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

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

by | Miðvikudagur.05.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

In what ways do you approach working with different artists?

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

                                                                              

Skaftfell – Centre for Visual Art, Seyðisfjörður 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Becky Forsythe

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

 

Not with a shout, but with a small cough.

Not with a shout, but with a small cough.

by | Föstudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english

Not with a shout, but with a small cough.

Step into Arna Óttarsdóttir’s solo show Allt Fínt (Everything is Great) and be enveloped by an overwhelming warmth of pinks and oranges and plush texture. The exhibition features mixed media works, which range from woven tapestries to patchwork wall hangings to sculptures of different materials, giving the impression of fragments of a home excised and rearranged in a gallery.

Innkaupalisti (Shopping List) is just that, a shopping list presumably written first on a scrap of paper and then blown up and turned into a weaving that hangs from the ceiling. It’s simple enough, a list of items down the left side, including milk, celery root, lamb, pizza, and an absent minded doodle at the top, as if scribbled while on a long phone call and needing an outlet for restless hands. That’s it, just a hasty scrap of paper reproduced laboriously into an object that declares itself with a tasselled flourish. The genuineness allows me to sink into the reality of it, imagining what was for dinner that night. Are the carrots and celery root to go with the lamb? Is this for a dinner party, or a simple family meal? Certainly not just a meal for one. I begin to imagine the morning routine, perhaps breakfast is AB mjólk and muesli every day, and the house has run out of AB mjólk. Or is there a baby in the house and that’s what it eats? Is the doodle actually an automatic drawing made by an adult, or a child’s intentional step towards self expression? The writing of Lydia Davis comes to mind, micro stories using brevity to such a degree that Davis creates entire narratives in stories that are only one or two sentences. This throw away object transformed into a tapestry has not changed in its meaning, but the transformation does reframe its value from utility into an entryway to meditation on routine, consumerism, self care, or any place the viewer cares to go when imagining all the context surrounding the artefact of this one shopping list.

Sápur (Soaps) is likewise engaging, 18 apparently handmade soaps arranged in an approximate grid on a table (itself composed of numerous folded white cloths like so much fresh laundry). Each soap is presented on a different plinth, a shoulder pad, a piece of hrökkbrauð, an overturned tupperware box, the plastic net that comes around a bottle of duty free wine, and more. Each soap is different, some translucent, some opaque, each embedded with various materials and items, from neon plastic netting to bundles of strings, to glitter and dried flowers, and most intriguingly, dried noodles.

Though there is a definite air of cleanliness and tidying present in the overall arrangement, these soaps are not for cleaning or sudsing. They become less functional items created and used for a task (cleaning) and more something else. What are they? Gems? Insects trapped in amber? Time capsules? A small and orderly sculpture garden? What is the relationship between soap and plinth? And why are these specific items all here together? They’re compiled of things you’d find while cleaning underneath the couch, or in a junk drawer, yet here they all are, arranged in their own specific places.

As I walk from piece to piece, I begin to have the thought “What is the point of this?”. I’ve been enjoying the intro and outrospection from some of the works, and certainly feel physically good in a room full of pink and orange and natural light. But why is this here? Visitors come in, look around for three minutes before leaving, and I imagine them thinking one of two things, either, “This stuff is nice, but who has time for this? The world is burning and I am supposed to lose myself in a landscape of dried flowers? And spend more than five seconds looking at an old grocery list? Everything is great? No, it is not.” or, “Oooh, these soaps are just darling, they’d make a fun Christmas gift.” I think about self indulgence in fine art, questioning what it means to make things that are pretty, to make things that are useless, that drive no change in the world.

But as I watch other people watching, I think that maybe we are all missing the point. The title of the show, Everything is Great, is so tongue in cheek. It’s the response to when someone asks you how things are going, and you don’t want to get into how things aren’t actually going great, but that’s not a socially acceptable response, so you just say, “Everything’s fine.” This work is well aware how the world is garbage, but it’s not so preoccupied with the worry that every effort and work must have a clear purpose of bettering the world in order to be of worth. Another clue comes from a textile collage titled Bleik klippimynd (Hvað get ég svo sem gert?) or Pink Collage (What Can I Do Anyway?). It’s got that question on there, and that becomes the thought pervading the entire show. It’s not despair, but rather permission to lose oneself, if only for a few moments, in a miniature world of soap sculptures, pondering why they are arranged the way they are, or to imagine the life of the person who wrote that shopping list.

Every piece in Allt Fínt has such delicious color and texture that the overall effect is like biting into a cold and refreshing fruit on an unusually warm spring day. Taken all together, the collected works are scraps gathered from around the home and re-presented as textile collages, textures draped over forms, swatches and samples, sketches and notes for later. These pieces are inconsequential things repurposed to demand thought, that expect consequence, not with a shout but with a small cough.

Rebecca Lord

Photo credits: Vigfús Birgisson

Allt Fínt / Everything is Great is on view at Nýlistasafnið until Sunday the 28th of April.

 

An interview with Cosmos Carl

An interview with Cosmos Carl

by | Mánudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

An interview with Cosmos Carl

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To sell a river? (2016) Josephine Callaghan

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

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

Cateater (2019) Jorik Amit Galama 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Bergur Thomas Anderson

 

www.cosmoscarl.co.uk

Featured image: Wet Unboxing (2018) Alex Frost 

Prime Matter – Kathy Clark at Studio Sol

Prime Matter – Kathy Clark at Studio Sol

by | Föstudagur.04.2019 | artzine in english

Prime Matter – Kathy Clark at Studio Sol

In an industrial suburb of Reykjavik surrounded by car dealerships and warehouses, the home gallery of Studio Sol transforms the large working spaces of the area through a wholly other use than industry. Entering on the lower floor of the building, one is overcome by the immediate shift in atmosphere to something that operates in a softer manner than the surroundings – you have to listen intently to hear its message.

In the exhibition & Again it Descends to the Earth, American/Icelandic artist Kathy Clark creates this initial atmospheric shift of the senses through the weather sounds that greet you (rain and thunder, plus the chords of a lute) and the subdued dusk-light in which a series of bright, shifting symbols dance across the floor. At first, you wonder if you have stepped inside a folklore museum display related to an offshoot of the Hidden People who have magically been making enigmatic sculptures out of lava rock for centuries. Every element comes across as being part of a larger narrative, informed with research carried out by the creator, yet transformed into a personal narrative that blends with a larger, timeless one.

With a tactile sensibility of handmade materials made of clay, yet reminiscent of bone and stone, Clark makes clear the significance between the activity of craft-making to connect their maker to an elemental reality through the timely, repetitive gestures involved in the process of building with natural materials. Large, mound-shape sculptures alighted with ceramic creatures, ambiguously deer-like, have become totems of the exhibition. The beehive motive is also prevalent, but in its completely black display with white lines showing the coiled shape of the structure, the pure symbol is returned to the viewer, as though the signifier were removed. In fact, all of the handmade sculptures in the show are painted a deep, matte black, creating a shadow-like fantastical landscape.

Like the prima materia, or the first matter in alchemy, the matte black color of all the sculptures create a seemingly unified base material of chaos reflecting one of the fundamental theories in alchemy, that of the universal nature of this first matter. The titles of works in the exhibition come from Isaac Newton’s translation of The Emerald Tablet, a text known to have existed between the 6th and 8th century attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the mysterious figure who is known as the father of alchemy. The cave-like space of the exhibition operates like some kind of prime material that has been burned and distilled, purified into an essence of all things, resonating with the act of purifying materials from nature throughout time.

Other early alchemists are echoed in the wax prints on which are etched in black acrylic, landscape scenes featuring massive stone figures, such as the one onto which The Emerald Tablet was purported to have been written. The alchemical manuscripts depicting scenes of processes laid out in metaphorical narrative landscape scenes found in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617), for instance, are especially reminiscent with the etchings of large stones upon which text is carved. The wax casting of the tableaus creates a tactile overlay making them seemingly reach further into the past than even their vast landscapes suggest.

Clark has created a kind of feminized tablet in her tableau, a rewriting of the text towards a matriarchal base in which it is explicit the metaphor of the female figure being anthropomorphized into a landscape. The fantastical archaeological complex of landforms makes an homage to the landscape as inherently female with the ribs and vertebrae making a middle world, upper world, and a tree of life erupting towards the sun, the mountain temple pyramid of the female figure’s head. Clark answers mysterious origins of landscape forms with her own landscape reminiscent of the Funk Art movement of California in the 1960s; large-scale assemblage works of cultural detritus. Yet instead of mid-20th-century cultural detritus of Americana, Clark’s Funk Art is pulled from the ruins of Neolithic pagan sites.

On the black walls are situated grids of palm-sized, ceramic icons, also painted black, creating a further sense of meaning arriving from depths of depths. It is possible to read the icons as a wall poem from multiple directions as a spatialized incantation, even more so if you choose to read the symbols out loud. The black symbols’ onto which white details have been etched makes it particularly stark in creating a distilled sense of the meaning behind the symbol being brought into form, as though they were tools in relearning the entire theatre of their meaning in a pantomime. The icons of sun, bird, eye, snake/earthworm, triangle, branch, and beehive create a continuous incantation, a poem brought to life through the low hum of a beehive making all of the pieces seemingly vibrate on the verge of vocalization. Everything alludes back to the female figure as both a tomb and a womb where the entirety of symbols, images, and sounds originate as an empathic response to a confrontation with the unknown.

The home gallery of Studio Sol with its location in an industrial neighborhood makes a further integument to the many layers of the landscape, capturing the New Weird Divine*, in the most unsuspecting places.

Erin Honeycutt

 *A term used by the writer, Elvia Wilk: ‘The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine.’

Sources: Pereira, Michela. „From the Tabula Smaragdina to the Alchemical Fifth Essence.“ Early Science and Medicine 5, 2 (2000).

All photos by Svenni Speight.

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

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

by | Sunnudagur.03.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

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

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

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

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

What do you mean by “useful”?

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

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

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

 Your work is also quite ironic, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And did you find an answer to these questions?

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

  

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

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

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credits:

Stills from the video: courtesy of the artist.

Photos of the sculptures: Vigfús Birgisson.

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

Mary, a revolutionary feminist?

Mary, a revolutionary feminist?

by | Laugardagur.03.2019 | artzine in english

Mary, a revolutionary feminist?

Having grown up in Italy, where the Roman Catholic Church is such a powerful institution and it is deeply rooted into the everyday lives of everyone, I can’t help seeing in Mary a symbol of a submissive femininity, an objectified woman, a tool through which the Church has kept women in a position of inferiority for centuries. Mary, even though she is worshiped by Catholics, has never reached the role of goddess, she constitutes a body through which God acted. In fact, women in the Catholic Church are prevented to take on high positions in the ecclesiastical system: they can be nuns, but not popes, not bishops, not even priests. My position in this regard is closer to Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas, she wrote in her book The Second Sex that “Beyond question the women are infinitely more passive, more subservient to man, servile, and abased in the Catholic countries such as Italy, Spain, or France, than in such Protestant regions as the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries. And that flows in large part from the women’s own attitude: the cult of the Virgin, confession, and the rest lead them toward masochism”. That is proven by the fact that women didn’t even have the right to vote until 1945 in Italy, while in Iceland they got it in 1915.

However, regardless my opinion, reviewing those stories which shaped our culture and heritage is a way to correct people’s behaviours and misbeliefs, so I will put my personal feelings aside and try to look at Mary as a revolutionary woman, like the Icelandic Love Corporation presents her in their show The Newest Testament at Hverfisgallerí.

Mary accepted the role of mother of God given to her by God’s messenger without asking any questions, without thinking about how her life was about to change, she accepted her fate and accomplished God’s will. That acceptance, that “yes” said without questioning anything, is proof of her courage. That “yes” constitutes a declaration of acceptance of all the pain which was about to come, a sacrifice for the sake of humankind, she didn’t ask for such a responsibility, but she embraced God’s decision anyway.

Acceptance is a value which is often forgotten, we live in a society which tells us we can do whatever we want and encourages us to pursue our dreams and desires. But life is not all sunshine and roses, learning how to process disgraceful events and keep your head up in difficult times is of vital importance. We need to be flexible, adaptable, ready to accept what life confronts us with.

Mary’s capacity of accepting and adapting to situations is symbolised, in the exhibition The Newest Testament, with water. Liquids are highly adaptable to different containers’ shapes because the links between their molecules are not really tight. They can change their physic state depending on the temperature and conditions, e.g. freezing into ice or evaporating when the temperature is high enough. Water also means life, when exploring new planets astronomers look for residues of water, no matter their physic state. Water is the means by which they determine if planets have ever been suitable for life or will be in the future.

This parallelism between Mary and the vital fluid is presented in Aqua Maria, a video work showing a lyric singer who emerges from the darkness and sings a song entitled Aqua Maria, a remix by Ólafur Björn Ólafsson of Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria and the Sigvaldi Kaldalón’s version. To access the work we have to pass through thick curtains of the same intense and bright blue color of Mary’s veil. The curtains look like some sort of artificial waterfall: they are dense and heavy but made of threads, a delicate material which become stronger when weaved together, like water does when streams converge into larger and powerful rivers. The singer, Agnes Wästfelt, performing in the video sings passionately and water is sprayed over her, yet she does not react to the water, she accepts it as it soaks her wet whilst continuing to sing. This willpower she shows by pursuing her intent without getting distracted by what is happening around her and on her unveils a certain perseverance, a strength and a will to accomplish her duty no matter what. When acceptance segues into perseverance it mutates from being a value for a peaceful existence to a necessary quality to carry out a fight and an attempt to change our society.

Liquids are present in the show also within the series Pissed Off!, works made with urine. Urine, along with those other substances through which we expel unnecessary micro-elements, is culturally considered repulsive, in fact they smell bad and they affront our senses just by seeing them: they are something to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, these natural needs are necessary for the body to keep working properly and it is also thanks to them that we can achieve all the great things human beings have done and are proud of. By deciding to use urine as material for their pieces, the Icelandic Love Corporation is elevating the idea of urine from a mere despised element to an artistic tool. They seem to suggest a change in our perception of our bodies, again by reviewing our cultural heritage. Just like Mary accepted her destiny, we need to accept ourselves completely, embrace everything about our body, this constitutes a rebel act against centuries of prudery and self-disgust.

The textile work Consent, hung from the ceiling in the middle of the room where the Pissed Off! works are displayed, recalls the traditional feminine craft of weaving. Weaving has always been associated with women. The Cretan princess Ariadne helped Theseus to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth by using a ball of thread, Arachne was transformed into a spider because she challenged Athena in a weaving contest which she lost and was therefore transformed into a spider – and that’s why spiders weave their webs. Women in the past were in charge of weaving clothes, a domestic labor which alienated them from the real world, because outside the front door it started the men’s territory. But also, women would soon start to meet up to weave and knit together, an innocent act that allowed them to group and band together. This art piece is made by using wool and nylon tights, merging together tradition and the modernity, the neon colors of the piece and the use of tights mark their belonging to contemporary times but the technique recalls the traditional women’s duty. Women are mothers and weavers and both roles are connected to creation.

The theme of rebellion is the focal point of the whole show and it is clearly stated at the entrance of the gallery in the work Rebel Kit. The Rebel Kit contains tools which are metaphorically fundamental to be a rebel according to the Icelandic Love Corporation. The kit provides: two caps, a crochet hook, scissors, blue sewing thread, a pencil, a small edition of Pissed Off!, some nails, a hammer and a blue lipstick. This work contains references to all of the other works presented in the show, and brings them together into a conceptual pocket revolution, putting together elements from the feminine world, such as the lipstick, supplies for sewing, and elements connected with art and craft, such as the small watercolor, the pencil, the nails and the hammer – although these can be seen also as a reference to Jesus’s Crucifixion, a symbol of his suffering and of what Mary has to go through because of her acceptance.

This piece seems to shout out loud that being a woman is OK, that there is nothing wrong about wearing lipstick and sewing clothes, and there is nothing wrong about having those characteristics typically associated with women. The whole show seems to work towards awakening consciousness that in order to become rebels, women just need to embrace the way they are, no change is required but on the other hand awareness is: in order to be rebels we simply need to be conscious of our values and our power, because so often the main enemies of women are just women themselves, falling under the weight of the cultural heritage that taught them what is wrong and what is right, how women should be. 

Ana Victoria Bruno

The Newest Testamen by the Icelandic Love Corporation is on show at Hverfisgallerí until Saturday the 2oth of March.

Photo Credit: Vigfús Birgirsson, artzine

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