Davíð Örn Halldórsson’s exhibition River únd Bátur was recently on view at Hverfisgallerí. The artist’s gesture of using found objects such as desktops, tables, and shelves for his abstract paintings calls attention to the material’s inherent aesthetic, which is transcended by the artist’s imaginative and worldly expressiveness. The effect breaks down barriers between cultures as it focuses on expressiveness and symbolism. Placed amongst the colorful worlds of his paintings, the artist has spray-painted directly onto the gallery walls a looming gray outline against which a coffin shape rests- as though he is aware of the anguish and precariousness of living.

The artist faces the precipice, taking the human predicament as the focal point instead of adhering to any formalist structures but his own. In the artist’s numerous works on paper, a visual language is formed which can be read from one frame to the next. The meaningfulness of one symbol may be disregarded in the next frame, embracing the dichotomy of meaning and interpretation. In an interview with the artist, he explains in his own weaving narration that ties many points of reference together, how everything can be meaningless as well as meaningful.

Erin: Your work appears lofty at first glance, like a fantastical world in itself, but upon inspection, it is quite taxing and heavy. There is a refreshing breath of abstraction with no signs of conceptualism- it oozes feeling and vibrancy with nothing calculated. These are my initial reactions to the paintings in the exhibition.

Photo: Vigfús Birgisson

Davíð: Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about calculation lately and how I can paint myself into a corner. There are these structures that I have a solution for, something that I think would look good but as soon as I do it I have to redo it many times more with different colors. There is a mindlessness to the work because a decision has been made already so there is this calculated system, which is a system that is very far away from the painting in the beginning. However, I’m stuck with it so I curse myself for a few minutes and then start to work at the system. The finished thing doesn’t maybe look like it is calculated, it looks more fluid than the rigorous task that it has been, so I’m glad that it is disguised but nobody knows about it. It’s interesting to always get this reaction that my work is so free flowing.

Erin: It appears that way, very much on the surface, but I think once you sit with it longer the painting gathers weightiness.

Photo: Vigfús Birgisson

Davíð: Also, some things aren’t very rewarding because I know from the way I work I have to work over them. So all of these stripes and color pairings, when I’m painting over the whole thing that I painted, is really not a system. It’s a repetitive gesture but the reward comes much later when I haven’t seen the painting for a long time.

Erin: Your work appears as though it could be visionary as though you are expressing a visionary experience. Do you approach it more as an inner vision that is already imagined or an abstraction of all of these elements around you?

Davíð: It is of course from my experience. It’s absolutely mine so if I come back to things that I’ve maybe done before it is still always some small twists to it that I travel along in this inner vision.

Erin: Maybe the question is more about vantage points- you said you work yourself into a corner and you brush over that corner with another layer and you lose yourself there. But do you work with space consciously?

Photo: Daníel Magnússon

Davíð: The paintings are fairly clear to me when they get started although there is a lot of work to be done. If you break that down in the project I know what needs to be done far ahead and I’m always trying to catch up. So I see it clearly after I am more preliminary. What I do is- I see it clearly and after every action, there is a small tilt to the vision. Jim Henson in Fraggle Rock had these small builders that were helping the Fraggles with these ramps all over and the Fraggles broke them and ate them and they had this symbiotic relationship. They start breaking them but they needed them to break them down so they could be prepared.

Erin: You might be laughing but I think that’s a great vision of this symbiotic relationship.

Davíð: So when I am working there come these shifts and these smaller experiments within each mission that changes everything. So I have to adjust according to whatever job that pops up. It’s like the first one is free flowing ideas and the main part is just to get things going, to work and maybe the muse will visit and the next part is doing all these little jobs like a Fraggle contract worker and the other part is just finishing up and maybe being like a head of a work crew or something.

Erin: So each action creates a whole new landscape from which to venture. Are you working from the outside or the inside?

Davíð: The answer is boring because I think it’s definitely both. There are some works based on events of daily life, a person processing the daily surroundings and carrying it out in visual language but I hate it because it’s so simple and obvious to put it that way because of course, I am doing just that. It’s just so boring to try to paint what influences you especially since you are mainly creating your own language. Sometimes I get concerned about repetition but that’s just a slow reaction. It rarely happens, but I get a bit miffed when someone points it out. For this reason, perhaps, one of the characters in the absurdist play in the exhibition text is talking about how it’s all the same- pointing out the repetition.

Erin: There is something about your repetition that brings the world together with the same motifs and symbols, which I think is more helpful than anything else. Who are the most influential painters for you? Hundertwasser comes to mind, of course.

Photo: Daníel Magnússon

Davíð: Hundertwasser comes up a lot. I’ve been on pilgrimages to Vienna a few times. But he’s not important in that sense- he’s more like a cousin. There’s also Joan Miró. When you are a teenager you jump onto things like Dali and the surrealist movement and then a little later it feels a bit vapid and not as interesting as you thought to begin with. I’m always rediscovering things just by going to exhibitions. I think I really need that- to see the paintings up close to create this big enthusiasm or to make an evaluation on where this artist is in my life. I saw an exhibition of de Chirico last year, which really changed my opinion on his work. I discover things but I don’t try to find out everything about them online or something, I want it to be a bigger moment, so if I see something interesting I just keep it in the back of my mind and maybe try to look it up when I’m traveling or something. It changes so much to see the real thing- it just has another glow.

 Erin: You often work with found materials like shelves and desktops. How did that process start?

Davíð: It started a bit more with me in school, not just me being broke. It started very environmentally friendly with the statement of not adding and just re-using material. I did this experiment when I was doing this movie in East Iceland on our days off where I decided to paint this mural under a bridge. I went around and asked people for leftover paint and materials. I thought it was a great concept for having their influence into the mutual paintings so it had some factor to begin with. Found materials can be so different from each other in shape and size and it keeps things interesting on some level. It also serves the purpose of not being delicate. The materials I use like spray-paint and different oils and industrials are not treated the same way inside the studio as they are when they get out. So that is just a method of working and being curious.

There is probably more outside rules to handle but with that comes also a lot of problems that I had to adjust to if there was old paint or varnish on them. The whole thing may come off when I take the paint off so I had to adjust my working methods to the materials so there is some sort of uniqueness to whatever I’m working on. There is a lot of that in this show from the same kitchen cupboards because a cousin of mine was redesigning his house and his mother had painted them all shiny white. I got them and felt bad about destroying their work but then I went to a children’s party and I saw one that had been left behind that they were still using which was big and beautiful and I just stood there stroking it during the party.

Erin: I can see how it keeps you having to continuously break out of this conventional frame. And then you have these black voids applied directly onto the walls of the exhibition. What would you call these black voids?

Photo: Vigfús Birgisson

Davíð: The found materials definitely keep things from getting monotonous in the beginning especially. Actually, I called the black voids milt myrkur or ‘mild darkness’. I do something on the walls usually but it is often more in the same vein of the paintings just on a larger scale with the same colors and maybe I’m trying to get them to speak a little bit to the paintings but I didn’t want to do that now. I wanted something to contrast the paintings.

Erin: They really balance out the other paintings.

Davíð: I wanted something to help me be expansive but still weighed down in this anchor, a druid headstone or something. I sort of worked towards it a little blindly. When I started making them in the gallery I did them first because of the fumes. I had to make a big decision about them. I didn’t get a chance to try them out because I wasn’t in my own studio, so I couldn’t do it on the wall there and it wouldn’t be the same if I did it on a plate so I just went for it in a sort of freestyle. I had this reference with the phrase milt myrkur (mild darkness) from an artist named Ernst J. Bachman who did the record sleeves for Mezzoforte in the early 80’s that are so weird. An album called Observations from my childhood was especially influential. It’s obviously just him doing experiments with airbrush and it has nothing to do with the music. The music is so upbeat, this jazz-fusion stuff and it was milt myrkur because of the music and the art. The album covers are more of an afterthought rather than being truly inspired, though.

Erin: This triangulation between the viewer, the color in your paintings, and the milt myrkur is very strong. I’m imagining a Hawkwind cover, although I’ve never seen these Mezzoforte covers. Do you listen to music while you work?

Davíð: I’m really inspired by music and have been my whole life. Music is very important but that has changed a little bit in the studio. In my old studio, I had my record player and all my music. I’ve been watching television now instead which is weird because I can’t really watch anything that is too challenging. It helps watching bad television when I am doing something monotonous like filling in color in repetitive lines. A friend gave me something when he was moving the other day, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Lots of people have been handing me their awful DVDs, which I tend to watch more than quality films. It gives me inspiration with weird phrasing of words for titles, so if I pick something up then I write it on the wall in the studio. If it is in front of me then it stares at me from the wall while I’m working. Sometimes I put the subtitles on while I’m working. Like here, for example, I wrote in my notebook… ‘Enemy of good’. I don’t remember where that came from.

Photo: Daníel Magnússon

Erin: I think there is something to that, though. There is a lot to be said for seemingly bad taste- it becomes part of a cult taste. We don’t know what compels us towards this. I had this vision in my mind that part of your work is processing the dregs of bad taste- some kind of sifting process. They still exist nonetheless- all of these cultural layers are all here. It’s so arbitrary what is considered to be good or bad. I think it’s really interesting to look at it all as one big image.

Davíð: I think for a period whenever I had an art show it was the same with every description of the art show dealing with the overflow of images. So I got very tired and bored of this quickly. Of course, it’s true like what you were saying earlier about everyone being confused about the influences of everything around them. It’s best to not complain but just to pick one thing. I pick Mezzoforte albums.

Erin: Maybe that’s the best method to get deeper into the matter.

Davíð: It’s hard to not follow trends, like mainstream advertising culture or something. A few years back I was traveling through Europe and I was also very active making art here in Iceland. Everywhere I went galleries and museums were putting up saunas like some freakish collective. Picking up your influence is sort of, talking generally, pointing out the obvious. Maybe you should just choose something; just accept it that everything is influential.

Erin: How do these black voids relate to the title of the show, River únd bátur. There was something I read about you relating the title to the notion of sinking or swimming.

Davíð: That was something I mentioned in passing, almost as a joke, in the gallery. It was quite a dark joke. The story behind it is much more me giggling with myself, just me depicting laughing at my own jokes in the studio. I’m alone in this self-made world and I’m collecting tiny objects and symbols into titles that don’t explain anything really. They are things I think are supposed to go hand in hand, although it’s not obvious on the surface. I went to the theater and saw this play and the actress was supposed to say the name of the character and I just kept hearing River únd bátur. So I was giggling in the theater at this and it just stuck. I’ve been carrying this with me for some time.

Erin: I saw some of these black voids as acting like some kind of black hole, a gateway where you could fall into or keep paddling and swimming, or, in your case, painting. The void is a source that can consume everything if you’re not continuing your action to paint. Is that far off?

Davíð: Maybe they are there in that sense. I don’t know whether I should be afraid of it or what. There is a lot of meditation and this, of course, happens so many times that you connect things with just a fragment of an idea and you are trying to grasp a work but it comes to you fairly easy without pushing it. That happens a lot and why not embrace it instead of being shy to talk about it. Maybe it’s a coincidence but it doesn’t have to be a crazy coincidence if you have all the elements and it comes together at the end. I get a little bit lost inside the studio because I have paintings all around me and titles on the walls and all these colors that you can’t see through unless you take it out of this context and let it breathe a little bit in a gallery or another place. Absolutely, it happens a lot but that is also the reason for the title. There is a vague point to be made with connecting it together and then maybe everything else sees the connection when it is given space to breathe.

Erin: The ambiguous imagery challenges how the viewer approaches a painting and in how we process visual imagery. Is it all at once in a huge impression or in these minor details? Your work seems to contain both perceptions.

Photo: Daníel Magnússon

Davíð: I’m trying to confuse with information but not let it be uncomfortable. People tend to read and write a book left to right, jumping at one symbol and then going out from there. At first glance, it probably doesn’t seem palatable, but I want it to be. I want them to make sense but that is another conflict. There can be a sensory overload in an exhibition but when you take one out of the whole thing and then put it in your living room or isolate one then it is completely different to look at it. Maybe it stands better or is easier to view, but that is sort of the struggle and that is why I wanted to make this experiment with the way I hung them. I wanted it to be a like a salon style, close together in one amorphous form. I was thinking about the colors and how to connect them all but it was too difficult to do it salon style. I decided having them down the line would be better in this context.

I used to be such an arrogant little shit. I thought you could only show a painting once- that it could only be in an exhibition once. I adjusted this thought into making every exhibition into a different book instead. The context they are in is only limited and some of them may be shown together but it’s going to be completely different. I’m so non-scientific that it’s almost ridiculous to talk about. It’s all about my aesthetic, my intuition. As for the pictures themselves, I’ve often said that the right settings about figuration give you the feeling that something just happened or something is about to happen. It gives a bit of tension that lasts like someone is about to walk into the setting or just walked out of it. The thing is that there is a teasing element because all my life I’ve gotten responses from different people that always go “it reminds me of this…” or “it looks like this…” I guess people are just trying to observe things and know how the mind works. It’s such a childish thing to observe and to talk about. The response is always a simple yes because I can’t say no. This reminds me of a snake- sure! I can’t disagree.

There is also this ethnic trend people are always comparing my work with. I don’t argue with it. It’s interesting to hear two people approach the same painting and place it on very different sides of the world- someone is talking about South America and the other one is Africa. I’m really intrigued by Aboriginal or decorative work all over the world but I haven’t really studied it in a way that I would use it, although I love it. When I recognize it, I am very intrigued by it. I was reading about Aboriginal art in Australia and I was kind of let down because that had only started in the 1960’s as a social and political expression so I had this completely different thought about how that had been perceived. I know how they use it in their religion and everything, but not how these people used it in ritual. That aspect is just weird- to hold up just one thing as art that is leftover from the religion when you are actually ignoring the way of life. So I like this decorative comparison but there is no real foundation for it and it is not delivered intentionally from me.

Erin: I think the whole notion of something native is something that is coming from an inherent-ness that has not been influenced by a wider sphere but contained in its own world. Maybe you’re native- Davíð, native painter. That’s not what I was expecting to come out, but maybe it’s not so off. You’re native to yourself, a native westerner. You’re not appropriating anything.

Davíð: It’s definitely difficult to pinpoint one thing, like naming an artist or theory or movement. Get rid of that; I’m just a native.

Erin Honeycutt

Photos: Daníel Magnússon and Vigfús Birgisson (courtesy of Hverfisgalleri).
Featured image: Daníel Magnússon.

Alicja Kwade’s exhibition, ‘A Trillionth of a Second,’ is on display at i8 Gallery from June 22nd to August 12th, 2017.

In glass cases sit what appears to be vase-like structures of an undeterminable age, while the titles of the works suggest wholly different objects altogether. The vase titled Lampe, for example, is composed of ground lamp, epoxy resin, glass, and brass, likewise with Kaminuhr (Table Clock), Computer (PowerMac), and iPhone. Compass needles in A trillionth of a second (I) and clock arms in Ein Monat (November 2017) form wave compositions in flat wall pieces, while a third wall piece in the form of a found abacus, Linienland III, reminds the viewer of the basics. The wall pieces seemingly ground the material processes that have occurred within the objects in glass cases with their structured systems of measurement.

Alicja Kwade asks big questions about how language shapes perception and what the consequences are for visual proof of the existence of gravitational waves. I spoke with the artist in a winding conversation to try to get a better understanding of her inspiration and process.

Erin: When I first looked at your exhibition, I was reminded of the show in Vienna from a few years ago, ‘Rare Earth’ at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). The curators were exploring this idea that our technology is continuing geological processes happening inside the earth’s layers on the outside surface.

Alicja: Yeah, I missed the show but it would be very interesting for me. It’s actually what I play with because you have this geological layer that is used to place things in time. It’s not just time but it’s how we figure out about time, what it is, and where these measurements come from. In this case, it’s coming from all these elements and measurements of elements, which are in this planet, somewhat like a… bowl of elements.

So that is a good starting point to think about my work. But for me, is not just about time. I think people sometimes simplify my work a little and just think of this poetic use of time because it is understandable for everybody. For me, time is just one template, one thing we invented to create reality. I try more to question all facts of reality- what that could be, what it is, where it comes from, what language is also doing to that, what we name things. We feel things or experience things because we have names for them. I try to see all these facets about matter, and with matter, what reality is, and what we are to that, and what we are to matter as well.

Erin: And how our perception is really what shapes that…

Alicja: Yes, our perception is really very much ‘man is the center of the universe,’ but it is that way because we can’t do differently since we are the only recipients of our world. So even if we, with all the technology and knowledge, think we know more and more, it’s still from our point of view and therefore still very little.

Erin: Because all we know about the world comes from our senses or the extensions we make of them through instruments…

Alicja: Yes, and they are kind of primitive. Of course, we are able to over-jump our senses in a certain way because that’s the tragedy and the great thing about human beings, I think. But on the other hand, it’s still very limited. So it is still our imagination and our perception of our reality that is just based on us which is quite a simple thing and everybody knows that. However, to just question it with simple facts in daily life is quite interesting because we forget about that. We probably even question the biggest things but we forget that the table is probably not a table but a piece of wood- so it’s a tree, and the tree is a bunch of atoms and those atoms are coming from the universe, and so you know… All these layers.

Erin: It is so beautiful just to think in this way. It has a bit of this vanitas theme to it, like a still life, in a way.

Alicja: Yeah, that helps, but also they’re just objects. Vanitas is just a term, but of course, I crush these things to dust and I recreate other things and they are forms of time made of other forms. It’s time as a fact of just destroying the fact and then recreating a fact. I mean vanitas is not always just vanitas, because vanitas also means a new thing. It’s kind of just destructive and productive processes.

For me, the term time is so difficult because it’s something we have a very fixed imagination about what it could be. We don’t know… that’s the big problem, but we have something we feel. I mean we are getting older so we have a very personal relationship to time but I think there is a bigger thing. I think it’s something much bigger than this little slice that we can feel and try to experience and think about but for me, all the world’s reality is just like a ‘happening’ in time. It is just like an extended meeting of matter and not just an object but subjects also.

Erin: … just a coordinate on the space-time continuum.

Alicja: I love the idea also that matter is never getting lost- even each dramatic way in which every atom of your body will still be there even if you are not there anymore. It is like my objects, in a way- a permanent recycling of eternal recurrence. It’s the very beginning of whatever it was giving itself back to us.

Erin: You recreate the big bang on a small scale.

Alicja: Not really at the moment, but I try to think how it could have been, or what that is, and what the big bang created and what this matter is and how it is shaped and who is naming it, and who is doing something to it and why it is what it is.

Erin: These tools in the exhibition such as compass points and clock hands- they speak to me of direction.

Alicja: It’s both direction as well as a tool of measurement. It’s basically measuring things and what we do to this reality is try to measure things to cut it into slices to create this system out of it to build onto the system. We need the system, but those two works are very much connected. However, the clock arms are just a pattern that already exists. I just took the clock arms out from the position it usually is not shown in because it’s just the position of the clock- the letters we use to count and describe time. I just moved them, not only in positions seen from a zero point as in our clock but I also moved them so I created a measurement system with time. This pattern then appeared which I discovered by chance and loved very much because it both behaves like light waves in this waveform which is kind of the essence of the universe, right? And that is kind of appearing in what we invented, but probably didn’t, so… we don’t know really.

For me, it’s a measurement system, something you try to orient yourself to that points to our position that is placed on the very first image. It’s not an image but a first illustration we are having of our universe. In 2015, they proved that gravitational waves exist by making the first observation of them. That is the first thing we know about this universe and a thousand of these measurements are creating this movement so you can see through this illustration and it is through this calculation and this illustration that it was moving. It was expanding and I recreated exactly this movement of what they illustrate as the first image of the universe with these compass needles.

Erin: Isn’t it weird that it was only now that they discovered a visual for this?

Alicja: But it’s just so abstract, right? I also think it’s a strange thing that even in science we always have this deep wish to illustrate things. We have to illustrate the image to create an image of what it could be so we always try to create pictures and that is for me, a very emotional picture because we don’t know exactly. But definitely it is existing and we can measure it and it’s very close together with the object pieces because that is the first idea of matter. Something started, like gravity started and then measuring appeared in space; that is kind of the breeze of creation.

Erin: Do you think about using the other senses to perceive time? The way that we measure the world, like the ways that you have shown, are all so visual. Do you ever think about other senses?

Alicja: I use quite a lot of sound elements also. Of course, I still think that we are very much visual. It’s probably our most important sense. It’s a very visual thing, science, so for me, it’s the most direct thing to use. But it’s of course not the only thing and, of course, I’m interested in other things. You know the first sound of the universe they discovered in 1974, all this background noise. I did a lot of pieces where I tried to catch the sound of energy; the sound of light, which is not light. You don’t catch the sound of light, but you can catch the vibration of the waves. I also try to use that. Also, very simply I sometimes try to include just counting sound in my exhibitions, which is not necessarily a clock like we think of a clock ticking. It’s something further that goes counting and that is creating a very emotional kind of feeling because it is like reacting.

Erin: Someone earlier was telling me about your exhibition at Whitechapel and how you have a mobile of mobile phones. I feel like you’re really good at just pulling from everyday life and then pulling at these huge questions and making them very palatable.

Alicja: It’s true, but it’s just things I’m using. I was always using lamps and clocks in my previous work and at some point, I started to destroy them and then with the phones it’s kind of the same habit. Then, I started using this app called SkyGuide where you use GPS systems to map the stars. When I think about that for a moment it’s kind of crazy- I mean Swedish satellites point you out and they create a picture and you are having that in your hand, in your palm, but that‘s a picture made by so many pictures from so many satellites. But then these things are not existing anymore and we just create a picture again and we try to figure out our position towards this picture and so it’s just things that are confusing, yet normal. When you think about these satellites that take care to correct your measurements towards because time is expanding so when you think about all this… everything gets really crazy.

Erin: Have you ever read about ‘Deep Time’? It is mostly used in geological terms, as in the deep time of the earth- putting things that are happening on the earth on the largest scale possible and just considering things from that point of view.

Alicja: That is a little bit of what I try to do with these objects. They’re coming from a much older stretch of what we have, which is elements.

 Erin: Do you find it important that our sense of linear time is distorted?

Alicja: I don’t believe in linear time at all. I think it’s still a very human thing to try to get a system out of that- to divide it with poise and distance and make it livable. We are animals, so we need a system, something to be able to connect with each other and to make things happen. Of course, I think it’s interesting because it’s such a deep, philosophical question. I mean that is a question like ‘Is reality existing at all?’ or ‘Do systems really exist?’ These are questions that really drive me because I don’t know and we don’t know, but I’m very interested because that is the biggest question of our existence: how and why.

Erin: Any last words on the exhibition?

Alicja: To kind of sum it up, for me, it’s something else about language, which is not visible so much in the first moment. You see this object and it’s obviously a vase but it is called lamp. It’s kind of a Magritte thing, a trick, let’s say. It’s very much about that because language is so deep in our sense of reality also, so it creates strange shifts. But it is still a lamp, but can it also be a vase? It’s a simple thing- very relatable. The exhibition has so much to do for me with language and the expression of things.

There’s this whole theory that is deeply true that is that we don’t even develop feelings that we don’t have the term for. I had a funny experience when I was a kid when we went from Poland to Germany. I went with the German kids to a camp and they were super sad and saying they were homesick in German. We don’t have this term in Polish; it’s just simply not existing. I was not understanding what was wrong with them. It was a totally foreign feeling to me. So when you don’t have the term for it, you kind of just don’t have it at all because we create our world around these expressions.

Erin: It’s like, you know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know.

Alicja: And you can’t feel what you can’t express- what you can’t tell somebody about.

Erin Honeycutt

Photographs: artzine

The first edition of Murder Magazine was published in May 2017. The editors/curators are writer/artist collaborators Bergrún Anna Hallsteinsdóttir and Síta Valrún. The magazine will have a different theme for each edition which will be published every three months. The theme for the first edition is ‘Body/Invisible’. I asked the creators a few questions about their new artistic platform.

Erin: When I Google ‘Murder Magazine Iceland’ the first things that come up are about the death of the young woman in Reykjavík earlier this year. I began to think about her story, walking home from a night out alone, and how it fit so well with the contents of this first issue of the magazine. It could almost be a tribute of sorts: the ultimate ‘Body/Invisible’. Did you come up with the name before or after this tragedy?

Síta/Bergrún: It’s interesting because the name came at the very start. At that point, we were in a very punk feminist vibe and the choice to use murder magazine came as part of that. The idea was that we wanted to murder the patriarchy 😀 since then we developed and de-labeled, cleaned up the aesthetic but we kept the original idea, we still want to murder the patriarchy but we want it to be an action, however small or large it ends up being. Not something we announce, but something we do. We did have a conversation about the murder here, earlier this year… it’s definitely sensitive. And we thought now when you described that it could even seem like a tribute, that this was very beautifully put. It’s not a tribute to her consciously but it’s a tribute to the invisibility of women and therefore, very much to those women who are murdered by men. The inclusion of ‘fanmail’ to Ana Mendieta is definitely a part of that tribute. In the end though, we are aiming to address the oppression of women, both by publishing primarily women, and also choosing material like “alchemy of pain”…well, all of it actually, where women are able to describe their experiences on their own terms and in their own words, or visually.

Erin: Can you tell me the brief story of how Murder Magazine came about? Your initial ideas, inspirations, visions, etc.

Síta/Bergrún: The story of how the project came about is kind of funny. We wanted to hold an exhibition together, so we would meet up to plan it. The conversation would somehow move in the direction of feminism and we would end up just sitting there, really pissed at the world and so we never managed to plan the exhibition. Then we had a break and came back to it with the idea of a newsletter instead of an exhibition, but then we were moved to make something tactile first, something which people could hold onto, and feel the weight of, so the idea of a zine which was more like a magazine in appearance and quality came about. Something where we could maintain our independent thought, but which would be a publication that people would value and take seriously. Not just a crazy rant, as it could be. Also, very important was to create something beautiful, a piece which people would enjoy owning, rather than being something that would end in the trash.

Erin: What can an artistic platform in the form of a magazine (or is it a zine?) offer that other mediums cannot?

Síta/Bergrún: The thing that attracted us to the form of the magazine is its compact nature which lends itself well to sharing. It’s moveable. Basically, it’s a Mary Poppins exhibition space, where people can put it in their bag but it can contain the whole world. We also liked the idea of being able to easily show art and poems we liked ourselves, without logistical difficulties. We made an open call, sent out fliers through friends in different countries; Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, America and various European countries and it was great to be able to make something so big and so small. We also contacted artists that we admired or if we thought that they would fit.

Erin: The theme for your first issue, ‘Body/Invisible’, brought about visuals and poems that are distinctly feminine… Do you have an outcome in mind when you decide your themes?

Síta/Bergrún: With the theme we did chose particular works so it was steered in that way. However, the majority of the work shown is the contributors’ interpretation of the theme ‘body/invisible’. This created an interesting outcome and was fun to curate with, working with knowns/unknowns. So yes, the feminine aspect could be due to many things. The fact that it is mainly women whose work we showed. The fact that we are women, choosing the work. The theme of body/invisible is perhaps also leading. The dichotomy of man/woman, mind/body leaves women very often connected to physicality and bodily-ness, so the connection of women to the body in a sense leads to this erasure… if that makes any sense? It does to us at least.

Erin: After being with the magazine in its entirety for the first time, I was struck by notions of pain and beauty. Do you think this came about from the theme of Body/Invisible as well?

Síta/Bergrún: Pain and beauty. We definitely see a clear red thread of pain and beauty running through it all. Which is in a sense also connected to that erasure. Like we were writing in the editor’s note, somehow we have to be hyper-visible, but not exist at the same time. Beauty is such a complex phenomenon, a much-used word which we feel entails so often making oneself vulnerable, in a myriad of ways. And that is painful.

Murder Magazine will be available in Mál og Menning, Listasafn Reykjavíkur-Hafnarhús, and Kiosk.

Erin Honeycutt

Photography: H.G.Ó.