All Is Full of Love: A Preview of the Solo Exhibition of Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

by Craniv Boyd | Sunnudagur.12.2018 | artzine in english

All Is Full of Love: A Preview of the Solo Exhibition of Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

There are few artist-in-residencies geared at taking emerging contemporary artists to the next level in their career and even fewer that make good on that promise. Since 1975, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin has been the exception that confirms the rule. Artists from all over the world work in its studio spaces in Kreuzberg. Most studios are linked to a given country (Canada, South Korea, Netherlands, etc.)., but this year’s Icelandic artist Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir, like most of the previous contemporary artists with ties to Iceland, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Erla S. Haraldsdóttir, and Ólafur Ólafsson & Libia Castro have previously occupied the independent artist studio, occupies a “nationless” international studio in the Bethanien program.

A privilege afforded to artists who participate in this residency program is the opportunity to exhibit in its state-of-the-art gallery adjoining the studios. This presentation, combined with studio visits by curators and art theorists, not to mention the more relaxed, public Open Studio nights, offer early- to mid-career artists like Hulda Rós an entrée into Berlin’s contemporary art scene.

I visited Hulda Rós in her studio at Bethanien and she walked me through the preparations and the concept of her upcoming solo exhibition titled All Is Full of Love but the title is a reference to a lyric by singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir. scheduled for January 2019. In response to the continued growth of the tourism industry in Iceland, Hulda Rós plans to install a three-part immersive work based on her long-term interests in the fishing industry, the post-colonial experience particular to Iceland, and the Atlantic puffin (Fratercula Arctica), a rock-nesting arctic bird with a large distinctive beak.

All is full of Love – Studio Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir. Curtesy of the artist

The first part will consist of a “Puffin Shop,” the kind of souvenir store now inescapable in downtown Reykjavík. However, in the iteration Hulda Rós is creating for a Berlin gallery setting, the 3,000 soft multiple puffins will not be for sale. Instead, a limited edition of 30 of the mass-produced birds titled PUFFIN LOVE is already available through an online crowd-funding platform. This is the vector for distributing the work. The sale of the limited-edition birds with the label “all is full of love 2018 / Studio Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir / Made in China” is intended to fund the minimum order of 3,000 stuffed animals the artist purchased from online retailer alibaba.com.

With this work, Hulda Rós is undermining ideas of exclusivity and value that the art object generally represents. Her main tool is the World Wide Web, more precisely the access it provides to Spring Xu, Sales Manager at the Chinese manufacturer Shanghai Xiyuan Import and Export Co. Ltd., as well as to the diffuse group of individuals who follow her activities in the art world and might purchase the limited edition.

One could take the view that what Hulda Rós makes would be as if Marcel Duchamp had made a soft version of his “R. Mutt” urinal from the 1913 Armory exhibition and sold it before the show opened. Soft sculptures were famously championed by Claes Oldenburg for his Store (1961–62) on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, ( See Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967).) as well as for his later oversized objects. In Hulda Rós’s puffin, the hand of the artist is absent—as in the classic Duchamp ready-mades of the bottle rack and the snow shovel known as In Advance of the Broken Arm (1964). This ready-made of an endangered bird and popular souvenir of Iceland turns into a collectible item in the exhibition.

The second part of the immersive exhibition experience might include a single-channel video called Material Puffin, in which the artists revisits a work from 2006 titled The Artist as a Puffin. In it, she is clothed in a pink or salmon-colored dress and wearing a large puffin mask. In the video, the puffin wanders around the downtown harbor area of Reykjavík and plays with remnants of the tools of the fishing and seafaring industry.

From the studio. Photo: Craniv Boyd

The third and final section of the exhibition will confront viewers with what the artist believes to be the Golden Calf of today’s Iceland: a fishing trawler. A scaled model of a freezer trawler covered in gold leaf, an allegory of the fishing industries, will be shown in the upstairs gallery, before visitors discover an updated version of Labor move, a three-channel video installation. This video uses striking chiaroscuro lighting, which would not be at odds in a Caravaggio painting, to show Icelandic laborers reenacting the process of moving and stacking boxes of frozen fish.

The upcoming exhibition of Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir promises to be insightful comment on life in our globalized supply-chain economy. By starting from her personal and local experience, Hulda Rós formulates a critique of the ongoing processes of ethnic branding and ethnic marketing (For essays about the commodification of ethnicity in the neoliberal world, see John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity Inc. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).) prevalent in Iceland and many other parts of the world.

Craniv Boyd

See the link to Hulda Rós’s crowdfunding project: here

See information about Kunstlerhaus Bethanien history: here

Featured image: Craniv Boyd

Sara Riel: art as a state of meditative unconscious

by Daría Sól Andrews | Laugardagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Sara Riel: art as a state of meditative unconscious

Automatic, Sara Riel´s exhibition at Kling og Bang, presents intuitive drawings and perplexing forms that cleverly imbue elements of the uncanny and spontaneous creation. Riel´s practice is based in Surrealism; she trains herself into a state of drawing that is characterized by improvisation and a release of control so as to liberate the subconscious. In Riel’s drawings we follow the thread of her imagination as it flows through her pen and onto paper.

Sara Riel follows in the steps of artists like Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst, pioneers of surrealism and automatism. These artists attempted to access the psyche at the purest level through art. Andre Másson first translated techniques of automatic writing to painting, and much like Másson and Miró, Automatic progresses from drawing into the painting medium. The exhibition consists of drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and performance work, and is quite based in this historical influence.

Riel´s hand moves randomly as artworks are created through intuition and accidental mark making. Take Stundir á staðnum/Moments in situ; the shapes are delicate and vaguely representational. I can make out noses, the inside of an ear, faces, birds, flowers, snails, if I really look for it. But maybe my brain is just playing tricks on me, searching for and creating something recognizable in order to make sense of it for myself. In these terms the rational mind is seen as an oppressive system against creation. Creating without intent is very much fighting against human nature. Another way to describe it is self-censorship, as if your conscious and logical thinking blocks a discovery about the true self. This artistic method is then in a way a rebellion, against norms and status quo, against predetermined ways of thinking and creating.
However, can a drawing, and are Riel’s, ever fully free from the conscious and from purpose? Riel says she throws away any drawings where she starts to notice her conscious presence taking over. How does one know when they have reached a truly authentic state of meditative unconscious? Her works are somewhere between sense and nonsense, but exactly that, in between. Elements register as visually pleasing and grounded in forms we can at least attempt to make sense of. Unconscious and conscious creation necessarily feed off each other, but Riel seems to enter into some realm beyond. She taps into a trance like state as she draws and paints without any preconceived notions of the end product, and so too can the viewer tap into such a state as well in looking.

A paper scroll, Stundir með litum og grafít-hreyfing/Moments with colors and graphite-hreyfing, unrolls onto the ground, revealing a colorfully flowing form with motion and direction. The textures of brushstroke reference to the painterly method, but the work feels otherwise quite natural and earthly: a waterfall cascading to the earth below, the waves of the sea, a cloud formation ascending to the heavens. A small stairway hints at the artist’s continued presence with the object. Imagine Riel standing at this stairway, unfurling the scroll, paintbrush in hand. Like nature itself, the piece is never still or constant. Next to it, Stundir með fimm litum og grafít/Moments with five colors and graphite suggests something human, but also quite foreign. We can’t place it, and that’s disconcerting in a way, this inability to place. The drawings seem to take the form of something from a dream, somewhere between the realm of the tangibly real and pure fantasy.
On the floor, a glass sculpture, Stund með pensla pennum og lazer- hringur/Moment with brush pens og lazer – circle. Moving over it, we peer into what registers as an endless abyss of glass, like looking into a wishing well. Formations are carved into the top layer, extending deep and down into the reflecting layers past our vision. This descending effect has a quickness of motion to it, as if caught moving at light speed. The shapes form a reflective halo around our faces, murky and shaded, shimmering, confusing.

In Stundir með blá-grá-grænum litum, ögn af appelsínugulum og grafít/Moments with Blue-grey-green colors, dash of orange and graphite, blue toned drawings register as marine or cloud formations, wisps of foamy waves. A large glass etched panel, Stundir með pensla pennum og laser- fljótandi, fljúgandi/Moments with brush pen and lazer-floating/flying, reflects onto the wall behind it. In the etchings we can almost make out forms of the body, but not quite. Next to this work are two larger framed ink drawings, Stundir með pensla pennum og heitum og köldum litum/Moments with brush pens and warm and cold colors, presenting repeating iterations of earthly green forms. They reference to all sorts of things natural: Tree trunks? Oysters? Fungus? The piece is intricately detailed yet without purpose. Our brain grasps at straws as we try to orient the shapes in something we know.

As viewers, we are stuck in this mind set of rational thinking, of orienting these forms as representations. Otherwise, if we free them from any purpose or meaning as they were meant as, they feel almost unsettling. So, the viewer makes associations to things we know, places we’ve visited, things we’ve dreamt of. The works become personal and real to our individual experience. Automatic is then more so a commentary on our own inner selves than on Riel herself. That we make something out of these forms points to our conscious’ need to form and categorize. Why this constant need for meaning? Why can we not accept an object as something unknown, uncategorizable?
In a black box room is a video and projecting sculpture work: Stund með 0.3 teiknipenna og laser- þyrping/Moment with 0.3 fineliner and lazer-cluster and Stundir á staðnum/Moments in situ. Three etched glass panels are reflected with light from a projection box, which slowly brightens and dims. A second sea-green colored reflection occurs, muddled and murky. Our own reflections interrupt the piece, changing its form. The video presents footage taken from below a projection box as Sara draws. At moments the action in the video stops as she switches out pieces of paper. We see then only the adjusting zoom of the camera on the projection box as it tries to orient itself, zooming the lens in and out. This orienting action of the lens is precisely how the viewer interacts with this exhibition. Constantly adjusting and repositioning, we attempt to orient ourselves in something we can’t quite understand, but desperately want to.
Our personal viewpoints very much inform and create meaning in these works, it is not prescribed or predetermined to us. Automatic is a diary of sorts, revealing inner parts of Riel’s subconscious as well as of ourselves. Through a spontaneous, artistic creation Riel creates pieces that are beautifully open to experience. References to Sigmund Freud are abound, and the associations we make in these drawings almost feel like a Rorshach test as psychological allusions of our inner thoughts are revealed. But there is an accessibility and simpleness to Riel’s methods, a meditative mindset that any of us can access. If we seize the moment the tools are presented to us. To follow her on this journey, accessing a state of freedom from logical thinking, brings us to question our own modes of thinking. This is ultimately what successful art should do, cause us to think, question, and reevaluate. Automatic is then a notable exploration into an artist’s search for an ultimately pure and free creation.

Sara Riel is recognized for her impressive public commission wall paintings. Her latest work To the Ocean, located on the Fishing Industry Building close to Harpa, has become a well known outdoor installation in Reykjavik’s urban landscape. Riel studied art at Fjölbrautaskólinn in Breiðholt and then at the Iceland Academy of the Arts from 2000-2001. She attended the Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin from 2001-2005, and the Mesiterschuler in Berlin from 2005-2006.

„Automatic“ is running until November the 25th at Kling & Bang

Daría Sól Andrews

Photo credits: Lilja Birgisdóttir, Daría Sól Andrews, Ana Victoria Bruno

Inclusive Nation: Cycle Music and Art Festival 2018

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Þriðjudagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Inclusive Nation: Cycle Music and Art Festival 2018

This year’s edition of Cycle Music and Art Festival is titled Inclusive Nation, and it aims to place the festival in a larger context, looking at what is happening in the rest of the world and reflecting on how countries and individuals deal with issues like immigration, integration and cohabitation of different cultures. Iceland has been isolated for many years, and just recently started to be a dream destination for migrants who choose Iceland for its nature’s stunning beauty and for the country’s welfare.

Sanna Magdalena Mörtudóttir of the Socialist Party, the youngest city council member and the first black woman in the Icelandic council ever, took part at the panel discussion Inclusive Flow at Iðno, and she unlighted how the homogeneous population of Icelanders is now facing a change: immigration is growing and cultures are getting mixed, the typical Icelander with blue eyes and blonde hair is no longer representative of the whole nation. However, Iceland had never really started any conversation about diversity, because it had never had to face this situation before. Cycle is taking place at the right moment: as immigration grows, racism starts to pop up here and there. About a month ago local newspapers reported an investigation about immigrants working in Iceland, showing to the Icelandic population a silent exploitation happening in front of our eyes.

Melania Ubaldo has been working on her personal experiences as victim of slight racism for quite a long time. The work consists of a huge collage of different canvas, assembled together through a long process, creating a dissonant unique piece in which the diverse parts find a kind of harmony despite their diversity. The bits of canvas sewed together are topped with a sentence written in quick movement “Is there any Icelander working here?”, a question the artist got asked while working, as she wasn’t Icelandic enough just because of her Filipino’s somatic features. Her work is part of the show Exclusively Inclusive, and it hangs on the wall of the Gerðasafn, just next to the reception, to contextualize the work in a physical place which recalls the one where the incident happened.

Meriç Algün, born and raised in Istanbul but educated in Sweden, lives between Turkey and Sweden, a living in the in-between condition which led her to explore concepts as identity and belonging. She contributed to Cycle with a series of billboards spread around the public spaces which report questions people got asked in the visa application forms to enter a foreign country. Questions like “Are you and your partner living in a genuine and stable partnership?” arise reflections about the travelers’ identity value, especially in the airports, places where privacy is suspended and the individuals are invasively checked and questioned, diminished, simplified to fit in a pre-established grid which will determine a person’s adequacy to enter the country. Airports fall under the definition of non places a category Marc Augé created to refer to those anonymous places of transition where the human beings just pass by without building any kind of emotional interaction with the surroundings, so that it doesn’t matter if you are entering France or Norway, in any case you’ll be asked “Do you speak english?”. This question also deculturalizes and reduces the values of the hosting country, affecting the experience people would get from it, emphasizing they are allowed to enter the country just as tourists, they are expecting to act as tourists, to have a touristic experience of the country, they are under control.

Melania Ubaldo, Er einhver íslendingur að vinna hér? (2018)

Meriç Algün, Billboards (2012)

Ragnheiður Getsdóttir, Who created the timeline? (2016) and Meriç Algün, Billboards (2012)

Magnús Sigurðarsson, Requiem for a Whale

Childish Gambino, ZEF – This Is France (2018), Falz – This Is Nigeria (2018), Fox – This Is Turkey (2018)

Magnús Sigurðarsson, Icelandic Parroty

Inclusive Nation aims to open up a discussion about our approach to the otherness. If we look up for the world “nation” in the dictionary we will find “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory.”, a definition which underlines the importance of descent, history, culture, all characteristics which can be inherited and can determine a person’s belonging to a certain nation. That definition could, on one hand, sound kind of problematic nowadays when people move abroad so often, and, want it or not, they bring their motherland’s culture with them. On the other hand, exclusiveness is a logical consequence of the existence of borders, countries need to be exclusive in order to define themselves and their population. We ourselves are defined by a process of exclusion: we build our identity by excluding what we are not. The main venue of Cycle, Gerðasafn, hosts the show “Exclusively Inclusive” which, by playing with the words, invites us to reflect about those two important concepts: can we a nation be inclusive while maintaining its identity? If yes, how? At what point exclusiveness becomes racism? And so on.

This year Iceland celebrates the centenary of its independence and sovereignty, and its relation with Denmark as well as the impact of its colonial history are taken into account in the festival. The work of Sara Lou Kramer, Norröna Voyage, on show at Gerðasafn, developed from a theory which says that around the 16th century the Danish colonists collected all of the silver goods from Iceland and brought it to Denmark, where they melted the silver and probably used it to make the three lions which are nowadays in the “Knights’ Hall” at Rosenborg Castle. Kramer has been traveling from Denmark to Iceland on the Norröna ferry, she documented her journey and edited the material to make a video of the three silver lions returning back to Iceland and melting again on the Icelandic land.

Standing right next to Norröna Voyage, Bryndis Björnsdóttir’s installation De Arm started with an act of reappropriation: the artist picked a splinter off a plantation master’s chair from the Danish West-Indies colonies, which was exhibited in a historical show in Copenhagen. The colonists used to withdraw the sulphur from Iceland to make gunpowder, an extremely important resource to maintain their colonies under control and to conquer more territories, and Björnsdóttir unified these two symbols of the colonial time – the wooden splinter and the sulphur – in a match. A third element closes the conceptual circle of the installation: a rope on the floor. During the opening ropes were ignited just outside of the museum: the performance invites the viewer to reflect on the double usage of gunpowder presented in slow matches, a bivalent element which, on one hand, ensure that the explosion will take place and, on the other hand, guarantees a safe time frame between the ignition and the explosion.

Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir’s work The Little MareSausage is an ironic sculpture of a sausage with an elegant fish tail, sitting on a rolled hot-dog bread. The piece is placed in the Tjörnin pond, and it has been broadly discussed, dividing the inhabitants of the capital in two groups: those who love it and those who criticise its phallic shape. The statue is a sort of new creature which merges the Danish iconic The Little Mermaid sculpture and one of the more famous Icelandic dish: the hot-dog. The work provokes in the viewer reflections about the particular connections arising from coloniser-colonised relationships, cultural exchanges, appropriations, revisitations and new developments are unavoidable, interactions which influence the identities of the involved nations and individuals, determining cultural contaminations which will soften the borders between the countries. But if the Icelandic history and culture is tied to the Danish one, does this make Icelanders a bit Danish and Danish a bit Icelanders? After all, a nation is “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture […] ”

Bryndís Björnsdóttir, De Arm (2018)

Bryndís Björnsdóttir, De Arm (2018)

Sara Lou Kramer, Norröna Voyage

Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir, The Little MareSausage (2018)

Jeannette Ehlers, Black Matter

The definition of “nation” given by the dictionary mentions also the role of language in delimiting a culture, and in fact the first problem the team of Cycle (the curator Jonatan Habib Engqvist, the artistic director Gudný Gudmundsdóttir, the co-artistic director Tinna Thorsteinsdóttir and the co-curator and researcher Sara S. Öldudóttir) had to face was the lack of an Icelandic word corresponding to “inclusive”, so that in Icelandic the festival is called Þjóð meðal þjóða (A nation among nations). This led them to reflect upon the role of language in terms of defining the nature of a country and of enlighting peculiarities of a given culture. Ludwing Wittgenstein states in the Philosophical Investigation that the meaning of a word lays in the use of the word itself, and in order to grasp its meaning in any given context we need to look at the non-linguistic activities in which a given group of people engages. These activities plus the specific use of language of the community create a “form of life”. Our understanding of the world is therefore shaped by our language, since it is the means by which we represent the information we get from our experiences. Language became a sort of red thread in this edition of the festival, because of its qualities of being both the consequence of the development of a culture and, in some way, the cause of a population’s understanding of the world.

The piece Mother Tongues and Father Throats by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, which is part of the show Exclusively Inclusive, reflects on the “khhhhhhh” sound that is used in many Arabic languages but does not exist in most of the Northern European ones. The work presents a diagram of the mouth where different letters from Middle East alphabets are placed to indicate which part of the mouth is used to pronounce them. The piece is also a tapestry, it hang to the wall and it goes down to the floor forming a sort of soft bench for the viewers to sit and rest. The “khhhhhhh” is usually perceived as an abstruse sound from non-Arabic people, it sounds primitive and strange as it’s not completely understood, but the piece combines this sound with a space for people to relax and to feel comfortable in, attempting to modify the perception of that sound and of linguistic in general, which is usually seen as a tough subject to the exclusive competence of academics. During the opening of the Cycle Bendik Giske performed playing his saxophone while walking around the exhibition. He goes beyond the classical way of playing the instrument by incorporating sounds of the mechanics and his own breath. At some point he stood on the work Mother Tongues and Gather Throats and created an interesting and intense interaction between the particular way he uses his mouth and his throat to produce a wide range of sounds and the mouth and throat diagram behind him.

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir have collaborated on the work “Sounds of Doubt”, a piece which investigates the possible connections between the sounds of a certain language/country and the local culture, asking through their work if such a connection exists. A microphone placed in the room detects the sounds from the surroundings and passes the information to a projector which creates a visualisation of the sounds we produce, while models of the seabed surrounding Iceland are scattered in the space. One of these models in particular has been made by merging the submerged peaks and the sound waves of the Icelandic national anthem, showing the similarities of their profiles and shapes. A video work presents the culmination of a process started during Cycle 2017 when through Sounds of Doubts – Workshop groups of artists worked with participants from different Nordic Countries. The aim was to unveil the influences of natural and cultural environments on the participants’ behaviour. The video shows alternately an interview with two Greenlandic ladies, holding inflatable balls depicting the planets of the solar system, and recordings from starships traveling through the universe. Sounds of Doubts creates a parallelism between our existence in the world as highly evolved creatures, with our cultural and knowledge luggage, and the universe invisible structures, primordial forces moving by nature’s laws which constitutes the starting point of it all. There is a flux of life which unifies everything existing in the universe, which we can’t avoid because we are part of a wholeness. We tend to forget where we come from, blinded by idea that we are some kind of superior beings just because we can build tools and we have technologies, but we just assemble or transform preexisting items. As Aristotle’s theory of act and potency says, every substance existing in nature has already the potentiality to become the actual objects in which they develop / are developed by the human beings. We are, indeed “[…] such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”, and here is where inclusiveness becomes a matter of accepting and embracing the wholeness we are part of.

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir have been working together as an artist and a musician, bringing together different experiences and points of view to create a multi-sensorial work which communicates through different media and through different languages. Cycle, in fact, embraces the idea of language in a comprehensive way, languages are not just about spoken or written communication, they are also about the individual’s different ways of expression: the festival brings together visual art, music, design, poetry and even architecture, artists are encouraged to maintain the characteristics of their own art, but also to open conversations and to work across the borders of nations and arts.

Slavs and Tatars, Mother Tongues & Father Throats (2012)

Bendik Giske

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir, Sounds of Doubts, (2017 – 2018)

Jeannette Castioni & Þuríður Jónsdóttir, Sounds of Doubts (2017 – 2018)

Exclusively Inclusive, installation view

The Circle Flute

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, In Search of Magic

Pinar Öğrenci, A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us (2017)

The Circle Flute is the perfect example of a borderline object placed on the edge between art and design. It has been designed by Brynjar Sigurðarsson and Veronika Sedlmair to explore and expand the possibilities of a normal flute: the instrument combines four flutes to form a one big and circular instrument which needs four people to be played and it’s able to produce a wider interaction of sounds than a simple flute. The work opens up to a collaborative use of the object, four people need to coordinate their movements and their actions since the Circle Flute is a combination of four curved flutes attached to form a single instrument. The Circle Flute is thought to be played for one listener who is supposed to stay in the middle of the instrument to get an immersive experience of the music, embraced by the flute and its sounds.

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson’s contribution to the festival fits into this process of unification of different forms of art. They started the project In Search for Magic in May 2017 with a group of musicians and composers, bringing together people with different approaches to music to compose songs on the Proposal for a new Constitution for the Republic of Iceland written in 2011 which was approved by the Icelandic population through a referendum in 2012 but hasn’t been approved by the parliament yet. The idea behind the constitution is to give voice to the people, the constitution has in fact been created through a collaborative project, people would bring new ideas and would discuss them together, everyone was welcome to contribute to the drafting of the constitution. In Search for Magic moves toward the same direction, the project is rooted in a collaborative effort which engages with the public, in fact viewers were invited to take a look at the workshop when musicians and composers were working, and to actually take part in the work by reading a sentence from the constitution which was recorded and will be edited in a single recording which will literally unify the individuals’ voices. The project embodies the utopia of a different world in which people take actively part in the building of their future, and the borders between artists and non-artists are torn down.

The artworks presented in the show Exclusively Inclusive and in the public spaces stay true to their nature of artworks even when the subject is placed in a social/political context. The video work by Pınar Öğrenci, A Gentle Breeze Passed Over Us, reflects about the terrible journey people from the Middle East have to go through to reach Europe’s lands, the piece is based on the story of a professional musicians from Iraq who was forced by human traffickers to leave behind his oud in order to fit more people in the ship. Despite the strong thematic, the video treats the episode in a highly delicate way, it does not show violence, but it communicates through poetic and emotional images, addressing the story to our humanity. Art doesn’t need to become a cold documentary about political and social situation in the world, there are many ways to tell stories, and art needs to keep its own touch.

Manifesta 12 in Palermo has been dealing with similar issues, but the biennial consists of mostly video works documenting the immigrants’ life in Italy or their original culture, a format which tends to repeat itself and does not fit such a big exhibition. Moreover, the works are often reduced at pure documentation, the glimpse of art and creativity is hidden somewhere behind technology, the message keeps repeating itself in each video, progressively losing its emotional impact on the viewers. Exclusively inclusive, instead, takes the opposite approach: the selected works do deal with tough themes, but the re-elaboration of the material made from the artists, the multiple collaborations which bring to multimedia outcomes, the way artists address their works to different senses to get the viewer/listener/smeller totally involved, all these qualities manage to give a new conformation to those images to which we are so inured, a comprehensive experience which talks to us on a new level.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credits: Ana Victoria Bruno, Anita Björk, Leifur Wilberg

Website: www.cycle.is

Come Rain or Shine by the International Young Female Artist Club

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Laugardagur.11.2018 | artzine in english

Come Rain or Shine by the International Young Female Artist Club

Human beings have always had a peculiar love-hate relationship with the weather. Our existence on earth is possible thanks to the atmosphere, the set of layers of gases surrounding our planet, and the first of these layers, the troposphere, the one closest to earth, is associated with the weather, since here is where most of the clouds we see in the sky are. When human beings weren’t in possession of any tool to protect themselves from the weather conditions, they used to just adapt to the external climate, but through the centuries we developed specific techniques: we discovered the fire which kept us warm, we sewed clothes, we built houses, we invented umbrellas, and time after time our relationship with the weather changed, storms ceased to be feared, uncontrollable and destructive forces of nature, because we learnt how to deal with them. We became more and more independent from the weather, and we are now able to carry on with our lives despite the meteorological conditions. But we went too far, we lost all respect for the weather and for nature, our anthropocentrism took over and we forgot how we used to live in connection with nature.

We only just recently started to think about the way our presence in the world influences the weather: we are around 7.5 billions individuals and we can’t pretend anymore we are not a factor in the environmental changes happening on planet earth. We need to acknowledge that such a large population has a huge impact on nature, the earth itself is begging us to review our behaviour toward nature: destructive natural phenomenons are becoming more and more frequent, signs of warning are everywhere.

The philosopher Timothy Morton claims that the humankind urges to rethink its approach to non-human entities, such as animals, plants, and nature in general. He states we need to reconsider the effects produced by our intrusive existence on earth, we need to find a new balance to re-establish a healthy relationship with the planet and the its other inhabitants, and in order to achieve this, we need to get over our anthropocentric view.

The show Come Rain or Shine moves toward this direction: the artists collective IYFAC (International Young Female Artist Club) aims to awake the viewers’ conscience by showing them how deeply we are connected to the weather. The works by Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir and Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir reference to a time in which the meteorological conditions used to have an active role in our daily life, when we used to interpret the future by looking at the sky, to use stones to navigate the sea, a time in which we used to respect nature and to live in symbiosis with it.

Sturludóttir created the series Placing a Ranke in a Field with Its Teeth Toward the Sky which is a sort of calendar reporting traditional knowledge connected to specific days and to the weather. For instance, the 9th of March is the Knight day, and “The weather on this day predicts the weather for the next 7 weeks”. This work reflects about the way the inhabitants of a place find a logic in the way the weather changes, and, time after time, deduce general rules from what they see. This folkloristic knowledge affirms our deep connection with the atmospheric changes: we wouldn’t have bothered to try to understand the way weather works if it hadn’t been important for us. Alongside this calendar the artist presents pictures which catch the consequences of the weather on persons and object: the sunshine softly getting across the curtain and projecting a light into the room, a mounting pole of a windsock bent from the wind, a wrist with a mark from a watch, elements which are witnesses to certain meteorological conditions.

Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir hung a long yellow drape from the ceiling of Hafnaborg all the way the floor downstairs, creating a “golden waterfall” which embodies a ray of sunshine. The light and soft material and its warm colour reflect our perception of the sunlight: a peaceful, joyful and embracing immaterial entity which gently warms up our bodies and our states. This site specific installation has been thought in relations to a particular architectural element present in the space: a little circular window on the top of a wall functions as a natural clock: by looking at the way the sunlight come through it we can deduct the height of the sun, and so the time.
Leifsdóttir contributes to the show with another beautiful and poetic work: the installation Polarity is constituted by two videos of close ups of hands turning the pages of the book The Sorrow Gondola by Tomas Tranströmer and placing on them an Icelandic spar, a transparent local stone through which everything looks double. This stone has been used by the vikings to navigate the seas, the properties of the stone allowed them to individuate the position of the sun despite it was hidden behind layers of clouds.

The artists Steinunn Lilja Emilsdóttir and Halla Birgisdóttir decided to work on the individual’s inner and intimate connection with the weather, a precious and unique relationship each of us develops with our surroundings.

Steinunn Lilja Emilsdóttir’s work It’s escalating deals with extreme natural phenomena, she transformed pictures of natural disasters such as desertification, the melting of icebergs, forest fires, tornadoes, and realaborated them into abstract and geometrical collages, associating each of them to a personal thoughts about the dramatic event portrayed. Her work aims to have an aesthetic impact on the viewer: within the frames the images are deconstructed in a style which resembles the Neoplasticism Art of Piet Mondrian, breaking the connection with reality and focusing on a subjective representation, a personal understanding of these tragedies. The sentences the artist wrote underneath each piece emphasise the belonging of the images to the her personal sphere, letting us get a glimpse inside her thoughts and inviting us to reflect on how those dramatic events are understood by us.

Halla Birgisdóttir’s work highs/lows occupies a long wall of the room filling it with drawings topped with short sentences, sometimes just single words, which express feelings, states, thoughts of the characters portrayed. Her work adopts the guises of a sort of comic stripe with no narrative: the characters appear just once, the words do not conform to comics’ dialogs, but they are captions of inner states or thoughts. The only element these drawings share with each others is the role of the weather which arouses emotional responses in the characters. Birgisdóttir portrays men, women, human beings caught in intimate moments, she explores the many ways in which the weather still influences our inner selves by illustrating our inner weather forecast.

Sigrún Hlín Sigurðardóttir works within the contemporaneity, she sees clothes as a meeting point between the weather and the human beings, layers of fabrics which create an intermediate bridge between us and the natural elements. For the show Come Rain or Shine she created a huge winter jacket, which, despite its big dimensions, gives an impression of lightness: it is made out of fluffy plastic material stuffed into a semitransparent fabric, and hangs from the ceiling as it was floating in the air, suspended in the space, resembling a cloud formation standing in the sky. Winter jackets, as well as many of our clothes, have an inherent contradiction: they are made to protect us from the weather, but the synthetic material they are made of, plus the consumerism affecting the contemporary society, transforms jackets into a non recyclable waste in a short time, contributing to the increasing of pollution. We protect ourselves from the weather by using something which damages our planet and, consequently, affects the weather, so that we will need to shelter ourselves into more layers, and the history repeats itself over and over.

The curator Marta Sigríður Pétursdóttir has been able to coordinate a show where the pieces by the five artists work together: each of them apports a personal research to shape a comprehensive overview of the environmental problem the world is facing, sending out a clear message.

We are part of something bigger, and, as Timothy Morton says, the whole is not bigger than its part, but instead it is smaller: a hand it’s made of five fingers, countless muscles and nerves, but it’s just one hand, which sounds extremely reductive. If we endeavour to invert the course of the progressive destruction of planet earth individually, we may achieve some results, but first we need to realize how important the weather is for our lives, and the show Come Rain or Shine has this first step covered.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photos by: Ana Victoria Bruno

Eygló Harðardóttir’s Another Space

by Geirthrudur Finnbogadottir Hjorvar | Laugardagur.10.2018 | artzine in english

Eygló Harðardóttir’s Another Space

Eyglo Hardardottir is one of those artists who for some years now has been associated with the title of being an artist’s artist. It is therefore fitting that Eyglo Hardardottir’s solo exhibition, Another Space (Annað rými), takes place in The Living Art Museum. Having a system of membership by fellow artists that guarantees independence from the pressures of public institutions or private patronage, its board has mandate to host works that embody avant-garde values at each moment in time.

While there is no style nor program of content that qualifies work as being the labour of an artist’s artist — as both would denote a trend rather than an aesthetic, Another Space is defined by a poetic sense of materiality. Even to the extent that the work gives the impression of a tactile sensibility common to a younger generation. This being an aesthetic built on excavating beauty from within mundane materials. And is an approach steeped in structural irony that may have come about in response to expectation for work to have social content or for its formal basis to be over-conceptualized.

The works of Eyglo Hardardottir (1964), however, carry an internal tension that are not easily read in terms of biographical information. What they convey is an elaborate microcosm of nuances within texture and form, the success of which relies on a quiet sense of ambition and what seems like long intervals of meditative concentration. The outcome of which transmits an intelligent sense of sincerity. The kind that is in fact the antithesis of irony.

Four 2015

Six hypnotherapy drawings, screenprint 2018

Exhibition overview

Floor Sculpture 2018. Photo: Eygló Harðardóttir

Floor Sculpture, detail

As a medium of creation, Eyglo Hardardottir has chosen to concentrate on the materiality of paper. While still fulfilling its traditional role in being the two-dimensional support for colour and form, paper is drawn into a conversation that extends into space to take the form of sculpture. In evoking a vocabulary of structural possibilities, the artist applies what seems like an exhaustive list of commercially available paper. Ranging from handmade paper from Japan and China, to cardboard or simply copy paper, each had been chosen for its capacity to produce a dialogue between their grain and structural consistency.

An example of such a structure lies in “Four” (2015), a small-scale structure made of cardboard, wood and paper. That material is forced into an architectural construct with the help of small wooden support beams. Those sheets form two vertical layers that protrudes from a column at the entrance of the exhibition space.

“Floor Sculpture” (2018) is another work that explores the ability of paper to form structure. A floor piece made from sheets of paper and glass, they are held in place by being attached along a central axis in a structure which allows each sheet to stand upright. The visual effect is of a large book standing on its spine so that each page may be “read” by circling around the construct. The content of which lies in variations of materiality from which each “page” is made; ranging from the rough stability of cardboard, the more delicate grain of loose sheets hanging from wooden frames, to handmade glass that enters in dialogue with the textures of paper.

Other pieces within the exhibition are unified by an underlying theme. It is based on a series of hypnotic sessions the artist had undergone first in 2007 and then between January and April 2018, each of which had been centred on a specific body part. Namely the throat, heart, stomach, brain, tailbone and face. That there is a concept that unites key pieces within the exhibition does on first impression contradict the sensation of materiality Another Space conveys. One may even suspect the inclusion of a concept to be a weakness; a capitulation towards underlying expectations of contemporary aesthetics. However, it is the very materiality of its record that remains at the forefront of each presentation.

The result of the hypnotic sessions is presented as text within a booklet on view within the exhibition. It contains transcripts written under the heading of specific organs. Yet descriptions have no concrete markers by which the body may be understood. Free of preconceived knowledge about biology or chemistry, the text follows a dream logic full of psychoanalytic insights about the relationship between memory and the internal workings of the human body. Asserting through visual metaphor how the imagination implants knots and barrels of cement at strategic points within it, and how by consequence, it is the imagination that is capable of releasing the body from that same weight.

Those words reappear within the formal composition of “Six Hypnotherapy Sessions, text” (2018), where they are printed on simple copy paper and cut into oval forms or trimmed along its margins. As if to reinforce the sense of fragmentation the text conveys, some prints are left intact while others appear in duplicate form and are pasted onto the other so as to overlap. Others have sections cut out from their middle and placed on opposite sides of diagonal mounts that resemble the slant of an open book.

The hypnotic sessions were also recorded in drawing. “Six hypnotherapy drawings, originals” (2018) consists of four rows of cardboard that stands upright in a zig-zag formation. Its sides display drawings of geometric shapes and compositions in which blocks of pigment alternate with folds of paper that coincide with incisions to cardboard. Rather than displaying drawings as the factual proof of a concept carried out, they are placed on the floor to be seen at obtuse angles and obscured by the very construct they are displayed upon. As a composition, it reflects the process of archiving internal sensations form within the subconscious. They tend to be perceived indirectly, caught in fleeting glimpses.

Those drawings reappear in the form of silkscreen prints, “Six hypnotherapy drawings, screenprint” (2018). They are printed on large sheets of handmade paper that are attached to each other with bookbinder glue to form six lengths of material that hang from vertical beams that extend from a wall. Some of those prints are large enough to occupy a single sheet of paper while others are scattered along its surface or repeat multiple times within narrower sections. Those forms range from simple cubes, delicate sketches of vertical and horizontal lines, to more intricate nebulas of open squares, each of which is restricted to its own colour scheme of either red, yellow, grey or shades of blues.

One may attempt to connect the content of a hypnotic session with specific prints. There are diamond shapes made by what appear to be densely drawn lines that resemble descriptions of the face and how it takes on the appearance of a mask. While round nebulas made of small open squares seem like the floorplan of a prehistoric city that is similar to how the throat had been described. But the validity of those interpretations remains an open question. While texts have titles to inform the reader which organ had been its inspiration, the drawings do not.

Although a continuity clearly exists between the number of hypnotic sessions and forms that exist within the same number of compositions, there remains an ambivalence as to which form is the referent to what organ. This sense of ambivalence is what aligns the concept of the hypnotic sessions with a larger working model specific to the artist. In which case drawings do not present schematic diagrams that represent mental projections by which the mind seeks to understand the inner workings of the human body. Such a style of presenting information would essentially form a hierarchically relationship in which the body is subordinate to the mind. What they instead present is a network of texture, colour, and form, that describes sensorial information through a logic of physicality.

Six hypnotherapy drawings, originals 2018

Six Hypnotherapy Sessions, text on paper 2018

Glass Sculpture, 2018

Left: Drawings, six Hypnotherapy Sessions 2018. Right: Drawings, six Hypnotherapy Sessions, detail

“Drawings, six Hypnotherapy Sessions” (2018) is another variation by which the results of hypnotic sessions are made into tangible form. It consists of large sheets of handmade paper attached along their edges to form a single surface suspended within the negative space of wall and support beam. Every other sheet has shapes made of bubble wrap attached to paper, all but one of which is crowded with marks that seems like writing but could just as well be traces left by the body in the act of recreating the memory of an experience. Whether that record is in the form of written language is unclear and most likely irrelevant.

What the resulting compositions propose is a symbiotic relationship between form and the human body. Both of which are interpenetrated by thought when communicating an interiority of the self to the world. What transpires is the sensation of being confronted with forms so delicate as to seem fragile. An effect that mirrors the choice of paper as a medium for sculptural installation. It being made to stand upright, seemingly by the force of the artist’s conviction that each material should be allowed to communicate in its native tongue.

This confrontation with form leads the audience to understand how a thing perceived as weak may non-the-less derive strength from an integrity to its own material condition. Which in turn produces a sense of depth that explains the designation of having been made by an artist’s artist. A term which inspires awe in a small group of professionals but does not necessary transpire into attention from a general public. However, too much heroic reverence may be given to the designation. As a guest had remarked at the opening, perhaps the art of an artist’s artist can more accurately be described as having been made by an artist, point. How to describe that which is done by anyone else is up for debate.

Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar

Artist Website: eyglohardardottir.net

Photo credit
Exhibition Photos: Vigfús Birgisson except for photo nr. 5
Featured image: Helga Óskarsdóttir

Last day of Exhibition: 28th October 2018

Disbelief – An Interview with Dan Byers

by Erin Honeycutt | Föstudagur.09.2018 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Disbelief – An Interview with Dan Byers

Having recently arrived from a trip to the United States, elements of the political climate were pretty unsettling and fresh on my mind. The newly opened exhibition at i8 gallery, Seeing Believing Having Holding: A Late Summer Show of Five American Artists organized by Dan Byers, immediately spoke to this sense of being unsettled and of the disconnection between what you read in the news and the reality of the situation. The title of the exhibition spoke to this sensation especially. Even the added addendum – a late summer show of five American artists – implied that it was the end of a season (or an era) and it was now time to return to a new arrangement of our basic sense perceptions with the help from the studios of artists working in a variety of mediums from all over the US: Kelly Akashi (Los Angeles, CA) Kahlil Robert Irving (St. Louis, MO), Michelle Lopez (Philadelphia, PA), B. Ingrid Olson (Chicago, IL), and Daniel Rios Rodriguez (San Antonio, TX).

In an interview with the Dan Byers, he filled me in on how these nuances inspired the exhibition.

Dan Byers: I think you are definitely picking up on things I was thinking and feeling. That is how the show came about: through an intuitive sense of artists I was interested in and a broad confusion between sight and touch. When Börkur and I first started talking about the show we were going to do something political that touched on the situation in America. However, the exhibition became something that addressed in very visceral terms what it feels like to be in America right now, which is really scary, unsettling, and destabilizing.

I walked back from that feeling towards work that was more metaphorical in the way it contains those confrontations and engagements but perhaps not explicitly engaging in them. The idea of ‘late summer’ came up because these summer group shows that are usually an opportunity to be light and playful. It certainly has that bit of late summer, like you said, a feeling of harvesting and getting back to organizing all the changes that happened over the summer, but it also has connotations of late empire and this moment where the shadows are longer and there is this anxiety that starts to creep in. It’s a bit playful that I’m putting ‘American artists’ in the title. I was hesitant because a lot of artists don’t like to be identified by their nationalities. It always has problematic connotations but at the same time, it is five young American artists from all over the country. As an American and an American curator, it feels important for me to let people know that there are things happening all over the country and that it’s a big country and people are doing things all over the country, responding to a specific vernacular and responding to what is happening. That is all part of a subtext to the show.

Seeing Believing Having Holding (exhibition overview)

Kelly Akashi: Curled Lifeform, 2018

B. Ingrid Olson: Vertical Column Whet Girdle, 2017
B. Ingrid Olson: Note (Kiss the architect on the mouth and paint a black stripe laterally across her forehead), 2018

All of a sudden these more process-based ideas around the confusion of touch and vision, sight and sense began to take on more political dimensions in terms of the skepticism of fact right now and the way in which fake news and even in my own disbelief when I wake up in the morning and read the headline news. I think to myself that this can’t actually be happening but it is very much happening so all of the sudden this idea of trying to confirm what you see with another sense is very prevalent. I think touch is the most affirming sense if we had to rank them although they each have their own qualities.

Daniel Rios Rodriguez: Snake Theory, 2017

Overview of works by Daniel Rios Rodriguez.

So this idea that the visual has its own tactile dimension to it is the thing that brings the works in the show together. They are images that have to be touched and even the things that have photographic processes come about through contact with a thing like Kelly Akashi’s photographs. They are a photogram of light through an object so it has a sculptural dimension to it. A lot of them are sort of hand-held and have that relationship to the body in a way. I think bodies feel very vulnerable right now on many levels as they are being attacked by society and by the government. I think that sense of corporeal vulnerability is also something I was thinking about throughout the works in different ways.

Erin: There are so many points that the exhibition touches on that are all so relevant right now. Just walking here and noticing how people are in a crowd and just looking down at their phone with a festival going on around them. I was just thinking about that as I arrived how no one is really anywhere they actually are.

B. Ingrid Olson: Splayed Corner, endless room, 2018

Michelle Lopez: C3PO, 2008

Dan: Right, and this sense of receding into ourselves that is very much aided by the phone and by that posture which alludes to the fact that all of these works are very much studio-based works. These are artists who have studio practices so there is a retreat that is inherent in making these objects that is necessary to have an engagement with the outside world. That sense of the studio space of making physical, trial and error work that is very handmade is very different than work made on the street that is external, relational, social, or all of these things. I think these works all have a very political dimension but it is filtered through the subjectivity of that specific person and that specific hand before it goes back out into the world.

Kahlil Robert Irving: Small block – Mixed Melodies (Jason Stockley can’t run, Google Scroll), 2018

Kahlil Robert Irving: Compacted Grit & Glamour, 2018

I always think of Philip Guston in the 1960s retreating to his studio in Woodstock, New York and making these incredibly radical political paintings that could only be made at a distance from where all this trauma was happening. That tradition I feel is easy at this very precarious political moment. I have to say I’ve never been to more political protests than in the past year. There is this sense that if you’re not showing up then you really have to question what you are doing with your time. I think with this work there is a sense of safety in your privacy where the work is made before it goes out in the world. I love the fact that this gallery has huge windows visible from the street and people interact with it like a storefront as a place of commerce but also the social realm and that sense of transparency has been great for the show.

Erin: I was also thinking about how the exhibition gives an accurate visceral sense of what it feels like to be in America right now that, in my experience, is not easy to convey. I could go on a lot of tangents with this.

B. Ingrid Olson: Kiss the architect on the mouth, 2018

Seeing Believing Having Holding (exhibition overview)

Dan: Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in this elite, liberal enclave under Obama I could feel self-conscious of being protected in a way, but now I’m quite happy being in a democratic area, although we definitely have Trump supporters in Massachusetts. I have to say there is a sense of safety. On the day he was elected, there was an immediate correlation in Boston of racist graffiti and people being harassed. There was a total cause and effect and people suddenly felt they had permission and were emboldened to do this. I think that sense of what one does with their personal lives becomes more poignant. I think with these artists there is a sense very much of the specific lived corporeal, subjective, psychological experience of each person and that sense of the intimate and the personal. Even if the show isn’t about politics or Trump you can look at how the show is about the every day of this moment.

Erin: I think this turning inward towards very intimate perceptions is becoming obviously more and more a place where we can find truth, something that is starting to be talked about more openly. This can be seen in the return to craft in the show; I see these delicately balanced objects and porcelain pieces.

Dan: Yes, I think that and the strength of having ones’ own place in the world when you turn to face the world. You have to tend your own garden before you can turn outwards and I think it does feel like one wants to have things settled with yourself so you can be a strong presence out in the world and behave in a way that feels brave to the situation. Everyone is going about their daily business and has their jobs, lives, relationships, but there is this constant drumbeat. It is always about trying to figure out how to balance how much you engage with it and how much you do your own thing.

Erin: Do you have a background in art practice?

Dan: I have an undergraduate degree in studio art and usually, when I do a studio visit with an artist I have obviously the knowledge I gained from working in galleries and museums, but my initial engagement is as someone who is thinking about what it means to make those decisions in the studio. These decisions are around materials and what the conceptual implications of those choices might be and how hard or easy it is do something. In some ways, this is much more close to my initial engagement because I am just as interested in how the work was made influences what they mean.

Erin: The materiality of the work and the actual physical space in which it exists in the exhibition really works as a metaphor with our own bodies in the way that the visitor has to really navigate the space with all the senses. With the disbelief of the material being one of the major metaphorical gestures being made in the show, I think you have definitely found a way to capture part of that aesthetic reality of this moment.

Erin Honeycutt

Seeing Believing Having Holding: A Late Summer Show of Five American Artists will be on view until October 27^th at i8.

Photo Credit: Helga Óskarsdóttir
All photos are from the exhibition Seeing Believing Having Holding
Courtesy of the artists and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik

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