From September 2^nd to October 22^nd Sigurður Guðjónsson will exhibit his first solo exhibition at BERG Contemporary. The former glass factory’s high ceilings and sonorous exhibition space is well suited to the artist’s compositions. In the darkened space, the natural light from outside plays a role in the visitor’s adjustment to the contrasting luminosity. Emerging from daylight, it takes a few minutes for the senses to adjust – an element that brings the visitor into awareness of the body’s sensual attunement to its surroundings. Once this sensory assortment has taken place, the audiovisual presence of three video projections pulls the sensory world of the exhibition into position.

AV Machine’s visual presence arrives from a not-so-distant past as a manufacturer’s conundrum – a compact unit (audiocassette player and television screen combined) of convenience that is not so convenient for the human senses. This ‘dead’ media apparatus flickers with a familiar glow on its miniscule screen, the pale blue light of which is self-generated, correlating to the fuzzy, crackling closeness of its search for a signal. The distant deep bass notes filling other corners of the space amplify the closeness of the unit’s audiovisual presence. Throughout the exhibition combined layers both mechanical and organic are wrapped within the same curious process of moist electronic decay. Layers of differing sounds are combined in their meeting place within the body of the visitor. Each audiovisual element carries itself into the next with the visitor’s body as host.

Installation view

The flickering closeness of AV Machine lies opposite Tape, allowing neither to be experienced in a vacuum. Tape takes the viewer right to the well-worn threshold of the audiocassette tape’s world where one half of the tape mechanically rotates, while the other half lies still and coiled. In magnified closeness, the intimacy is paired with a droning bass that echoes the movement of the plastic ribbons of data as they slough off one layer at a time. The tape exists as much in one’s memory as in reality, as a nostalgic piece of time, recorded yet living. In Tape the materiality of the audiocassette performs without pause for the information it carries. We do not hear the recorded data of the tapes but a simulation of their rotation throughout time- the very circulatory movement of their mechanism rolling throughout time but for what event?

Stepping into the presence of the next component of the exhibition takes one to a new source. The audiovisual composition of Well reaches a similar place of depth in the body where wet pulsations are timed with the sea. The encompassing bass notes in Well with its watery environment takes the viewer into the earth where elements of media originate as rare earth materials. As daylight filters through the opening of the well, its depths locate both endings and beginnings in an oracle-like manner. Both the flickering monitor in AV Machine and the pulsations in the well’s opening carry their own source of light reflection; water becomes signal, rippling through time, appearing on whatever medium is available.

Installation view

Sound and vision are composed in the enclosed space not in competition but in the bodily recognition of new ways of sensual reconnaissance. These sensual layers delve into spaces within the body, some that are tightly coiled like one half of the audiocassette tape, while others move with the rhythm of time. Organic elements of sunlight and water intermix with the mechanical droning of electronic signal flicker and tape rotation, their coexistence made possible in the sculptural world of the audiovisual. The exhibition’s atmosphere of sublime dread and Romantic materialism carries suite with the artist’s oeuvre of surface tension yielding deep undercurrents. Sigurður takes you to the source of sensual information, one magnetic layer of mechanical rotation at a time.

Erin Honeycutt

 By Becky Forsythe

Space / drawing, which brings together numerous works on paper and in sculpture by Þóra Sigurðardóttir, offers a record of the information that we use to read or map space. Reconsidering the spaces that surround us and our investments in these places as lines, impressions, framed memory or conceptual horizons becomes a way of creating an alternative viewpoint, such as a drawing or diagram. When the works in this exhibition are taken into closer consideration, Þóra´s art practice is revealed as an extension of her life experiences: things she has stumbled on and become fascinated with, observations that transform, and an attention paid towards growth, repetition, exchange and tangibility as it appears to her in the surroundings. She takes on the role of the artist as a mobile perceiver by offering different angles of the fields we occupy as consideration for structures found in everyday life and society – structures and perceptions which are in the end fluid, moving and able to shift.

Most of the work presented here is recent, aside from a few elements, including an older recording that arrives from time spent in Denmark and is revisited in Arinstofa. The video shows a tree, covered completely by white webbing and is not far off or unlike Þóra´s approach to drawing. The natural lines drawn through the tree by the web are organic and visceral, with numerous layers to work through and visual language to decipher. This work, like the entire exhibition, is a look into the qualities of material in transformation, the process of outlining negative and positive spaces, and environmental sequences that feed Þóra´s ongoing explorations in navigating and recording. One viewpoint of a tree in a natural urban habitat becomes endless material for investment when it is transformed into a sketch of something else. Through the attention paid to the found subject, the video reminisces over a certain experience in a place during a particular moment, which becomes a thread running through the exhibition. The perspective given in Gryfja also considers this point in a series of movements through built environments..1954, Akureyri) art practice applies drawing, and often other mediums, as a way to expand patterned repetition, inversion and transformation through the nature of material, process and environment. Working in two- and three-dimensional forms she places emphasis on navigating layered surfaces and structures.

In Ásmundarsalur you will find large works on paper, with titles referring to their medium, hung alongside a collection of digitally-printed impressions collected from cut trees. Both of these series examine line as a build-up of different layers, which push how the surface is read, or multiple surfaces in this case, as space is added and subtracted in positives and negatives. Space is seen as a series of layers – from the ground up – a sequence of environments that absorb multiple surfaces and reference not only time, but distance, measurement and shifts within those structures. Drawn and constructed grids appear throughout and help to breakdown the levels in a mathematical way, reflecting an obvious human-made system of recording. Organic lines then trace different and contrasting pathways that cut the systematic surfaces and their structure most distinctly in the large drawings and the sculptures. In this dichotomy the hand of the artist, or the human, draws pathways across our measured and perhaps material world. As mirrored also within the tree-ring records, nature and human experience remain a sacred part of the investigations Þóra undertakes. These act as a reminder of the innate worlds that exist beyond those readily visible to us. In the case of the trees, spent or exhausted natural remains and processed leftovers are investigated in such a way that they see new light and are expanded in a context where they are free from their usual boundaries. The surfaces contribute to adapting physical (and intangible) structures as a new way of seeing particular environments, like those things we find in the artificial world.

Þóra´s works reveal another side to the patterned one that surrounds us, sometimes from domestic interiors, as navigations through those interiors, recordings, or built settings. In particular, this reference point, the view offered to us through the artist, can function as a meeting place for the imagination and its physical counterparts. Reading surfaces becomes more of a way of understanding our own position in the spaces we occupy and the relationship between the two. The key to entering into Þóra´s work is to keep one foot on each side of the division, or better yet, allow for both sides to permeate the other.

As you wander through the exhibition, amongst conceptual horizon lines, I encourage you to consider the space your body occupies, what surrounds you and the paths you create as you move and construct trails. Allow the works to be reference points or reminders that calibrate the awareness of your movements and gestures, both as negatives and positives. It is my hope that a reflection of other environments will lead you to recollect or connect to the way Þóra´s work builds new representations. Our environments can be examined as planes layered one on top of the other and map-like as they consider different, but specific moments. Whether these moments can be translated into other forms of space-making is left up to the viewer. And, the viewer is encouraged to investigate this matter further. By taking a longer look into these things, we might recognize an attachment to our own experience as it contributes to the way we read the world around us.

Þóra Sigurðardóttir´s (b.1954, Akureyri) art practice applies drawing, and often other mediums, as a way to expand patterned repetition, inversion and transformation through the nature of material, process and environment. Working in two- and three-dimensional forms she places emphasis on navigating layered surfaces and structures.

After completing studies at the Icelandic College of Art and Craft (1979-81) Þóra pursued graduate studies at Det Jyske Kunstakademi in Denmark (1987-91). She then received an MA in Cultural Studies and Cultural Management from the University of Iceland (2012) and has studied Philosophy and Art History at the Open University.

Þóra´s work has been exhibited locally and internationally since 1991 and can be found in private and public collections in Iceland and abroad including the Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland, and the Living Art Museum. Other projects have included managing and curating Dalir og hólar, a mobile exhibition project in Breiðafjörður and developing the guesthouse Nýp in West Iceland.

For more information visit: www.thorasig.is

Becky Forsythe received her BFA from York University with a concentration in Visual Arts (2007), her MA from the University of Manitoba with a research specialization in cultural history and contemporary art (2011) and a Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Studies from Georgian College (2014). Becky is a writer, curator and Collection Manager at the Living Art Museum (Nýló) in Reykjavík, where she currently lives and works.

Photographs from exhibition: Courtesy of Vigfús Birgisson.

Last Saturday I attended the inaugural Plan B Art Festival in Borgarnes, a town just an hour’s drive north of Reykjavík. It was a free event, organized by a group of artists, an art theorist, and an architect, many of them hailing from Borgarnes. The festival was arranged through an open call for submissions which ran earlier this year, from April to July. The exhibition spaces were filled with paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations, while the fourth space, Studio Mjólk, was a venue for a few works and performances on Saturday night. A foggy day filled with structured gallery hopping in the city ended with an emotional spasm when I completely gave myself up to the performances at Studio Mjólk—they each demanded a different type of mental effort and level of concentration to process and understand. In case you didn’t make the performances on Saturday night, I’ve got you covered: this is a short summary of my thoughts.

First, in order to get to the performance venue from downtown Borgarnes, you had to hop into a car and follow a treasure map that was drawn up for the event. If you scanned your eyes to the right side of the map, you would have found a large X surrounded by three arrows, labeled COW SHED. Yes, indeed, Studio Mjólk was located on a farm but the space, entirely cleaned up and converted, fit the performances perfectly.

The night began in the first part of the shed, where digital projections were displayed around the room, showcasing the works of Harpa Einars and Jakob Veigar. In the back of the room, artist Maiken Stær was unsuspectingly reclining in a hay filled stable as an early part of her performance “strap-on butterfly.” After 8 pm, more visitors filled the barn and grabbed a beer. (See image on top of article)

A voice then emanated from a speaker and announced to us that we were being invited, or possibly being summoned, into the following room. I heard banging and clanging from behind the interior double doors, and a bright red light shined through the crack in between them. After the first two audience members abandoned the comfort of the beer and projection room, and left the rest of us standing in the dark, we quickly decided to follow suit and entered the performance space: an industrial environment flooded with bright spotlights and bits and pieces of used metal. “This feels like a dungeon,” I remember thinking, and in my head I knew we were all going to be in for a surprise. I had just entered Olga Szymula’s installation but had not anticipated to become a part of it along with the rest of the audience. What ensued was a brilliant ensemble of aluminum-foil-rattling, horseshoe-banging, hand-holding, circle-walking, and balloon-kicking, in a dark room in an empty cowshed in the middle of nowhere. We began to hum a song together, led by Olga, who walked around in the center of the room with a microphone in her hand, encouraging us to hum a certain way. When the room was completely filled with “uhms” and “ahms,” and when we were all holding hands, walking around in a circle, I felt that each of us in the room and even the baby being pushed in the stroller had become a family. That baby became my baby. Olga became my sister. I loved every minute of the performance and I want to relive it every week for the rest of my life.

Olga performing “national song.” Photograph courtesy of the author.

Some time later, a naked boy emerged crouching on the floor by the far wall of the room, surrounded by computer monitors on red cloth-draped pedestals. We curiously huddled around him. He looked like a beautiful kinetic statue in that moment, demanding attention to his softly lit body in the the dim room. He then stood up and perched himself atop the concrete floor with a bowed head and his arms at his side. This was Anton Logi Olafsson’s performance entitled “ROOSTING.” He reached for a pair of shorts on the ground, and before I knew it, he was leaving the room and heading out of the shed. I headed for the door as well, entranced, confused, fascinated. I felt his adrenaline pass itself onto me, and I wanted to run away with him. But I never did, and I never caught up to him, because he headed down the road and ran away from the shed and the farm. I don’t know what happened to him. Anton, are you okay? I thought about what he could be running away from so determinedly, and I feel that his instinct to run away from a technologically reliant enclosure and into an open, natural space is one we could all relate to.

The next performance was a continuation of “strap-on butterfly.” I was suddenly standing in front of a girl with her wrists chained to her body, positioned in front of an industrial white double sink, and she was diligently pouring water from one sink to the other. The lighting in the shed was haunting and dramatic. The sinks rapidly but rhythmically dripped water from their bottoms. Maiken wore a lopapeysa with no sleeves, and her entire body glimmered as it reflected the only two lights in the dark room. An unexpected whale vertebra became the center of her attention and she eventually abandoned the sinks, but the interplay between these objects was flawless—Maiken’s body connected them and brought them to life while the rest of us watched with curiosity and unpredictability. Crouching on the floor, she began to cradle the large vertebra, and this intimate dialogue between the two actively progressed as she went on to wrap her chains around the bone, rode it, caressed it, and worshipped its presence.

Emma Guðnason brought the laughter to the evening with her performance “shitcore; a loud statement against all wars!!!” Clad in an eclectic homemade costume with a cape made of Bónus and Krónan shopping bags, an aluminum foil cap, and a toothbrush attached to her forehead, Emma revealed a complex relationship with a metal sheet and an amplifier, generating chaotic but epic sound clashes through the whole performance. Frustrated but actively moving around the littered paper on the floor, Emma revealed a sign and taped it to the wall – the title of the performance. The pink pigs on Emma’s cape occupied my vision as I listened to the persistent clanging of the metal sheet, and I was then transported to a reality of bizarre, but here in the shed, totally normal happenings. Energy and angry emotions filled my own body while I watched Emma, whose performance motivated me to think about our members of humanity who continue to fight for our freedom of speech and expression, freedom to react and to protest, and freedom to fight for peace in the midst of “all wars.”

The only appropriate ending to the night had to be epic and highly intensive, and Ylfa Þöll Ólafsdóttir’s performance did not disappoint. Ylfa pulled into the barn shed in her small car, parked it, and darted out of the vehicle. Wearing a car mechanic’s outfit, she opened the doors and trunk of the car and hopped onto the roof. A deep, primal roar came out of her throat: “DAME MAS GASOLINA.” She would continue to demand more gasoline as she assumed various positions both inside and outside of the car and, ahem, – humped—the car. Fast and furious, potentially painful, and completely serious, it was difficult to look away. Her moans and groans, and the frequent repetition of “dame mas gasolina” penetrated every corner of the shed. The emergency lights on the car blinked, the windshield spray shot out and away from the car in a completely sexual way, and Ylfa continued pounding the car for the entire length of the performance. No door or seat was safe from her hips. At one point, she smeared what looked to be car oil on her face, and the act quite visibly satisfied her. I imagined the type of response the car would had given if it could have given one—was this rape or was this consensual? Ylfa’s costume filled in the gaps for me. A hilarious situation came to life before my eyes—a desperate, gasless car mechanic, with no physical gas around, took a final attempt to revive the car and exhausted herself in the process. When Ylfa finished, she shut the gas tank, the doors, and trunk, got into the driver’s seat, miraculously turned on the car, and backed out of the shed to a clapping frenzy from the audience. It must have worked. While I was watching Ylfa I was also scanning the room, looking at the faces of the audience. Some were at total peace, their faces completely neutral, while others were entirely giddy with laughter. Even some children were watching. Ylfa’s performance challenged me to accept her behavior. I tried to identify what it was about the performance that initially disturbed me. Was it her seriousness, or perhaps the sound of the satisfaction in her voice? I was caught off guard and without an explanation. Thinking about the act of putting gas in a car, I realized that the gas pump is entirely phallic and the act of putting it into a hole in the car really emphasizes this analogy. When the performance ended, I was relieved in the sense that I finally understood Ylfa’s efforts—she fueled up the car by fully committing her body to the cause. I think we all walked away a little bit changed by “Gasoline,” and maybe quite relieved that we actually put gas in our cars in a less demanding way. I would have enjoyed a Puerto-Rican ready made cocktail as a mid-performance refreshment.

Ylfa performing “Gasoline.” Photograph courtesy of Gissur Pálsson.

If you missed Plan B Art Festival this year, do not worry, because it will be back to Borgarnes next summer. You can still view works that are up at Mjólkursamlagið, the venue on Skúlagata, as it will run its exhibition through August 27^th. However, an entire set of artworks were not covered by this review, but you can read about the full selection of artists who participated and find more information on their work at www.planbartfestival.is. The weekend proved to be a fantastic engagement with the Icelandic community, but the festival also brought international artists to Iceland and even provided some of them with a residency studio leading up to the date of the festival. You can read more about Plan B Art Festival, and stay up-to-date with news, access more photos, and hear about the next open call applications by following their Facebook page: facebook.com/planbartfestival. If this first festival is any indication of the festival’s projection, I say come prepared to be completely unprepared for the newest, weirdest, coolest art being made in Iceland and internationally.

Anna Toptchi is an art history graduate student living and writing in New York City.

Samantha Shay is a young American artist and director with a fascination and love for Iceland, its art scene and people. She is a CalArts graduate and founder of the artist collective Source Material, that has put on artistic and ambitious theater pieces that play on the verge of performance art. With Marina Abramovic as her mentor and a deep passion for her work she is sure to go far. This summer, on July 22, she will premiere a piece in Iceland, inspired by the country, that she has been working on for three years called OF LIGHT. We interviewed this interesting artist and found out what to expect from her and her show.

What is your background and artform?

My background is primarily in theatre, although my work is quite interdisciplinary by nature. So I’ve ended up working in other art forms too – I’ve made films and done a bit of performance art. I just like to make work by whatever means is necessary for telling the story, so that can include any relevant medium. Although theatre is certainly my home, I trained classically as an actor.

 What does your past work have in common? How would you describe it and what are the key ingredients?

No matter how my work may vary, change, or evolve in different ways, there is always an intention of creating live performance that is empowering the wisdom of the intuition. I have found theatre to be a less popular art form in our modern day societies because it relies to heavily on academia… and although I don’t dislike thoughtful and dramaturgically sophisticated work, I think it needs to include other people in its conversation. I think there is a way to be thoughtful, and sophisticated, and somehow to rip the rug right out from underneath people with the potency and emotional sophistication (not just the intellectual sophistication) of the offering. So I really like to work with the right hemisphere of the brain. I really like to reinvest, again and again, in what something could mean, instead of what it should mean. If we want to have a collective experience, we need to be collectively challenged. We need to be able to question our experiences and values again and again, even with something we seemingly know, its true in art and its true in life. When I didn’t know what to call my work, I adoped that popular term “non-linnear”, but I was never happy about it. Our intuition and our bodies create constellations of meaning about everything, so I’ve started to call my work, Intuitive Narrative. That is my signature as a theatre artist.

When did you first visit Iceland and how has that influenced you?

I first visited Iceland alone in June 2011. I had spent a lot of time inside a house in Massachusetts completely snowed in, almost completely alone, in a very dark and introspective time in my life. I made plans to travel alone after this time, to gain some perspective. My body was so entirely shocked by the midnight sun, and that lead me on a journey to create OF LIGHT. I was so curious about the ways in which we experience light and dark from emotional and psychological perspectives, how it effects us cellularly, what our judgements are around healing and our shadows, all that. I also have just continually been humbled by the land. Iceland is a place where nature is in charge more than most places in the modern world, so unapologetic, wild, beautiful, and at times frightening and truly dangerous. That has grounded me, and in some way, reverberated into my being and I’ve learned to be a bit more wild, beautiful, and at times frightening and truly dangerous (I would say in a good way…). I also am very impressed by the music scene here, and have made some great friends and collaborators. There is such a high standard for making work, and everyone just rolls up their sleeves and goes for it. I’ve been in a lot of artistic communities that are all talk, but Icelanders seem to just make it happen and go for it. I really love that. So I’m pretty thrilled to be presenting OF LIGHT here for many reasons.

Trailer

Tell us about your piece OF LIGHT that will be shown in Reykjavik this summer?

OF LIGHT is a durational performance, we also call it an opera, and I would say it is kind of like a long form incantation. I have been really interested in the history of initiation, how all humans experience it in one way or another, and how we have these intense transformative periods in our lives where we kind of go to the underworld and come back, or don’t, I guess some of us don’t too. But we all experience transformation and initiation in some way. In ancient times, the first theatre performances were collective ceremonies and rituals that usually were about marking transformations. Our modern day world doesn’t have that. Performance is a place where we can experience collective initiation.

So I wanted to create a space for the audience to go into their shadow realm, to feel held in a container to experience that, and to kind of conjure light from within. It is my most abstract work to date. It really came from my own life unraveling and realizing we can emerge more complex and enriched by getting close to our shadows. I was also excited about sound being a representation of light.

One of my teachers told me a story of how monks will sometimes climb into caves and sing, and their vibrational frequency could create light. I love that. I wanted to make a piece about how our bodies as celestial and incandescent.

What was the process and how was Marina Abramovich involved?

I met Marina several years ago when I was performing in one of her pieces. She is always excited about what young artists are doing and we kept in touch over the years. When I began work on these ideas of making a durational piece in the dark, working with ideas of initiation and celestial bodies, she got really excited and we just started doing skype calls and meeting up every now and then to bounce around ideas.  She’s really just encouraged me to get in touch with my deepest and most uncompromising self and to do whatever I want. She’s just gently nudged me towards my original intentions, and helped me strip away any frameworks or conceptual apologies I was making because I was afraid to do something. That is the best thing a mentor can do, just help you get out of your own way.

What is next on the horizon for you and your artist collective Source Material?

After we premiere OF LIGHT in Iceland, and a concert from the collective on the 2_ in Mengi, I am going to be presenting an original performance concert called A Thousand Tongues by Nini Julia Bang (who is in OF LIGHT), at the Grotowski Institute in Poland this November, as part of the European Capital of Culture 2016. We are working in collaboration with the director of the Grotowski Institute Jaroslaw Fret, whom is actually one of my favorite directors of all time. It is a really huge honor and I’m very excited.

We thank Samantha for the interview.

Tickets: here

The piece will only be shown this one night!

The interview in Icelandic: here