of spaces so much, and I find them very exciting. At Nýlistasafnið, for example, there is the same wonderful vibe that has been there from the beginning, a very positive energy, of people working together and supporting each other. Everyone has a voice and there is no sense of hierarchy, no sense of stress, but rather a beautiful trust between everyone on staff. In August 2019 I will show in a group exhibition in Hjalteyri, working with curators and project managers Erin Honeycutt, Bryndís Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, and Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar. The show is titled Mild Humidity – The (Digital) Age of Aquarius. It is quite a special project, evolving very much from the conversations between people around it and the ideas that come forth. For a studio based person like me it is quite exciting.” Eygló will also show at Alþýðuhúsið in Siglufjörður in 2019, as well as at Safnasafnið in Akureyri, alongside Steingrímur Eyfjörð and Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir, who was nominated for the Encouragement Award last year.

“I have so many ideas, old and new that I’m working through currently, projects that I’ve been working through for some time that need time to evolve as I work through a transitional stage” Leifur tells me. “I think a lot about the working day, and how different people approach their time in a day. Me and friend and coworker Siggi have been working on an interview project around this concept, how we treat the work day, and the time therein. My work from Manuscript is also going to be showed in different spaces now, where smaller selections of the plates will be shown together, so the work will change in that way. This work really depends on the space it’s displayed in, because people connected with and responded to this work in such an interestingly personal way.”

Daria Sól Andrews

Photo Credits: Sunday & White Photography

Reflections on Belonging: Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir at Ctrl Shft Collective

by Daría Sól Andrews | Þriðjudagur.01.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Reflections on Belonging: Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir at Ctrl Shft Collective

In the downtown district of Oakland, California, sound artist Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir opened her latest installation work, Reflecting, in a group exhibition at the Ctrl Shft Collective, Traslación. Entering into a urban warehouse building, piercing blue eyes blink out at the viewer from a projected video screen in a black box room. There is a subtle overlapping chatter, conversation from that of a fortune teller woman. The viewer is bombarded with sound from all corners, and one can almost picture the kitch fortune ball and tacky decorations. There is an element of ‘otherness’ and yet an immediate relatability to this voice. We know her, this woman, without having to know her, her vague and generic fortune tellings to which one is so desperately prepared to apply any aspect of truth or meaning to our own lives.

Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir is an Icelandic artist who defines her practice as somewhere between a composer and an installation artist. Ingibjörg has worked collaboratively throughout her career with filmmakers, dancers, visual artists, fashion designers, and photographers. She recently moved back to Reykjavik after completing an MFA at Mills College and working in the Bay Area for three years. When she first moved to California, Ingibjörg describes ‘listening’ to the culture to learn its rules, history and sensitivities; “I had to listen to learn, to be able to form my own opinions in that culture and I had to learn that even though I felt very foreign in this culture, I would be a portrait as a certain type of human based on my gender, my ethnicity etc. You have to learn what is expected of you as that person you are seen as, even if you feel you don’t have anything in common with the group you are now categorized within.” Whilst Ingibjörg’s home roots are in Iceland, her practice is quite dually based, and I found it compelling to learn how she navigates, professionally and personally, between these two worlds she has laid claim to.

Ctrl Shft is an artist run organization and non profit art collective in the center of Oakland, providing artist studios to members, who pay rent and collaboratively put on exhibitions in the common exhibition space. The urban warehouse building is located in the downtown center of Oakland, and is almost hidden from the street, with no visible sign or marker. A new visitor wouldn’t quite know what to expect upon entering this experimental art space, as I didn’t. The collective and its members is largely queer and nonconforming to binary and heteronormative stereotypes, working to represent marginalized communities in their studio spaces. Ctrl Shft feels reminiscent to OPEN, Nýlistasafnið, and Kling og Bang, to name a few artist collectives in Reykjavik that are achieving similar success. However, community oriented, artist studio and dually functioning exhibition spaces are few and far between in Reykjavik, especially those that specifically attempt to bridge the gap between marginalized communities and professional art opportunities.

The show, Traslación, was co-curated by Colombian artist Susana Eslava and Carolina Magis Weinberg. Susana moved to the Bay Area in 2015 through an MFA grant, and is currently developing projects between Bogotá and the Bay Area. Her practice is interdisciplinary and explores themes of migration, colonization, and the intersections between social relations, art and politics. Among the participating artists were Ingibjörg, Susana, Carolina, Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo, Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Shaghayegh Cyrous, and Patricia Leal. All of the artists are international to the Bay Area, but share the common connection that each has based their practice here in California at some point along their journeys.

The exhibiting artists in Traslación, as Susana explains, are “in a state of otherness. They think in different languages, and create in a constant state of translation. They create in the impasse of the outside…engaging into conversations about what it meant to have an art practice –and a life– from a dislocated position. Traslación refers to the circular movement of a planet around a gravitational force which inevitably, takes it back to its initial position.” The exhibition explores thematics of inside/outside relations, acceptance, nativeness, discrimination, and belonging. Issues of gender, power dynamics, identity, locality, and politics are at play. These elements provide an effective connecting point to art life in Iceland, where so many feel like a constant outsider to Icelandic culture despite maintaining an artistic practice in the country for many years. This struggle is universal, apparently, for acceptance and belonging, to be from somewhere. How do we belong to and from any place?

Despite these elements of inaccessibility and otherness that seems connected to experiences both in the Bay Area and in Iceland, Ingibjörg comments on their similarly community and locally oriented natures when comparing the Bay Area to the art scene in Iceland. She states, “one similarity that surprised me was that I was not expecting to be running into the same people over and over again, like frequently happens in the art scene in Iceland. So soon it felt like ‘home.’” She values being able to connect with artists on such a familial and intimate level in her homeland; “I think it is unique in Iceland that it is very easy to connect with people, even the most successful artists are not that unreachable, and because of how similar we all are we sometimes operate as a one big family.” With that being said, the Bay Area opened up many opportunities for her, and she describes how ‘small’ Iceland feels in many ways since; “I think how similar we are creates limitation in how we sometimes think in Iceland. I didn’t realize how little I really knew about the world before I lived in the Bay Area and was blessed with so many international friends that have taught me so much.”

To add to a level of accessibility in the show, the exhibition text is presented in each of the languages of the artist’s home countries. In Ingibjörg´s Reflecting, the description explains that before moving back to Iceland from the Bay Area, she visited two psychics to “make sense of the crossroads.” Ingibjörg explains that we are constantly trying to “predict the future through tangible concepts”, seeking answers and meaning to our being. Like she explains in Icelandic, “rýmið er gjörólíkt, eftir því hverju þú trúir.” This piece creates its meaning through its audience, we see and experience what we personally believe and look for, whether it is a skepticism or a blind acceptance of truth. “This creates two worlds, intertwining within the same space while simultaneously challenging each other’s existence. As Ingibjörg reflects on her own past, present and future, she invites the audience to do the same.”

Sound echoes out from the black box and through the entire exhibition space, referencing the constant permeating of these messages out and into our everyday lives and existence. In her sound installations Ingibjörg frequently works with multi-speaker sound systems to create this surrounding effect. She tells me, “I put equal emphasize on sound and visual aspect. I believe that the visual will affect the aural experience, so it is important that those two aspects complement each other. None of my installations have been site specific, but it’s important that with each installation that the space also compliment both audible and visual part.”

In terms of current projects on the horizon, Ingibjörg is planning an installation with a traditional string quartet and live improvisation. She is also collaborating with two Chinese artists in the Bay Area of a dance film based on a previously enacted performance piece, dealing with similar thematics as Traslación. “It’s about being foreign in a new culture, the things you bring with you and the distance to you home. The dancer is dressed in water sleeves, a traditional Chinese costume, that has traditionally strict dance movements but bringing it to a new culture she is reinventing herself and the movements possible with that custom. It all began with long conversations at the dinner table, where we would also share our culture through food. Soon those conversations transformed into pieces of art, where we were building a bridge of understanding of each other and deepen understanding of cultural differences. Sophia plays a traditional Chinese instrument called Pipa but plays it a very untraditional way. In this specific piece, I am creating the soundscape, partly with using my own voice singing and reciting an Icelandic poem by Anna Marsíbil Clausen that was specifically composed for the performance piece. My favorite line in the poem is about how the sea should be gray, with tall waves. It is one of those things you don’t really think about when you grow up in a certain place, but when you are far away you start missing those things, like a certain color of the ocean that you don’t see in the new place.”

Daría Sól Andrews

Ctrl Shft Collective

ctrlshftcollective.com

More about the artists:

ingibjorgf.com

carolinamagisweinberg.com

montenegrojaramillo.info

enardediosrodriguez.com

shcyrous.com

www.susanaeslava.com

www.patricialeal.art

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

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