“Between people and places”: An Interview with Gavin Morrison

by Becky Forsythe | Miðvikudagur.05.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

“Between people and places”: An Interview with Gavin Morrison

My first meeting with Gavin Morrison was brief, sparked through his research on Donald Judd in Iceland, and its connection to the Living Art Museum. Morrison visited the museum, via Ingólfur Arnarson, in hopes to collect information related to a group exhibition in 1988 Judd had participated in and what remained of this moment in Nýló´s archives. An article about this history titled “Donald Judd and Iceland” was later published for the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, 2018. The article explores the narrative circulating Judd´s activity in Iceland, what led to those explorations in site, place and expanses, and is not so far removed from the way Morrison (or others) ended up here, working with artists more permanently.

Fast forward and Gavin is now Director of Skaftfell – Centre for Visual Art in East Iceland. In this interview Gavin considers his relationship to Iceland, and current role through a global perspective, with reflections on the movement of people to places and the connections made in between. For him, these things become a site for placing local or regional contexts amongst an “international vernacular” — a curatorial practice embedded in cultural history.

You are a curator (also a writer, publisher and collaborator). Where and how did this begin?

I can’t say with any great certainty when the beginning was, but while studying philosophy at Edinburgh I somewhat accidentally established Atopia Projects, a curatorial and publishing initiative with an artist friend, Fraser Stables. We’d both been concerned with similar problems, an anthropological understanding of how we inhabit contemporary spatial locations. He was approaching this through art and I through writing. We expanded our dialogues by inviting others to join in, which evolved into publishing a journal of sorts. This was around 1999 and since then we have kept an erratic schedule of releases making books, exhibitions and other published forms. Working this way, in the collaborative approach and realizing ideas in different forms, made me very interested in the ways those aspects affect the ideas expressed.

This resonates as a key moment and meeting point, how did it translate into making exhibitions?

I think through this I became fascinated in the exhibition format, its ability to present objects and ideas in non-linear, disjunctive and discursive relationships. I love the primacy of the visual medium and to make exhibitions that can only be understood in that form. That is not to say that I am not equally committed to writing and books, I enjoy the luxury of being able to work through various modes of thinking reliant on the particularities of those forms. More recently I have fallen into collaborations with artists. I don’t think of myself as an artist and I’m not sure exactly what those things are that I have made with artists, such as on-going project A History of Type Design with the Scottish artist Scott Myles or a series of prints with the Norwegian artist Arild Tveito, they seem to fall between designations, they are not exactly artworks, more allegorical emblems in a type of thinking, one which can only be expressed through a visual mode.

In what ways do you approach working with different artists?

I try to respond to artists and their work in a way that is consistent with their intentions, and try to avoid using artists to illustrate an idea which I may have. Where it is easy to fall into a didactic approach within the curatorial role, it is undoubtedly more interesting and rewarding to engage with the breadth and the intentions of an artist’s practice. I am fortunate that this approach has resulted in extended relationships with various artists. It is wonderful to be part of a conversation about the work. It is these types of relationships that have led to creating those ‘allegorical emblems’, where discussion of shared interests makes for something new that couldn’t exist with either of the individuals solely.

Skaftfell – Centre for Visual Art, Seyðisfjörður

From Scotland, to the south of France, now Seyðisfjörður; what precipitated your connection to Iceland and projects here?

I’d been living around Marseille and on Corsica for a number of years before here. I first came to Iceland in 2001, on a three day stop-over to Houston to undertake a research fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts there. An artist who I’d been working with in Scotland, Alan Johnston, was a highly vocal advocate for artists in Iceland, and he connected me to various people in town. It was an incredibly brief period but I made connections with artists, writers and curators that have continued to this day. I found there to be a generosity, both personally, and in thinking with those I got to know. That generosity, I think, arose from the concentration of the art scene in Reykjavik. Almost immediately I started to work with the artists I had met and came back to visit regularly.

In 2010, I finally made it to Seyðisfjörður, I knew of the place through Birgir Andrésson, who had long implored me to make the effort to come here. After his death, I heard that Skaftfell had his former home for artists in residence, so I came to work for a month on curatorial projects. On the way I was stuck in Reykjavik for a few days, waiting for the wind to change, and blow the ash cloud from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull away from the flight path to Egilsstaðir. I had an incredibly productive time and was asked back a few years later as part of a project with Skaftfell, organised by Ráðhildur Ingadóttir. Following which I was invited to serve as the Honorary Artistic Director in 2015 for two years.

There are moments of movement, finding place and connection that sit at the forefront of your experience with art, and no less in your relationship to the island. What would you say were your first impressions of the art scene when you arrived?

I do wonder if I would have the same experience today arriving into Reykjavik as I did in 2001. The people I met at that time were eager to show and talk of their work. I doubt that has changed so much, but with greater connectivity between people and places and how Iceland has excelled in establishing itself within the art world, there is perhaps easier ways to make connections than showing up a studio door. It seemed that during each studio visit the artist would phone someone else, and I would go straight from one to the other not quite knowing who or what I was going to see. I did enjoy that more naive moment, where now the internet provides an avenue for perpetual research and forewarning. But at the heart of it, I think the Reykjavik art scene has retained its vibrancy and excitement. It is small. Small enough that everyone knows one another, more or less. And with that scale it means hierarchies can seem absurd or at least easily circumvented.

Coming from Scotland I was impressed that the museums would show young Icelandic artists. That seemed like a powerful acknowledgement that artists were of value and also that museums were part of culture not merely an accumulated history. Existing alongside this also seemed to be an ambivalence to art history amongst the artists. I don’t mean that there was an ignorance towards history but rather they didn’t seem bound by it or feel it as a burden. Instead there was an ability to quote from it and reinterpret it. This also seemed liberating, it was as if there was a residual spirit of dada, fluxus or punk.

Even though Reykjavik is diminutive in scale it didn’t, and still doesn’t, feel culturally small. I suspect that is due in a large part to its cosmopolitan make up, both that it is welcoming of international artists who spend time there, either short term or for longer periods. But perhaps most notably is the way in which artists studying abroad return and their divergent experiences become braided with one another.

As new Director of Skaftfell, how are you positioning yourself?

I feel the curatorial position of Skaftfell comes with a certain mandate principally related to the context of Seyðisfjörður. It does not restrict the program to being local and provincial but is a point from which the curatorial view originates. In many respects Skaftfell is a custodian of the cultural history of Seyðisfjörður. The art center arose through the initiatives of a group of local artists and there always seems to have been a radical substrata to the art scene here. This history, of a group of artists in a particular place, looking out into the wider world suggests the mode of working — an attention to the local which informs a global perspective. It is a kind of international vernacular. This perspective is written into the material structure of Skaftfell. We maintain three buildings, the Skaftfell house, Geirahús and Tvísöngur: a traditional timber house converted into a bistro, gallery and residency through the design of Björn Roth (that draws influence from Dieter Roth); the diminutive and colourful home of the local outsider artist Ásgeir Jón Emilsson (1931-1999); and the concrete sound sculpture by German artist Lukas Kühne. Each building is a type of artwork, where inhabitation has creative potential. As custodians of this heritage we seek to find ways in which it can be celebrated and discover how contemporary artists can relate to and form their own legacies.

My current inspiration in this role comes from this inception, the initiatives of this group of local artists, through to its relationship with the diverse local community as both audience and collaborators. It is this particular vernacular that underpins the curatorial strategy — the view outward from Skaftfell and Seyðisfjörður, an undoubted international perspective but approached from the specifics of history, locality and geographies.

Still Images from the installation: Dieter Roth, Seyðisfjörður Slides – Every View of a Town 1988-1995, 1995

What is in store for Skaftfell regarding this summer’s exhibition?

This summer’s shows takes on Skaftfell’s history and potential directly by re-staging an installation Dieter Roth made in a harbour-side building in 1995. The work, Seyðisfjörður Slides – Every View of a Town, 1988 – 1995, an installation of six slide projectors which shows every building in town in the winter of 1988 and then in the summer of 1995. Was first shown in the town wide exhibition Á Seydi in 1995. This exhibition was organised by artists in the town and was an important precursor to the formation of Skaftfell. Our re-staging of the installation offers an opportunity for the town to look back at its history and consider the social changes since it was first shown. In conjunction with this installation we will also mount an exhibition in Skaftfell’s gallery, a form of retrospective of Dieter Roth’s book and published works, with the printed paintings and textiles of New York artist Cheryl Donegan.

Donegan and Dieter’s similar and divergent methods will provide a fascinating way to consider a shared utilisation of printing and publishing strategies between these two artists. For the exhibition, Donegan will present recent work in the form of clothes, paintings, videos, printed textiles, and zines.

What, in your mind, can an exhibition space become — and more specifically regarding Skaftfell?

I think that there is a particularity to spaces, one that can be felt acutely with Skaftfell. The conversion of the building establishes a functional and ethical position for the gallery. The ground floor of Skaftfell houses the bistro, with its library of Dieter Roth books, and from which a staircase directly leads to the gallery space on the next floor (and above the gallery is an apartment to be used for residencies and visiting artists). This arrangement echos the primacy of Skaftfell’s place in the local community. There is a porous relationship of Skaftfell’s function as a space of social interactions, which easily flow from the bistro to the gallery and back, and as a type of town forum, a place where discussions can be arise due to the work in the gallery, or despite of it. It is one of the most socially dynamic galleries that I know. This is the background to making exhibitions at Skaftfell.

Sometimes the purpose of the curator is to create the circumstances to let an accident happen. This type of purposeful ambivalence was partly what motivated our spring exhibition, Collectors. We wanted to create an exhibition in which the outcome was not something determined by curatorial oversight but was the expression of a local vernacular, an exhibition made by the local community. We made a general invitation to the people of Seyðisfjörður, that if they had a collection, irrespective of what it was or whether it was the result of purposeful collecting or accidental accumulation, that we would show it in the gallery. We wanted to create a situation where the town could show something of themselves to one another, something that perhaps was to an extent private. A type of self-portrait of Seyðisfjörður and also a means to consider the role of the gallery for the local population. The gallery does have that ‘power’ as being a part of the conversation in how a town thinks of itself. And it also has the capacity to disperse and re-orientate the curatorial ‘power‘ allowing for a plurality of expression.

Installation view of the exhibition Collectors at Skaftfell – Center for Visual Art.

This thought of a plurality of expression is so relevant to both visual art and curating presently in the world, and although broad in consideration, why was it contemporary art for you?

I am excited that contemporary art lacks a functional purpose, with that it has the ability to change and adapt, to be whatever it wishes within any circumstance it finds itself. This malleability can also be taken advantage of, art being used as a surrogate and chorus-line, being made to fill in gaps of social provision and take on causes. I think my position is in part to help maintain its purposeful purposelessness, to allow for it to have utility as it wishes but always retain its autonomy.

Becky Forsythe

Gavin Morrison is a writer, curator, publisher and current Director of Skaftfell Centre for Visual Art in East Iceland. He previously served as Honorary Artistic Director there between 2015-2016 and was responsible for exhibitions including: Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir & Eygló Harðardóttir; Ingólfur Arnarsson & Þuríður Rós Sigurþórsdóttir; Unoriginal: copying, duplication and plagiarism in art and design; and solo projects by Hanna Kristín Birgisdóttir and Sigurður Atli Sigurðsson. Throughout his career, Morrison has held positions at and collaborated with various international institutions including Kungl. Konsthögskolan, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Osaka Contemporary Art Center, Japan; University of Edinburgh, Scotland; and most recently as Research Fellow at Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, USA.

An interview with Cosmos Carl

by Bergur Thomas Anderson | Mánudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

An interview with Cosmos Carl

Cosmos Carl is a project by artists Frederique Pisuisse and Saemundur Thor Helgason. Their website can be described as an artist-run online exhibition platform that celebrates the democratization of the web while unveiling its potential when it comes to presenting artworks. Frederique and Saemundur are both based in Amsterdam, where we met to talk about the ongoing voyage of Cosmos Carl.

B: When and how did the Cosmos Carl adventure begin?

F+S: It started after we moved in to our first apartment together in 2014, along with two other people who are both curators. Two artists, two curators in one house. There was a separate room in the house that we thought to do something with, like hosting exhibitions or artists’ projects, which in the end didn’t work out. So we resolved it by doing something online instead. When we started out we saw Cosmos Carl as a response to the net-art at the time, which was very code-based. This made the presentation of art very difficult if the artist didn’t have experience in coding. Artists were already using platforms like YouTube and Vimeo to distribute and present their work online, but mostly through their private artist websites and portfolios. Cosmos Carl became a way to use these existing platforms to explore the online presence of artworks and a way to critique platform-based capital by misusing them for art.

Our first project was with Icelandic artist Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, and it was our contribution to the Frieze art fair of 2014. We made a film with him and originally hosted it on a special Cosmos Carl Vimeo page. Styrmir’s video recalls an encounter he had while buying fried chicken from a street vendor. At the same time the story is told, he navigates a little trip from an apartment, to the market, and to the vendors house where a humorous exchange of deals takes place. The visualization of his trip happens on Google Maps. It was after this project that we realized the full potential of Cosmos Carl, and the video was later moved to Styrmir’s own Vimeo account and presented as a hyperlink on the CC website.

Calling you from Cosmos Carl (2014) by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson.

The name came to us while watching the Cosmos series, made by Carl Sagan in the 80s. I (Frederique) kept referring to the show as Cosmos Carl, and it seemed to fit with what we were doing by creating an online exhibition space. The internet is often perceived as this infinite, non-material thing but vast enough to cruise around as Carl Sagan does in the series. Our intention is to expose and show our visitors corners of the web they wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise.

B: What advantages do you see in artists using these pre-existing platforms versus the traditional artist-as-coder approach when it comes to presenting art online?

F+S: We were already using platforms such as Google Drive and similar apps to communicate and work through. We find them interesting because the politics of those platforms are much more embedded in to the fabric of the world wide web. When we started, we thought net-art was really formal, in the way that artists were using code and software to create images and fictional worlds, almost like paintings and sculpture. We are interested in seeing art being presented online in a more casual way, within the flow of browsing social media sites or eBay. It’s important for us to see art contaminate and be a part of our every-day internet usage.

B: When I visit the Cosmos Carl website, I feel as if I’m at a virtual transfer station… I enter it, and I am immediately sent back to other, often more familiar interfaces. How do you see artworks contributing to this flow of images we are so strangely accustomed to?

F+S: The language of the Cosmos series has provided us with a good analogy, for the viewers travels through space on Carl Sagan’s voyager. Experiencing the Cosmos Carl websites means navigating through a constellation of artworks which exist on different platforms. It’s like a cross-section of the web, and more like a map in this sense. The page directs our visitors to platforms and content that they don’t usually belong to. From the perspective of the platforms that host some of the works it’s difficult to figure out what the interests of visitors arriving via Cosmos Carl actually is.

The online art crowd is pretty undefined to the platforms if you compare it to their subscribers and daily users. We see art occupying these spaces as part of our process to reclaim space for art and democratize the web. Artists used to feel hesitant by showing their work online because of the border that coding created, but in reality, artists use the internet as much as anyone else in their research and free time. As a consequence it has become much easier for artists to imagine their work online if they imagine it belonging to this flow. We encourage them to display their work as they would like to stumble upon it in their act of browsing online and contribute to this flow of data, images and sounds…

It’s been over a year now since an artist has supplied us with a link to their own website and sadly, most of those earlier contributed links are offline by now. In one case, a porn site actually bought a domain name once owned by Nicolas Riis. He made this website and named it cleancare.club It was a beautiful website with his research material and objects that belonged to his thinking process. it was actually a type of object porn. Then he stopped paying for it, so the domain name was taken over by this porn site and for a while Cosmos Carl was temporarily presenting Nicolas Riis’ contribution as a porn site!

It’s currently offline again, but I’m sure the domain will get another resurrection. Actually, now it has become a sort of video platform! Dropbox, eBay and the like just stay online however. The biggest websites don’t renew their links, the URLs just get longer. One work was actually presented as a poetic tour through a fictional apartment on AirBnB! No one has yet reported it as a fake place, so it stays there, which is a really fun thing.

To sell a river? (2016) Josephine Callaghan

B: It’s very beautiful to think about art belonging more and more to the gesture of browsing the web… Jorik Amit Galama’s work is hosted on liveleak.com, and it’s interesting how the work appears next to advertisements, click bates and videos that could relate to his film called Cateater. Do you think it can take over at some point? What’s the influence of art taking up online space, where does it lead, besides a more inspiring and cultured web experience?

F+S: We believe we are continuing the trajectory of culture jamming, a movement which has its roots in activism. Google and YouTube are “bad” corporations, but we use them anyway. By using them you are forced to agree to their specific terms and conditions which concern your privacy online. We see Cosmos Carl as being quite mischievous because it uses the platforms in an unintended way. Culture jamming made use of already existing advertisement images to alter them and therefore shift our understanding of corporate identities and capitalism. We like the idea of using these existing platforms in an unintended way, to undermine and critique them.

Cateater (2019) Jorik Amit Galama

Jorik Amit Galama’s film Cateater is a good example. The work is an essayistic film and poem which pops up on the very dodgy platform liveleaks.com. The platform allows for very violent and disturbing content, and Jorik’s contribution to Cosmos Carl involves uploading a video to liveleaks that responds to it in a way that hopefully confronts its daily users and their addiction to this unhealthy material. The impact is probably more if you don’t get introduced to the work via Cosmos Carl, but stumble upon it through its clickbait title Cateater. It’s interesting for us to see artworks in these different contexts of the web and claiming space there in a gesture of disruption and critique.

Few contributions are really on the edge of our own ethical borders. One piece took place on a sex workers platform named myfreecam, used by two artists who were raising funds for a future exhibition. The piece consisted in them doing live nude drawing in front of a webcam. The concept was that they were wearing socks, and I remember there was a dog involved as well. Viewers could therefore attend the event, chip in and ask for specific drawings. It is of course very different when you enter these kind of chatrooms with the interest of looking at it from an artistic perspective to a perverted one. That line really blurred there and we felt the work confronted notions of the male gaze by dealing directly with a platform that encourage it. In a way, it’s interesting to think about these two different groups coming together in a chatroom like that, and all of them being anonymous as well.

When you visit this link now you are redirected to Camilla Rhodes’ profile on this platform. She is the alter ego of an artist from Mexico who finances a part of her practice by doing these types of performances.

Nude with Socks (2018) Camilla Rhodes and Zoe Claire Miller

B: Cosmos Carl is accessible 24/7 and provides visitors with a private experience of art. How do you feel about the accessibility and intimacy the web provides? How does it influence your visitors?

F+S: It’s tricky with online art. In a way it very much conforms to the on-demand attitude, but at the same time it’s not a social act. We feel like people might ignore Cosmos Carl for a few months and then come back to it to binge artworks. Just statistically speaking, people spend around 3 minutes on average on the site itself, before they embark on the journey provided by the hyperlinks that are there. It’s a very light site with almost nothing on it, and therefore becomes a pretty easy task to immediately jump out of it as soon as you enter.

B: Can you tell me how the design of the site came together?

F+S: We borrowed the design from the Werkplaats Typografie (Arnhem) and the typeface is made by Gabríel Markan, also known as Gnax Type. The typeface, available through the Cosmos Carl website, mixes references to digital aesthetics and traditional calligraphy. We like it because it makes the interface and design of Cosmos Carl very unfamiliar and therefore fits with this idea of being a portal.

B: I’m curious to know how an online opening works, and how you introduce yourself to the rest of the web?

F+S: We have a launch every other Friday. There is a ritual which takes place with the introduction of each new link. It’s good for us to keep it rigid. Adding works to the site is practically as simple as sharing a link. We announce each new work on Facebook with an event, and afterwards the links exist on our page as undated, infinite hyperlinks. We feel positive about branching out through interviews and doing more things in public, hopefully belonging to more intricate networks of websites. People are going to be led to our page via artzine, which is a great thing. A Wikipedia page would also be helpful.

We had a contribution as part of a collaboration with the Young Art Biennial in Moskow with Art+Feminism. They are a group of online activists who edit and add pages about women artists, writers, thinkers, musicians, and the more forgotten female figures in history. This needs to be done because Wikipedia is sadly a very male-dominant place. If you look at any male writer who has done something and compare it to a female one, there will undoubtedly be more information and praise about the male one. It’s also very likely that the woman you’re looking for doesn’t even exist on Wikipedia. How we present ourselves outside the CC website is something we are thinking about now, and hopefully we can find a solution to integrate more creatively into people’s calendars. Facebook served us well so far, but we feel there could be a more old-school, analog way to announce the launch of each new link. To be resolved.

B: …and how do you tackle issues relating to the lifetime of the page and the links provided?

F+S: Rhizome started a service which lets you record websites. It started by archiving the net art works from the 90ies and records them in a way that enables you to experience them in the technological context of the time. For example, Constant Dullaart made a work which used Google, and when you visit the piece through Rhizomes archive, you see the work through a browser from that time. You see the piece in its original quality and resolution.

You can do it to your own page as well, and we’ve started archiving Cosmos Carl through their service. The archive of the internet (archive.org) has also been archiving the internet, but in a less precise way. It visits every single website every now and then, and skims over it while taking screenshots. It then creates an overview of the development of your website through screenshots, which you can of course download in case you want to make a biography about your website. But Rhizome is more precise and works better for what we need, it enables us to record the whole website experience with all its links.

B: …So online archiving methods lets you store entire websites similarly to how you store image information inside a .jpg file?

F+S: Precisely. We were wondering if Cosmos Carl needed to be archived, or if we should just celebrate the temporal nature of the internet. The more a link is shared, the longer it lives. But links die out, websites disappear. There are companies which maintain everything very well, but even there, images take up a lot of space and disappear for no reason. No one knows where they go.

As far as artworks go, well, we think it’s important to see them as just being a part of the internet. We decided to start archiving Cosmos Carl because we are making a guided tour through the website that places it within the context of what is happening in the world of platform capitalism today. Capitalism is becoming more and more platform-based and we are interested in reflecting on what the status of art works are within that process. Our work speaks of these less-obvious layers of the internet, but in the subtle activist way that art does. We are able to critique it while being the users of it.

B: You recently did a presentation (at Page Not Found in Den Haag) in the context of the website being a publishing practice. How does the notion of publishing strike you as a part of Cosmos Carl’s qualities?

F+S: We believe that the notion of publishing has been inherent in the workings of CC since the beginning, but we are only finding out now through these interests coming from other publishers. We use these opportunities to give lectures and talk about the works we have on the site, and we are happy to be branching out at the same time we are starting to archive and preserve the websites qualities.

B: It’s interesting you are branching out more and more in to offline territory. What are some of the upcoming activities of Cosmos Carl?

F+S: We have an opening at Banner Repeater in London on the 26th of April. It’s great, because the space is actually located on the platform of a train station! Banner Repeater is an exhibition space and a bookstore, and we were invited to make an exhibition with them around the notion of online publishing. We will show a video where a guide takes the viewer through the city of Amsterdam, with characters entering the story and presenting different parts of Cosmos Carl through their smartphones and tablets.

Our plan is to go through public and platform-based spaces to further elaborate on the blending of offline and online living, and how that distinction is becoming less and less relevant today. For us, those two experiences are constantly merging, and it’s a bit scary what is happening today with state- and privately owned platforms merging in to more fluid entities. It is becoming a bit like a Black Mirror episode.

In parts of China they have actually started doing everything through the phone. You pay for everything with it and what you do online and offline is running together in to one coherent story. That’s one extreme of it and we plan to show another, which presents situations in real platforms such as libraries and public squares while browsing our platform-based website.

In the work we will also visit an exhibition space in Amsterdam where Alex Frost’s piece, ‘Wet Unboxing (Big Mac)’ 2018, will be on view. Alex presented the piece on the website recently, and this part of our voyage is made to compare an online exhibition experience to an offline one. The video is still in the making of course, but we want to create a Carl Sagan-inspired voyage which presents the story of Cosmos Carl as an entity which merges offline and online living and explores the status of the artwork within the age of platform capitalism.

Bergur Thomas Anderson

www.cosmoscarl.co.uk

Featured image: Wet Unboxing (2018) Alex Frost

About science, emotions and the Roman Empire: a conversation with Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Sunnudagur.03.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

About science, emotions and the Roman Empire: a conversation with Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar

A few weeks ago I had a chat with Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar about her show Desargues’s Theorem Lecture and Three Other Sculptures at Kling og Bang. Some sculptures would welcome the visitors into the exhibition, playing on the concepts of two-dimensional and three-dimensional, real and unreal, questioning what existence means. The video work Desargues’s Theorem Lecture would then give an insight on the process the artist went through, a sort of key to read the sculptures. Geirþrúður’s mind seems to be an unresting machine which absorbs, processes and reformulates realities in an extremely mathematical and logical way. Through this conversation I tried to grasp her creative process and her understanding of art.

I would like to start this conversation by asking you to explain a little bit further the first sentence of the text in your show’s pamphlet “Desargues’s Theorem Lecture is a video that relies on the assumption that ideas have shapes.”, I find the concept of art dwelling in space between ideas and the physical world really interesting. Where does this idea come from?

At that time, and still maybe now, I was thinking about the relationship between science and alchemy, since alchemy has as forefather a scientific thought, even though this connection is really suppressed. They have a common impulse to do analytical things and to get into a state of mind which contemplates the possibility of figuring things out. I wanted to see what I could do with that, there is a kind of mysticism inherit in all sort of sciences and it is interesting to see how and if they can be brought together in a way that is useful. Everyone who goes into art or who appreciates art is aware that there is some kind of underlying relationship between forms and a more abstract sense, feelings and thoughts. It‘s a bit hard to trace where this idea came from, but at the basis of this work there is a very sincere impulse.

What do you mean by “useful”?

Well, useful as it is not about making fun of science or to try to disqualify it. Science and mysticism are intertwined and you can‘t really go further in either direction without accepting both. On one hand science is a very enclosed system, it would support itself, but on the other hand if you want to get all mystic you will probably end up joining your cult and then whatever you say becomes so enclosed that even talking to other people doesn‘t make any sense anymore. But between these two systems there is something really interesting.

I am also thinking about quantum physics which explores how something thought impossible could actually exist in other quantum realities.

Yes exactly, the further science goes the further it goes back to incredibly metaphysical understandings and statements about how nothing is real after all. And I think if you are serious and eager to discover, then you are following the same track someone in the 15th century would be following when they were making gold, which is also an allegory for knowledge. But it feels like, especially in a social sense, science is used to scare you away from wanting to know something, they say you have to know the scientific method and you probably need ten years of studies to be qualified for it. So this playfulness is not really allowed.

Your work is also quite ironic, right?

It is actually weirdly not ironic. It seems ironic because it is really sincere. The impulse is to create some kind of a narrative, a sort of suspended belief, and to see science as a narrative. If it seems ironic it is because I wanted to do that, since I‘m very ironic.

In the text you talk about the work in terms of a coded love letter, how did you weave together science and emotion?

In a way that is what I am saying in terms of that it is completely sincere, I did go through all this process that I described in the video. At a certain point I was a bit addicted at looking at all these images of certain things so I just did it more and more, and there is a point in which you exhaust certain materials visually on google and then you start to have a real eye for what brings you into a new place. I think there was something going on in that theory that I just found interesting to explore and then I just kept thinking about that and I really started making this model. On one hand it was a little bit of a joke, the theorem is completely abstract and I was making a thing out of something completely immaterial, I was completely aware that it is kind of funny to try to do that, also because I used whatever was in the kitchen. It was really playful, and I think that was also part of it, this will to take something really scientific and doing something so playful with it, so irrelevant about it. But it was part of something a little bit more concrete, I wanted to make a sculpture out of the theorem, and why did I want to do something which doesn‘t make sense? Well, in part because it didn‘t make sense, if it did make sense then it would have been so pointless. I think the reason why anyone has a passion for something remains inexplicable, and I suppose the only way to grasp it is to make this analogy with things that are part of an emotional landscape. The scientific world says that we have to separate science and emotions, but I don‘t agree with that, I think things going on in the mind can be very passionate in a very abstract way and I think passions can be extremely rational.

There is also a kind of instinctive side to discovering how things work.

Well, you know, the mind is the biggest sexual organ, they say. We use all kind of ways to seduce who or whatever we are interested in. In the background of my mind I was also thinking about the implicit masculine nature of scientific discourse, which is very much ego-based and willing to dominate, the scientist is this alpha male who seduces with his great brain. To me it was interesting to see what it feels like to take on that position.

And how did you feel in this alpha man/scientist role?

It was fun, I’m still trying to have a dialogue with that scientific part of myself, I think it is something that everyone should do. It is conditioning for a woman to think about science as a complicated thing. Wanting to shy away from technology is really common, as it is scary, but it is important to be able to take something scientific and make it yours, play with it, you don’t have to be afraid of not being qualified. And this is also part of this desire of creating this scientific discourse and being convincing, because it is just a theory.

Talking about being convincing, you state in the show’s pamphlet that the piece is very much inspired by the 20th century communication, I think the format you have decided to use for this video is really interesting. In which terms are you interested in the 20th century communication?

I think it is about being contemporary, the modern communication defines the era on every level. Concretely, it represents also an interest in science in terms of knowledge and how it is communicated. I never stop being amazed by how easy it is to have information nowadays compared to how it was before, I managed to master four different programs thanks to Youtube tutorials. I think the piece is a kind of celebration of that, I find interesting the relationship between the word and the images that we have become able to recognize, and this is completely new. It is part of mass culture: now everyone knows how to get a picture from google and put it in a powerpoint, and that produces this logic which is part of our consciousness now. On the other side, I’m interested in the narratives in these kind of media which are really competitive so within a certain amount of time you have to gain the viewer’s attention. But also, considering the social-political climate, these media are quite dangerous, the flat earth theory is the perfect example of how we just apparently got back to the middle age all thanks to precisely this kind of presentations of information. Sometimes I can just watch these videos and sincerely be a little bit scared, because I can feel critical about them, since I’m visually trained to be able to understand all these subtleties, but I wonder if all of the millions viewers who have seen the video are also trained or maybe they just believe it for what it appears. I think there is something about artistic education which is quite valuable in terms of decoding presentations of information, and it actually would be useful for people to navigate those media.

Talking about the importance of art history, I was browsing your website I noticed that there are recurring symbols of the Roman Empire, architectural elements like the Ara Pacis and the columns in Desargues’ Theorem Lecture.

I’m really fascinated by the Roman Empire because you could decode or you could foresee a lot of things about history’s unfolding by learning Roman history. You can actually understand today so much better by understanding Rome than by understanding any contemporary theory. I have also being concretely influenced by the financial crash in Iceland, I was in Europe at the time and it was a very strange sensation because at that point no one in the rest of Europe could perceive a social movement as being anything other than populist and I had really mixed feelings whilst I felt there was such a huge possibility to create something, but then again there are so many things that can go wrong if there is not an understanding of historical perspectives underlying mass movements. On one hand there is a lack of class-conscious reading of history in the general education, on the other hand those training to be part of the upper classes universally receive a classicist education which provides them with a playbook to maintain power, they just don’t have to come up with a new strategy if they know the history, it is all there, like a toolbox for countering the next move.

Your book Mindgames, published in 2012, brings together John Lennon, Henri Lefebvre, Halldor Laxness and Caligula, it looks like you are taking fragments from different areas of knowledge and mixing them together. What was your aim? And why did you choose these four subjects?

The idea was that they represent different spheres in society, it was a sort of mathematical formula which brings together the politician, the musician, the theorist and the writer, I was fascinated by this relationship they had with recognition and with their audience. It is a lot about time, repetitions and patterns. I was thinking in a cybernetic kind of way when there is a feedback and when there isn’t and how the author transmits information to the reader and that this would produce something new, a feedback which then will influence the author. These are all kind of subsystems, and I suppose I was trying to figure out my position and wondering what the contemporary artist could hope to achieve by creating new work, if artists can really influence anyone at any level, if that’s actually the aim, and how quality is created.

And did you find an answer to these questions?

Yeah, in my own kind of mathematical way, in terms of theory, I found the mathematical kind of calculations to figure out the probability, the correct proportion between the different elements you need to communicate something. I probably figured out for myself what I wanted and how I wanted to make art.

My last question does not really relate to your own work, but since you have been living abroad for about ten years, in Holland, Germany and Colombia and you had the chance to experience different art scenes, I would like to ask you what you think about the Icelandic contemporary art scene.

I think it is pretty good, you can actually see some pretty good works and shows. There are a lot of big cities where a lot of things are happening and you really have to try hard to find good exhibitions, while in Iceland the art scene is at a surprisingly good level considering its size. I think there are a lot of artists doing super interesting things. If I wanted to make a critique it would be that in the past there has been a quite strong impulse to try to suppress any kind of intellectual sensibility. But this is changing though, there is more space now, because it’s just a matter of having a wider spectrum, and I think it’s also quite valuable that there is a lot of room for people who are not into this super intellectual/critical/reading kind of discourse, while in a lot of places, for instance in Europe, you have to make sure you’ve read certain books and check out certain things to be allowed to this sphere, and that art under those conditions can be boring because that doesn’t come from an inner desire of the artists. So I think it is nice that here there is that side of the spectrum, but I think it’s also good that you can include in something more intellectual or conceptual and to try not to dismiss that, and I think that’s becoming more accepted than it was before.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credits:

Stills from the video: courtesy of the artist.

Photos of the sculptures: Vigfús Birgisson.

Website of the artist: http://www.geirthrudur.com

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

Pappakassar stór hluti af íslenskri menningu

by artzine | Miðvikudagur.02.2019 | Viðtöl

Pappakassar stór hluti af íslenskri menningu

Tvíburasysturnar Maria og Natalia Petschatnikov héldu sýninguna „Learning to read Icelandic patterns“ í Gallerí Úthverfu á Ísafirði seint á síðasta ári. Maria og Natalia dvöldu vikurnar fyrir sýninguna í gestavinnustofum ArtsIceland á Ísafirði og var sýningin byggð á upplifun og rannsóknarvinnu þeirra á Vestfjörðum yfir þann tíma. Maria og Natalia eru fæddar í St. Petersborg í Rússlandi. Þær fluttu til New York þegar þær voru 17 ára en búa í dag í Berlín, þar sem þær eru með stúdíó og setja reglulega upp sýningar með abstrakt málverkum og innsetningum. Blaðamaður artzine settist niður með þeim systrum yfir kaffibolla og spjall um upplifun þeirra af Íslandi og hvernig sýningin þeirra varð til.

„Við vildum ekki hafa einhverja fyrirfram ákveðna hugmynd um hvað við ætluðum að gera, við vildum nota tækifærið og fá innblástur héðan. Við byrjuðum á að gera litlar teikningar sem leiddu okkur í ýmsar áttir. Þaðan komu hugmyndirnar, með lítilli rannsóknar- og þemavinnu sem var í raun endurvarp á hinu magnaða landslagi allt í kring. Sem dæmi um þetta var ýmislegt sem við sáum á ferðalagi okkar, myndir af fjöllum í gegnum bílglugga þegar það rigndi, þannig að rigningin og regndroparnir urðu hluti af verkunum.“ segja Maria og Natalia og segjast hafa óttast í raun að geta ekki endurvarpað þessari nátturlega fegurð í verk sín. Þess vegna hafi þær frekar reynt að finna leið til að færa fegurðinni nýja vídd.

Getur ekki verið venjulegur maður*
Heimsókn þeirra systra á ákveðinn bóndabæ í nágrenni Ísafjarðar leiddi svo til sýningarinnar sem þær settu upp. „Það var eiginlega tilviljun að svo varð. Það er heit laug þar hjá bænum og Elísabet (Elísabet Gunnarsdóttir hjá Gallerí Úthverfu) fór með okkur þangað einn daginn. Er við sátum í lauginni þá sáum við bóndann á bænum, hann Finnboga, skyggnast út um gluggann. Það var ákveðin upplifun að sjá þennan skeggjaða mann í glugganum, einn í þessu húsi sem er umvafið stórfenglegri náttúru. Við töluðum ekki við hann í þessari heimsókn, en okkur langaði að fara aftur þangað og kynnast honum.“ Í huga þeirra systra var öruggt að um merkilegan mann væri að ræða. Einhver sem býr aleinn, umkringdur þessum fjöllum, getur ekki verið venjulegur í þeirra huga. Þær segja þessa upplifun hafa verið afar óraunverulega því í borgarumhverfi sem þær eru vanar þá er mikið af fólki en mjög lítil náttúra, en þarna var bara ein manneskja en öll þessi náttúra.

Það var svo í næstu heimsókn þeirra á bóndabæinn sem þær töluðum við Finnboga. „Fyrir heimsóknina höfðum við lesið bæklinga um sauðfé til að geta átt einhverjar samræður við hann! Honum leið nú ekkert vel með að tala ensku en við fengum með okkur í heimsóknina hana Heiðrúnu sem vinnur hjá ArtsIceland og hún þýddi fyrir okkur. Hún sagði jafnramt að íslenskan hans Finnboga væri líka sérstök, að hann talaði með einstökum hætti. Hann var nú ekki mjög málglaður en hann sýndi okkur bæinn sinn, gaf okkur kaffi og við gáfum honum rússneskt sælgæti. Hann sýndi einnig list okkar áhuga sem við skoðuðum saman í bæklingi sem við tókum með okkur í heimsóknina. Svo sýndi hann okkur einnig gamla húsið sitt, þar sem hann fæddist og sagði okkur að þar byggi huldufólk og að það væri ástæða þess að hann slæi ekki grasið þar.“ segja Maria og Natalia.

Þegar þær systur fóru svo að huga að sýningunni sjálfri þá voru þær ekki ennþá ákveðnar hvað þær vildu gera. Þær settu upp litlar teikningar sem þær höfðu gert en þeim fannst þær þurfa eitthvað meira. „Galleríið er lítið rými og okkur fannst við á einhverju að halda sem myndi gera það algjörlega að okkar rými. Við óskuðum eftir pappakössum í verslunum á Ísafirði og fengum nokkra. Okkur til mikillar ánægja var liturinn vel við hæfi, þessi brúni litur. Pappakassar eru svo stór hluti af Íslandi og íslenskri menningu vegna alls þess innflutnings sem á sér stað hér. Þannig að við þöktum gólfið og veggina í galleríinu með þessum brúna pappa, það varð striginn okkar. Og við byrjuðum að mála, við máluðum Finnboga sem varð að fjalli með sauðfé í. Þetta var tilraunakennt, gróft og óklárað, unnið með stórum bursta beint úr fötu! Svo bættum við litlu teikningunum við.“ segja þær systur og það vottar á glampa í augum þeirra er þær rifja upp uppsetningu á sýningunni.

Of mikil örvun
Þær segja að það sé mjög erfitt að verða ekki fyrir áhrifum af Vestfjörðum. „Allt sem þú sérð er svo sérstakt, þú vilt taka það allt upp, festa á filmu eða mála það. Og stóra spurningin er hvernig á maður svo að túlka svona lagað? Þetta er gott dæmi um of mikla örvun, stundum þarf maður bara að draga djúpt andann, þetta er allt svo spennandi! Fólkið sem býr hérna tekur örugglega ekki eins mikið eftir þessu og upplifir þetta ekki eins. Það er mikil orka allt í kring og við erum afar þakkláta að hafa möguleikann að halda sýningu til að vinna úr þessari upplifun.“ Maria og Natalia segjast hafa velt fyrir sér hvernig það sé ef maður fer til Íslands með skemmtiferðaskipi í einn eða tvo daga, hvað maður eigi að gera við alla þá upplifun eftir svo stuttan tíma. Að þeirra sögn hefði upplifunin einfaldlega verið of mikil ef þær hefðu ekki haldið sýningu til að vinna úr henni. Auk þess segja þær að þær hafi stöðugt spurt sjálfa sig hvort landslagið væri raunverulegt eða tölvugert?

Þær systur segjast nota rýmin mikið þar sem sýningarnar þeirra eru settar upp. Að þeirra sögn eru rýmin ekki hlutlaus og vilja þær nota sögu staðarins og vera sjálfar hluti af upplifun fólks af sýningunni. Þess vegna þurfi þær að skilja aðstæður og staðinn sjálfan. „Sem dæmi um þetta þá er það pappinn sem við unnum með í Úthverfu. Okkur fannst hann minna okkur á bárujárn sem finna má í svo mörgum húsum á svæðinu. Öll gömlu húsin sem hafa verið máluð margsinnis og endurgerð og fólk hefur lent í vandræðum með veðráttuna hér. Það er líka ein ástæða þess að við völdum að vinna með pappann!“

Þær Maria og Natalia segja að lokum að það sé mjög mikilvægt fyrir listamenn og heimafólk að listasýningar séu settar upp í litlum þorpum á landsbyggðinni. Með því fái listafólkið tækifæri til að kynnast heimamönnum og skilur aðstæður þeirra betur og heimamenn fá tækifæri til að sjá list og sjá hvernig ókunnugt fólk sér heimahagi þeirra. „Það er líka mikilvægt að gera list sem allir geta skilið, ekki bara einhver elíta. Það geta allir skilið list og talað um list. Það setur manni alltof miklar skorður ef listafólk reynir að gera bara list fyrir aðra listamenn eða gagnrýnendur.“

Aron Ingi Guðmundsson

Myndir: Maria og Natalia Petschatnikov

„What’s wrong with this picture?“ An interview with Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson about their work at AVL MUNDO in Rotterdam

by Bergur Thomas Anderson | Föstudagur.02.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

„What’s wrong with this picture?“ An interview with Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson about their work at AVL MUNDO in Rotterdam

The artist duo Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson recently presented two works for What’s wrong with this picture?, a group exhibition at AVL MUNDO in Rotterdam. The space itself is run by the Dutch sculptor Joep van Lieshout, and places a diversity of artists in conversation with his practice, which examines the interplay between art and life. It is therefore a multi-use space surrounded by spacious walkways and parks populated with his work. Like many artists making large scale works, his studio is a tightly run organization with contributions coming from a group of people. The AVL MUNDO is inspired by Andy Warhols factory, its philosophy is to be an autarkic society within itself, inviting you to discover the world of van Lieshout and his contemporaries as you enter the space.

…

B: For the works presented here, you wrote a text in collaboration with the philosopher Nina Power. Can you introduce her and tell me how your collaboration came about?

L + Ó: Nina is a philosopher based in London. She is a feminist, post-marxist, leftist philosopher. We met her in 2012, when we were participating in the Liverpool Biennial. We had been looking for someone on the theoretical side to work with for our contribution there. For the Biennial, we launched a project called ThE riGHt tO Right/WrOnG, which appeared as an intervention in two iterations upon one of the city centers representative buildings, St. George’s Hall. On it, a neon sign flashes alternatively and reads ThE riGHt tO RighT and ThE riGHt tO WrOnG. It also introduces a blending of the two alternatives, proposing a new, unspeakable word RighT and WrOnG spoken simultaneously.

Along with this intervention, we made a newspaper as part of this campaign with a collaborative article written about the idea of the right to right, and the fundamental ideas around the beginning of rights. In preparation, we asked our philosopher friends if they knew interesting female philosophers working in the UK, and we were lead to Nina Power. We addressed her to write an essay in collaboration with us, which would become a free magazine distributed around Liverpool in relation to the work and the Biennial. She liked the idea, and that’s how it started with us.

The posters in the exhibition at AVL MUNDO are one outcome of our collaboration as well. They are an appropriation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was written after the second world war. The idea about rewriting the Universal Declaration came about as we were working on the essay on the right to rights… and wrongs. We saw how much of the Declaration was aspirational and thought to rewrite it according to how the situation actually is and it ended up being a satire. We turned all the Right articles in to Wrongs and wrote the aspirational parts as how things are. So you end up with a very skewed mirror of reality. It looks more like the actual picture.

B: You mean that theoretically the Universal Declaration works, but in practice…?

L + Ó: Precisely. The intention or aspiration is good, but it is written in a very matter-of-fact way. The way it is written became interesting for us to look at. Essentially it concerns rights, so the question is how do you factualize rights, and the right to rights? We became interested in what is revealed when you present the opposite of Rights. When you turn it in to Wrongs, you get this image of the world.

B: Your works investigate the subverting of power through appropriation. It is interesting that the partial declaration is presented like a street poster in the show. It reflects how the public expresses its own messages in to society.

L + Ó: The partial declaration of human wrongs came out as an insert in the newspaper that we made with Nina Power. They are meant to be on the streets. When it was first published, the partial declaration was distributed to vendors and kiosks around the city of Liverpool as well as being present in the venues of the Biennial. We wanted to address everybody, and that everyone could have the publication, and do whatever they wanted with it. We were wondering how we could use the power of institutions to enter the streets and become visible to the public eye. When you make art that goes in to the public sphere beyond the exhibition space, then you are actually wanting to address everybody, we think. We do this as a search to see if everybody has the possibility to meet the work. It is a work that is very much about making ideas public. Our concern with this project is how an art institution can be used as a bridge to the public, and really… go out there. This work has been presented in different ways in public space and we have several versions yet unrealised. In 2016, we made a huge print (about 11×15 meters) which was pasted on a square in Venice, in a collateral exhibition to the Architecture Biennial, creating The Partial Declaration of Human Wrongs – Temporary Public Square (Venice).

B: It is good to see art becoming more inclusive of other view points. Of actually thinking about theory and therefore inviting a theorists in to the work or thinking about nature and inviting someone from the field of science in to the pieces…

L + Ó: Of thinking about music and inviting composers and musicians… That’s in a way what we do all the time with our work. The work we are doing in Iceland right now around the new constitution will end up being a musical composition. It will be a collective writing of a score, of a composition.

B: Is that the work you made for Cycle festival last year? I saw the installation there…

L + Ó: The old/current constitution was there on display, with a performance and video piece that we made in collaboration with composer Karólína Eiríksdóttir and the national television. The work was about the history of civic movements in Iceland and the old constitution. We spent around a year working with the people who fought in favor of the new one… The new one that was supposed to be implemented if it weren’t for the conservative government re-gaining power. We made an event, a public meeting, in the museum of Gerðarsafn that was a mixture of a symposium, activism, presentations and a performance. There we invited thinkers, the public and politicians to participate in an open discussion about the history of the Icelandic constitution, or the fight for an Icelandic constitution and the civic movements in Iceland and the fight for the implementation of the new constitution.

Now we are going back to Reykjavík to work with a larger group of composers, musicians and the public. Together, we will make the very first sound experiments that react on the new constitution. These fragments and experiments will function as a pool to work forward with this idea of appropriating this large document in to score. Collectively, we will make experiments and re-imagine the whole constitution as a musical piece. Hopefully we’ll get nice stuff going! We started working with the composers already. We met first in our Berlin studio, but we are meeting again in Iceland in the next few days to take the experimentation to another level.

B: What can you tell me about the Illusion Woman, a figure who is represented on a large screen here at the AVL MUNDO?

L + Ó: Illusion Woman: Study #1 is the result from our second collaboration with Nina Power and is from 2016. We were getting interested in experimenting with the form of moving image and its illusory, deceptive qualities. And when we started working with Nina, we immediately wanted to do more, in different places and with a multitude of thinkers. The idea of collective writing therefore manifests itself in the Illusion Woman, where it appears as a layering of sorts, of masking as a way to include these layers of voices and thoughts coming from different sources. The mask worked for us in several layers… it has a minimal, reductive function as she very distinctively makes an image of herself which is morphing through out the piece. It is also a mask, which for us means that many people can become her.

B: She reminds me of the magician, or the mystic within. She is both the persona that tells you what you want to hear, but she also tells you how things really are. I found the piece intriguing because it demands me to interpret the sincerity of the actual performance. What is actually said and what you can see in it becomes a very interesting challenge for the viewer of the Illusion Woman. She delivers a fortune, as well as masking herself away from it at the same time.

L + Ó: The Illusion Woman‘s speech is a plea which reflects on the political situation in Europe and beyond since the financial crash of 2008. Within this agitated space, she ponders two possible futures. One which resembled a dystopic, coarse world, ruled by a powerful and political 1%. The other comes as a proposal towards a radical, feminist, democratic and environmental insurrection. A movement which functions in the name of peace and strives to end poverty in the world.

For us, and when working with Nina, we were thinking about the video as a medium. And we were thinking about the video as a manipulative, hypnotic and illusionary medium available for artists. The illusion is already there from the moment you begin watching. We asked ourselves what are the most basic, hypnotic images? We studied archival images of hypnosis techniques, Duchamp and op art. This lead us to dazzle camouflage, which is something the British were doing in the first world war. They painted warships in black and white stripes to dazzle the opponents. The ships are crazy, they are like artworks. They are like, really, really freaky! It seems to work because from images they are like cubist paintings, breaking perspective plains. This results in the opponent not knowing whether the ship is coming or leaving, or to which side it was going. It’s all about illusion. That’s how we started to think about drawing as hypnosis, and we were interested in seeing her putting the mask on in real-time while delivering the text. The transformative proposal within the text was then mirrored in her actual metamorphosis, by painting. This we feel references back to the hypnotic, the dazzle paint, and references traditions of the mask in art history. An important aspect is also that she does not have her role fully memorized, so she is both speaking it from her heart/memory and partly reading her notes.

B: Watching the work gave me the impression of a rehearsal, and it creates an ambiguous feeling of who she is addressing, what she is preparing for. It is almost as if she is applying the warpaint, and pondering these two alternative futures.

L + Ó: She is pleaing for a resistance without war. She masks herself, evoking standardized notions of femininity on the surface. We actually think she is masking herself to prepare to fight for another possibility. Her painting herself was also helpful to us because we didn’t want her to be overacting, because it makes the concentration really concrete. She is free to repeat sentences or start over with some parts. The work is a rehearsal in a way. It’s a study of collaborative writing, of image-making, of thinking through the medium of moving image. It is essentially a way to emancipate a way to go forward, a working towards knowing how am I doing this?

When you look at the video, you are actually looking at a reflection. The camera was pointing at a mirror that it shares with the actress. So there is a double illusion on the technical side. We were always interested in the deconstructive, self-reflective element of the video. We wanted to meet reality from the lucid reality of the video. In a way, we feel that now both ends will meet again. How could this work meet different contexts in reality? In comparison to the work that create interventions in reality, like the signs or the newspaper, this work is still in a reflective state. Currently we are thinking to the space of reflection and fiction. It gives a certain freedom to experiment with models, whether they are utopic or dystopic, and to think in those spaces with other thinkers. We would like to place many minds together in this fictional space of ours, meeting real life again at some point.

As our talk comes to a closing, Libia and Ólafur happily mention that the neon-text-work ThE riGHt tO RighT/WrOnG is having a return. The Office For Art in Public Space in Rotterdam (BKOR) is acquiring the work for the city in collaboration with AVL Mundo, where it will be installed and have an unveiling during the opening of Art Rotterdam 2019, an art fair celebrating its 20th anniversary. The work will be placed in the heart of the Merwe-Vierhavens district, the last active inner city harbour area now designated to become a new creative district.

Bergur Thomas Anderson

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