Eygló Harðardóttir and Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson Take Home Awards at the Icelandic Art Prize

by Daría Sól Andrews | Laugardagur.03.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Eygló Harðardóttir and Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson Take Home Awards at the Icelandic Art Prize

“Time is money, it’s cliché, but it’s quite simple and true.” I’m sitting with Leifur Ýmir Eyjólfsson in his studio in downtown Reykjavík over coffee, as he builds shelves to house and protect 250 ceramic plate artworks coming from the Reykjavík Art Museum. He recently closed an exhibition there, entitled Manuscript, for which he won the Encouragement Award from the Iceland Art Center this past week. Winning alongside Leifur was Eygló Harðardóttir, who took home the prize of Artist of the Year. Her winning exhibition, Another Space, showed at Nýlistasafnið this past year. “It is like Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir has quite beautifully told me”, Leifur continues, speaking about a fellow nominee for Artist of the Year, “art is quite delicate, like a precious flower, you have to protect it and care for it, and programs like the Icelandic Art Prize do just that necessary work.”

The Icelandic Art Prize was established by the Icelandic Visual Arts Council in February 2018, awarding exhibitions that took place in the year 2017. Margrét Kristín Sigurðardóttir, the Chairman of the Icelandic Visual Arts Council since 2016, tells me that these awards are “intended to contribute to promoting Icelandic contemporary art, both in Iceland and abroad, as well to draw attention to what is well done in the field. The prize gives the opportunity to direct the spotlight at what is considered outstanding in Icelandic visual art each year.” Two recognitions are awarded, Artist of the Year, awarding 1 million ISK to an Icelandic artist who has shown outstanding work in Iceland, and the Encouragement Award, awarding 500.000 ISK to a young artist who has shown outstanding work publicly in Iceland.

“This recognition is quite precious, really, feeling that someone really is paying attention to my work, it is a really amazing feeling, but it is hard to describe,” Eygló tells me when I ask her what this award means to her. “When you work in art you sway between being insecure and paranoid, asking yourself ‘is what I’m doing working?’, all the while believing in the work and pepping yourself forward. Often there is a lot of silence around art in Iceland, so programs like this perhaps open up for a different way of thinking about art, artists, and exhibitions, and of critically comparing and talking about each other’s work. I think this program could have the affect that people visit exhibitions a bit differently, because when work is brought into comparison to another’s a certain suspense begins to build.”

Leifur similarly recognizes the important effect awards like these have in awakening a necessary conversation around art in our community. “You are very vulnerable, and ego is of course some element to this. It is in our nature to search for some sort of feedback. Like the name of the prize says, it motivates me forward, and it awakens a conversation and an interest, which is a beautiful thing.” He explains to me that his exhibition, Manuscript, was really a process of baring himself bare to the world.

“I am also awake to the fact that it’s all contextual,” Eygló reveals to me. “This year my exhibition was in the right climate for this moment, but perhaps it may not have been last year or next year. So you can’t really say that some one thing is best, artist, or art, or otherwise. This really matters to me. Criticism here in Iceland has so often been about good or bad. Even if there is only one prize, it’s not always about better or worse, but about opening up communication and critically comparing and talking to one another about art.”

Margrét explains to me that the public submitted proposals for nomination of the two prizes, and that she was quite pleased by the large response of submittals. The jury then decides together who is nominated in each respective category. “The members of the jury are people with extensive knowledge in the field of art, representatives from the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists (SÍM), the Icelandic Academy of Arts, the Visual Art Council, the Icelandic Art Theory Association and from art museum directors in Iceland. During the decision process, each member of the jury presents their views on each artist and his work. If the jury is not unanimous we vote, the artist who receives the majority of votes is then nominated.” Margrét has been the head of the jury of the Icelandic Art Prize since it was established, and was joined this year by Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson from the Art Theory Association, Sigurður Guðjónsson from the Icelandic Academy of Arts, Jóhann Ludwig Torfason from SÍM and Hanna Styrmisdóttir from art museum directors in Iceland.

When discussing the future of this program, Margrét is optimistic about its continuing growth and evolvement, hoping to expand the categories as the art scene in Iceland continues to expand and flourish. “It is important that each year we pay attention to the visual art scene in Iceland and celebrate what is outstanding. The awards should attract deserved attention to Icelandic visual art.” Like Leifur emphasizes, the grant and awards process is a critical and necessary element to working in the arts, and he is hopeful that programs like these will only continue to grow over the years. “This program is such a good addition the professional art scene here in Iceland. The grant process is so necessary and essential, and it is so important that these opportunities for artists are growing to the point where it is almost hard to keep track. It’s such a positive.”

Like Margrét emphasizes to me, these types of programs give necessary recognition and motivation to outstanding artists in Iceland. “As the aim of the Icelandic Art Prize is to honor and promote outstanding Icelandic contemporary art and encourage new artistic creations I hope it will give the nominated and awarded artists great opportunities. They deserve to get attention and hopefully it will encourage them to keep on their good work. I think it is important that the prize has established itself and that it will be desirable to receive the awards.” This prize then functions as an important and valuable tool that she hopes will be a growing part of the art scene in Iceland in the future.

“There is always this question, what comes next”, Leifur laughs as I probe him about what the future holds for his artistic practice. “I’m a little shy about it. It’s a clap on the back but at the same time a kick in the butt. It equates to fire, kindling to keep my ideas flowing and developing. It’s a hard question, it hasn’t quite registered in me yet, but it’s amazing, and I want to say how thankful I am.” Like Eygló reiterates, the financial aspect of this award does not go unnoticed or under appreciated. As an artist, “a million ISK can stretch out as some months of salary, and I’m very pleased with that, to be able to go work somewhere and only on my art.” Leifur similarly emphasizes that this award gives him a moment to breath and develop his next projects. “For me it really comes down to time, the classic time is money, money is time dilemma. Now I can focus on the time aspect of this equation and take a moment to transition, to reorganize both physically and mentally, and to place myself mentally in the next project.”

Next on the horizon for these two remarkable artists? Eygló tells me she has three exhibitions planned in Northern Iceland over the next year, all at artist-run spaces, an important element to her. “I respect these types of spaces so much, and I find them very exciting. At Nýlistasafnið, for example, there is the same wonderful vibe that has been there from the beginning, a very positive energy, of people working together and supporting each other. Everyone has a voice and there is no sense of hierarchy, no sense of stress, but rather a beautiful trust between everyone on staff. In August 2019 I will show in a group exhibition in Hjalteyri, working with curators and project managers Erin Honeycutt, Bryndís Hrönn Ragnarsdóttir, and Geirþrúður Finnbogadóttir Hjörvar. The show is titled Mild Humidity – The (Digital) Age of Aquarius. It is quite a special project, evolving very much from the conversations between people around it and the ideas that come forth. For a studio based person like me it is quite exciting.” Eygló will also show at Alþýðuhúsið in Siglufjörður in 2019, as well as at Safnasafnið in Akureyri, alongside Steingrímur Eyfjörð and Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir, who was nominated for the Encouragement Award last year.

“I have so many ideas, old and new that I’m working through currently, projects that I’ve been working through for some time that need time to evolve as I work through a transitional stage” Leifur tells me. “I think a lot about the working day, and how different people approach their time in a day. Me and friend and coworker Siggi have been working on an interview project around this concept, how we treat the work day, and the time therein. My work from Manuscript is also going to be showed in different spaces now, where smaller selections of the plates will be shown together, so the work will change in that way. This work really depends on the space it’s displayed in, because people connected with and responded to this work in such an interestingly personal way.”

Daria Sól Andrews

Photo Credits: Sunday & White Photography

In light – a weekend at List í Ljósi

by Nanna Vibe Spejlborg Juelsbo | Sunnudagur.03.2019 | artzine in english

In light – a weekend at List í Ljósi

I cross a mountain pass and follow the road down through a white valley, pass a frozen waterfall, through continuous turns. Then suddenly a sign appears out of the darkness. As I move closer to the sign standing in the snowy hills beside the road it appears not to be any regular road sign, but a three-meter-high wooden structure holding a doodle-like image of a windy road through hills, a portrait of the road I am currently driving made in reflective tape. The sign glows when hit by the headlights and then disappears in the darkness the second the car passes it, so that one could wonder if it was an illusion. I continue, passing by three more of these reflective installations colored in blue, yellow, red and each of the them appears out of the darkness, vanishing quickly as soon as I pass them. I am approaching Seyðisfjörður – a small town in one of the East fjords which, because of the surrounding mountains, has not seen the sun for four months.

Driving into this rural town the scenery is at first completely dark. For two days the street lights are switched off between 6pm and 10pm in the night. The fourth edition of the annual light festival List í Ljósi has taken over Seyðisfjörður for a weekend to celebrate the return of the sun in mid-February.

List í Ljósi has been founded and carried out by Celia Harrison, originally from New Zealand, and Sesselja Hlín Jónasardóttir, a local to Seyðisfjörður. The festival was awarded the prestigious cultural prize Eyrarrósin 2019 just few days before the opening, increasing the expectations for this edition of the festival even more.

This year the festival has invited 32 commissioned national and international artists to take part in List í ljósi, but it also involved the whole city of Seyðisfjörður: the primary school children perform a dance show dressed in LED-light costumes, exhibit installations created through workshops during school hours and dress the old wooden school building’s windows in the colors of the rainbow. The local art school, LungA, participates with works made by current students in the community center Herðubreið, and even private homes around the town have been turned into large scale canvases hosting projections and sound works.

Phase Transition,Quincy Teofisto & Brandon Tay (SG – Singapore)

By Wikipedia, Christian Elovara Dinesen (DK)

rear_view_further, Lotte Rose Kjær-Skau (DK)

As a festival participant, I follow a path carved out in the snow. It takes me in a big circle around the lagoon located at the center of the town. The works are scattered around the route and walking slowly around feels like the right pace to experience the festival.

The outside works differ between sound works, installations, projections and performances. I pass by some works quite quickly, whereas others demand me to stop and gaze for a while. The way outdoor works, performances and indoor visual works presented in Herðubreið talk to each others reveals a thoughtful curation which aims at offering the viewer a wide range of experiences.

The first piece I stop by is projected onto two corner walls on the outside of the community center Herðubreið. Made by Slovakian New Media artists, Boris Vitazek & Zuzanna Sabova, this meditative 3-D projection mapping is accompanied by hynotizing ambient music. The accuracy of the realisation and the precision of the details of this audio-visual piece are impressive. Large crowds gather around the projection throughout both nights, enjoying the almost hallucinative expression of bodies moving, falling and dancing on the walls. Presenting such a strong and technically complex work marks the curators’ ambitions, and this work serve as one of the center pieces of this year‘s festival.

Working in the cross field between sculpture, video and digital painting, Danish artist, Lotte Rose Kjær-Skau, presents an installation consisting of three main elements: a rowing machine, a vertical LED-screen, a colored silicone banner. These three objects are framed by a large scaffolding and poles of burnt wood attached with elastic training bands, merging together natural elements such as wood, and artificial materials and objects such as steel and a large-scale digital screen. Simultaneously, the flapping silicone banner moves in the wind creating a synergy between the changing images on the LED-screen and the tilted rowing machine. An energetic installation which stands out in the program because of both its materials and its style.

When moving inside Herðubreið to experience the indoor works, an installation created by the Swedish Heliosynchesiy Research Center catches my attention. The piece enacts a treatment center for people suffering from the lack of direct sun. The research center is formed by an unnamed Swedish artist, who in collaboration with psychologists has created the fictional neurocognitive syndrome called Heliosynchesiy (Helio = Sun, Synchesiy = Confusion). In this science fiction inspired research project the Heliosynchesiy Research Center works with round objects and formations imitating the sun as a way of helping people, specifically the Nordic regions, to go through months of no or very limited sun in the winter season. The audience is invited to let themselves be treated by a soothing film of continuously moving round objects.

Raging Event of Continual Noise (The Sun), Emily Parsons-Lord (AU)

Heliosynchesiy, Heliosynchesiy Research Center (SE)

Disco ball, List í Ljósi Team (IS/NZ)

During the afternoon on the second day of the festival, Australian artist Emily Parsons-Lord invites the audience to gather outside for a performance. Parsons-Lord works with installations and performances informed by research within natural sciences and through this performance she aims at recreating the unique colors and shades of the sun which would be visible if the sun didn’t appear as bright as it does to the human eye. After a brief talk about the visible rainbow-colored light emitted by the sun, Parsons-Lord lights ten columns consisting of potassium powder and color pigments and slowly moves the board around while the smoke ranges from dark purple to bright blue, red, orange and yellow. The performance itself appears as a simple gesture, though the physical reaction creating a vivid color palette has a poetic effect in the vague light of this afternoon.

At 6pm the streetlights are once again turned off for the festival. Standing trees are lit in different colors and a purple waterfall falls from one of the bridges along the route. The curators of the festival have inserted additional works into the program creating a flow around the path. One of the largest pieces of this year’s festival is a giant disco ball hanging from a crane also made by the List í Ljósi team. A simple set-up which transforms the surrounding area into one big dancefloor while at the same time it shoots a projection of the disco ball onto one of the mountain sides creating a reminiscence of a solar eclipse. Sadly, the massiveness of the piece and its light seem to disturb a couple of the nearby art pieces, making it difficult to experience them on their own terms. However, the disco ball is a crowd-pleasing factor and it serves as a welcomed addition to the festival taking a broad crowd into account.

I am continuously surprised by this festival: the idea of bringing a lot of people from around the world to Seyðisfjörður during this time of year, taking the weather and the darkness into account, seems at first a mad idea. However, artists, volunteers, crew members, visitors and even a growing international audience, happily return to the fjord every year in February for this specific occasion.

To sum up this year’s List í Ljósi, I am impressed to see how the festival expands by every year. Compared its last edition, the festival has grown in both the amount of art works, participants and side projects happening as a part of the festival. This year, for instance, it engaged the local primary school children and added a new Nordic Program which offers five shortlisted Nordic artists a two-months funded residency leading up to the festival.

Though, presenting exclusively light art seems a not easy frame to fill for an entire festival. How does one avoid forcing both objects and art works in the attempt to make them fit into a seemingly limited theme? Most of this year’s artworks deal with light in one way or another: the idea of light, the long for or the absence of light, while others, such as the previously mentioned piece by Lotte Rose Kjær-Skau, do not actively engage with light as a theme, but they do utilize light as a medium.

I am relieved to experience a rather open curatorial approach and the same seemingly openness towards the individual artist’s own interpretation of the theme. Light might be a suitable frame for this festival as it celebrates the return of the sun, but List í Ljósi is also an art festival which accepts the challenge of this frame and once again presents a well-curated and exciting program of artists and works from all around the world.

Nanna Vibe Spejlborg Juelsbo

Featured picture: Second Litany, Boris Vitazek & Zuzanna Sabova (SK)
Photo credit: Chantal Anderson

Rósa Gisladóttir’s Mesh of Material and Light

by Katerina Spathi | Þriðjudagur.02.2019 | artzine in english

Rósa Gisladóttir’s Mesh of Material and Light

Mediums, or the channels through which cultural practices are transmitted, have been subject of extensive research and re-defining in recent years. Irrespectively, the material world itself often seems absent, or non-relevant. In this exhibition, mediums are rethought in context of the intellectual and physical substance of Matter. Aristotle’s understanding of Matter is that any material object/substance is generated by receiving Form, therefore it becomes Substance. It can be neither independent nor inseparable from its surrounding environment. Τhe other elements that define Matter are Energy and Purpose. Altogether they fabricate actuality and an undeveloped potentiality.

Medium of Matter strikes the visitor as a gathering of forms, studied in relation to their environment: their roots and their footprint on the space. The works exhibited are of two general natures, intermingling together through spatial continuity and the antithesis of light.

In the hall, furthest from the entrance of the gallery space, extended windows allow the natural light to shed onto sculptures made of plaster. Placed on an illuminated plexiglass platform, they lie there resembling a still-life snapshot. The objects cast glowing shadows on the surface transpiring a sensation that they are wafting over it. The lines are clear, the angles sharp yet softened and harmonic. Time and gravity are ever-present. There lies a certain fascination of re-inventing potential everyday-use objects into new forms. Aesthetically, they depict an obvious Greco-Roman influence with a minimalistic twist. A connection can be traced to the artist’s 2012 project Like Water Like Gold (2012, Trajan’s Market, Rome), where large-scale sculptures of a similar nature became an attempt to experiment with ancient forms and modern materials – the element of light always playing a predominant role.

In the rest of the space, wooden, featherweight architectural structures extend through invisible lines towards the skies and the three dimensions, or sole windows – open gates to new ones. The large structures in the centre are slender and transparent, allowing the viewers’ eyes to linger on apparent impalpable forms and to follow on all surrounding surfaces their large, intimidating dark shadows, which multiply their spatial impact. Intense beams of light of artificial source accentuate the delicacy of the material and the frames, that comes into controversy with their constructivist references.

An installation of ancient temple pediment-like molds hung on one wall appears as an anamnesis of classical-period remnants. Which as in the rest of the works, comes perhaps as an attempt to communicate the inborn symbiotic relationship between architecture and sculpture, deriving from material and utility.

Katerína Spathi

Photo credit: Irini Spathi

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bergur Thomas Anderson

Snip Snap Snubbur: a shift in Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s practice

by Ana Victoria Bruno | Sunnudagur.01.2019 | artzine in english

Snip Snap Snubbur: a shift in Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s practice

Guðmundur Thoroddsen is best known for paintings and sculptures which used to embrace the irony and dreamy qualities of surrealism, opening a window to a parallel universe where absurdity is presented as ordinary, works which have been often connected to a critic to masculinity and to our patriarchy society. His solo show Snip Snap Snubbur at Hafnarborg features some new works which demarcate a new step in the development of the artist’s practice, a shift towards a more abstract aesthetic enhancing the material aspects of the works.

His will to engage in a more material-orientated practice has been hindered by his parallel need for a narrative, an important part of his practice which he couldn’t let go completely, and which functioned as an anchor to prevent him from sinking into the uncharted waters of abstract art. Through the use of the oil paint on canvas the two urges converge into pieces where subjects and recognisable elements are present but unified in a single level of existence: characters, objects and backgrounds cohabit blended in masses of colours where shapes are defined not by distinct boundaries but by the diverse patterns and textures. The same process is visible in his sculptures: he has ceased using the wheel, an instrument which used to give some kind of stable shape to his works, and decided to make them manually from start to end, playing with piling up clay in different layers. The sculptures, just like his paintings, look like melted, collapsed, formless objects made by children in a kindergarten, suggesting a certain enjoyment and lightness behind his practice, but prompting an uncanny feeling in the viewers because they resemble human beings and familiar objects, but deformed and not quite matching the way we see people and objects in our everyday life.

In his new works the focus on material aspects gained more importance in the composition of the paintings, taking over the meaning of the works themselves: the references to the real world are reduced to echoes, mediators in this shift from a figurative practice to a more abstract one. His new works feature men smoking, walking around anxiously, in small interior scenes or in imaginary landscapes, deconstructed and melted within the background, like visions from a different universe where there is no third dimension, no perspective and no physical borders between entities.

The technical aspects of his new paintings have been influenced by Andreas Eriksson, Swedish painter whose practice focuses on landscapes transformed into abstract representations in which viewers can recognise their own places. From Erikson’s painting Thoroddsen took the ability to synthesise the variety of nature’s color gradients and shapes into simplified masses which abstract the original view, creating a sort of new nowhere land. In Eriksson’s paintings the brushstrokes are visible, a style which uncovers the importance of human gestures over a realistic portrait of reality, of human instinct over rationalism. Guðmundur Thoroddsen follows Eriksson’s research for a primordial act, an impetus which comes directly from inside the artist, whom is not trying to emulate but to create, an attempt to produce something beautiful, when „beautiful“ is understood as natural and honest.

Thoroddsen’s new works are reminiscent of the series of paintings Otages (“Hostages”) by Jean Fautrier, paintings with great material qualities representing humans’ featureless heads and torsos floating into a no-landscape, barely recognisable as parts of a human body. Jean Fautrier was active during the post second world war, and he, as many others, was dealing with the lack of faith in humanity following the brutality of the war, which he experienced in first person. In Jean Fautrier’s work the dematerialisation of the body, the fade of the subject into the landscape, was a metaphor for the cancellation of identities, and therefore humanity, in the context of the war. Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s work does not have such a dramatic implication, but there is something in those interiors scenes of men smoking which recall a sort of subtle and sneaky universal anxiety in regards of modern times.

The figures in his paintings seem to illustrate what Noam Chomsky reflects on in the documentary Requiem for the American Dream (2015). Noam Chomsky talks about the changes in the contemporary ages through a comparison to what was happening in the 70’, when despite the economic upheavals that followed the postwar economic boom and the war in Vietnam, fights for the rights of mistreated social groups such as black people and women were taking place all over the world, and people believed that the situation would get better at some point. Nowadays, Chomsky says, we are hopeless in regards to a world where conditions are not improving, on the contrary humans rights are called into questions by politics, the environmental problems are growing, and, as a result we don’t see anymore the light at the end of the tunnel. The characters in Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s paintings can be read in relation to this new human condition: they are hopeless, trapped into a room or in a nowhere landscape, overwhelmed by the surroundings, unable to find their identities, lost in the liquid modernity’s flow, the characters are eventually frozen in a time with no future.

In Guðmundur Thoroddsen’s opinion art is about having fun and he switched to a more abstract approach because he felt his practice was becoming repetitive and he needed to engage in more stimulating work. This prompted his desire to dig deeper behind the surface of his imaginary world and to experiment with a more complex physicality in his practice. The show Snip Snap Snubbur presents a new exciting stage in Thoroddsen’s art, a new direction which could bring to deeper explorations of the material if he continues walking this way. These new works represent a starting point for something new and we are thrilled to see how it will develop, if characters and objects will disappear completely absorbed into the abstract, or if figurativism will take over again. The path is open, Guðmundur Thoroddsen just has to decide if he wants to walk it all the way.

Ana Victoria Bruno

Photo credits: Ana Victoria Bruno

Reflections on Belonging: Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir at Ctrl Shft Collective

by Daría Sól Andrews | Þriðjudagur.01.2019 | artzine in english, Viðtöl

Reflections on Belonging: Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir at Ctrl Shft Collective

In the downtown district of Oakland, California, sound artist Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir opened her latest installation work, Reflecting, in a group exhibition at the Ctrl Shft Collective, Traslación. Entering into a urban warehouse building, piercing blue eyes blink out at the viewer from a projected video screen in a black box room. There is a subtle overlapping chatter, conversation from that of a fortune teller woman. The viewer is bombarded with sound from all corners, and one can almost picture the kitch fortune ball and tacky decorations. There is an element of ‘otherness’ and yet an immediate relatability to this voice. We know her, this woman, without having to know her, her vague and generic fortune tellings to which one is so desperately prepared to apply any aspect of truth or meaning to our own lives.

Ingibjörg Friðriksdóttir is an Icelandic artist who defines her practice as somewhere between a composer and an installation artist. Ingibjörg has worked collaboratively throughout her career with filmmakers, dancers, visual artists, fashion designers, and photographers. She recently moved back to Reykjavik after completing an MFA at Mills College and working in the Bay Area for three years. When she first moved to California, Ingibjörg describes ‘listening’ to the culture to learn its rules, history and sensitivities; “I had to listen to learn, to be able to form my own opinions in that culture and I had to learn that even though I felt very foreign in this culture, I would be a portrait as a certain type of human based on my gender, my ethnicity etc. You have to learn what is expected of you as that person you are seen as, even if you feel you don’t have anything in common with the group you are now categorized within.” Whilst Ingibjörg’s home roots are in Iceland, her practice is quite dually based, and I found it compelling to learn how she navigates, professionally and personally, between these two worlds she has laid claim to.

Ctrl Shft is an artist run organization and non profit art collective in the center of Oakland, providing artist studios to members, who pay rent and collaboratively put on exhibitions in the common exhibition space. The urban warehouse building is located in the downtown center of Oakland, and is almost hidden from the street, with no visible sign or marker. A new visitor wouldn’t quite know what to expect upon entering this experimental art space, as I didn’t. The collective and its members is largely queer and nonconforming to binary and heteronormative stereotypes, working to represent marginalized communities in their studio spaces. Ctrl Shft feels reminiscent to OPEN, Nýlistasafnið, and Kling og Bang, to name a few artist collectives in Reykjavik that are achieving similar success. However, community oriented, artist studio and dually functioning exhibition spaces are few and far between in Reykjavik, especially those that specifically attempt to bridge the gap between marginalized communities and professional art opportunities.

The show, Traslación, was co-curated by Colombian artist Susana Eslava and Carolina Magis Weinberg. Susana moved to the Bay Area in 2015 through an MFA grant, and is currently developing projects between Bogotá and the Bay Area. Her practice is interdisciplinary and explores themes of migration, colonization, and the intersections between social relations, art and politics. Among the participating artists were Ingibjörg, Susana, Carolina, Ana María Montenegro Jaramillo, Enar de Dios Rodríguez, Shaghayegh Cyrous, and Patricia Leal. All of the artists are international to the Bay Area, but share the common connection that each has based their practice here in California at some point along their journeys.

The exhibiting artists in Traslación, as Susana explains, are “in a state of otherness. They think in different languages, and create in a constant state of translation. They create in the impasse of the outside…engaging into conversations about what it meant to have an art practice –and a life– from a dislocated position. Traslación refers to the circular movement of a planet around a gravitational force which inevitably, takes it back to its initial position.” The exhibition explores thematics of inside/outside relations, acceptance, nativeness, discrimination, and belonging. Issues of gender, power dynamics, identity, locality, and politics are at play. These elements provide an effective connecting point to art life in Iceland, where so many feel like a constant outsider to Icelandic culture despite maintaining an artistic practice in the country for many years. This struggle is universal, apparently, for acceptance and belonging, to be from somewhere. How do we belong to and from any place?

Despite these elements of inaccessibility and otherness that seems connected to experiences both in the Bay Area and in Iceland, Ingibjörg comments on their similarly community and locally oriented natures when comparing the Bay Area to the art scene in Iceland. She states, “one similarity that surprised me was that I was not expecting to be running into the same people over and over again, like frequently happens in the art scene in Iceland. So soon it felt like ‘home.’” She values being able to connect with artists on such a familial and intimate level in her homeland; “I think it is unique in Iceland that it is very easy to connect with people, even the most successful artists are not that unreachable, and because of how similar we all are we sometimes operate as a one big family.” With that being said, the Bay Area opened up many opportunities for her, and she describes how ‘small’ Iceland feels in many ways since; “I think how similar we are creates limitation in how we sometimes think in Iceland. I didn’t realize how little I really knew about the world before I lived in the Bay Area and was blessed with so many international friends that have taught me so much.”

To add to a level of accessibility in the show, the exhibition text is presented in each of the languages of the artist’s home countries. In Ingibjörg´s Reflecting, the description explains that before moving back to Iceland from the Bay Area, she visited two psychics to “make sense of the crossroads.” Ingibjörg explains that we are constantly trying to “predict the future through tangible concepts”, seeking answers and meaning to our being. Like she explains in Icelandic, “rýmið er gjörólíkt, eftir því hverju þú trúir.” This piece creates its meaning through its audience, we see and experience what we personally believe and look for, whether it is a skepticism or a blind acceptance of truth. “This creates two worlds, intertwining within the same space while simultaneously challenging each other’s existence. As Ingibjörg reflects on her own past, present and future, she invites the audience to do the same.”

Sound echoes out from the black box and through the entire exhibition space, referencing the constant permeating of these messages out and into our everyday lives and existence. In her sound installations Ingibjörg frequently works with multi-speaker sound systems to create this surrounding effect. She tells me, “I put equal emphasize on sound and visual aspect. I believe that the visual will affect the aural experience, so it is important that those two aspects complement each other. None of my installations have been site specific, but it’s important that with each installation that the space also compliment both audible and visual part.”

In terms of current projects on the horizon, Ingibjörg is planning an installation with a traditional string quartet and live improvisation. She is also collaborating with two Chinese artists in the Bay Area of a dance film based on a previously enacted performance piece, dealing with similar thematics as Traslación. “It’s about being foreign in a new culture, the things you bring with you and the distance to you home. The dancer is dressed in water sleeves, a traditional Chinese costume, that has traditionally strict dance movements but bringing it to a new culture she is reinventing herself and the movements possible with that custom. It all began with long conversations at the dinner table, where we would also share our culture through food. Soon those conversations transformed into pieces of art, where we were building a bridge of understanding of each other and deepen understanding of cultural differences. Sophia plays a traditional Chinese instrument called Pipa but plays it a very untraditional way. In this specific piece, I am creating the soundscape, partly with using my own voice singing and reciting an Icelandic poem by Anna Marsíbil Clausen that was specifically composed for the performance piece. My favorite line in the poem is about how the sea should be gray, with tall waves. It is one of those things you don’t really think about when you grow up in a certain place, but when you are far away you start missing those things, like a certain color of the ocean that you don’t see in the new place.”

Daría Sól Andrews

Ctrl Shft Collective

ctrlshftcollective.com

More about the artists:

ingibjorgf.com

carolinamagisweinberg.com

montenegrojaramillo.info

enardediosrodriguez.com

shcyrous.com

www.susanaeslava.com

www.patricialeal.art