April 25th 2024
14:00
Artist talk.
Artist talk with Hrafnkell Sigurðsson. The event will be in Icelandic but there will be some time in the end of the talk that you can ask questions in English.
Gallery 1 / 2nd of March – 25th of August 2024 / Aerials
Nature is not only encompassing it also resides in us preventing us from distinguishing clearly between outer reality and inner perception. This is why Hrafnkell Sigurðsson is preoccupied with nature as the one who realizes that he belongs to it completely. He pitches his cusped, prominent tents – foreign elements in style of symmetric space laboratories or oriental pagodas – in front of the snow-white surroundings. His whimsicality towards nature is characterized by a provocative boldness whereas the surroundings cannot assume his orderliness and must consent to a position of a neutral background to his staging. Our inner nature is however amply revealed in Buchers´ Duel, a video of two symmetric butchers, holding on to hooks in mid-air as fighting Samurais dressed in pastel coloured freezing plant outfit against a black background, ready to attack one another with long daggers, which however never touch.
Another challenge appeared in 2024 in form of Aerials, as continuation of Freeze Frame, a video loop installation on five LED screens exhibited in Ásmundarsalur, Reykjavik, in 2020. Both series are the result of innumerable climbing to the summit of Mount Skálafell, dating back to 2017, where the snow laid aerials and the sculptor’s supporting iron rods covered in clay seems obvious. The difference is that Hrafnkell is not involved with the modeling but satisfies himself with documenting the attacking snowdrift, the result of nature’s elements thus approaching creation itself yet avoiding any appropriation of its product.
Hrafnkell Sigurðsson (b. 1963) lives and works in Reykjavik. He graduated as Master of Arts from the Goldsmiths College in London, in 2002, after studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, 1988-1990, and the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, 1987. According to himself, he provides the structure on which nature relies, photographs it and processes in a computer, partly assisted by artificial intelligence. The human hand, nature’s elements and digital technology are combined in a complete process where the final result appears in the form of photographic works.
In 2023 Hrafnkell Sigurðsson received the prestigious Icelandic Visual Art Award.
https://www.hrafnkellsigurdsson.com/
Text by: Dr. Halldór Björn Runólfsson
May 9th 2024
14:00
Artist talk.
Kristín Scheving museum director talks to artists Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir and Mikael Lind on May 9th from 14:00.
Skinnings / Gallery 2 / 2nd of March – 25th of August 2024
The new video installation Skinnings by Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir and Mikael Lind was created specifically for the exhibition. The installation consists of 30 video pieces and 30 sound works created for 3 projectors and 6 speakers.
Sigga Björg works with both figurative and abstract drawings on paper and also draws straight onto walls. She has made many video works using stop-motion technique, in which every frame of the animation is drawn by hand. The exhibition includes drawings from the process of making the video works, and those drawings could be seen as animations even if they are made with pencil, pen and watercolour on paper. The drawings were created layer by layer and recorded frame by frame, so the connection between the drawings and the video works is indissoluble.
The sound world of the video installation is composed by the electronic musician Mikael Lind, who has worked together with Sigga Björg on a number of video projects in the past years. Mikael interprets the colours and movements of the subject with individual soundscapes characterized by diverse electronic music styles. The sound designs span everything from ambient music and musique concrete to pure techno. Mikael’s sound world works effectively to open up and create space within the overall work. Sigga Björg’s works often bring together figurative line drawings, colourful and parallel worlds that indicate that there are more than five dimensions of perception, and provide insight into magic as well as our potential for weaving more complex patterns of reality than we experience in our own lives, thus tracing our way along unpredictable paths into the future.
Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir (b. 1977) lives and works in Reykjavík. Her works have been exhibited widely abroad and in all major art museums and art spaces in Iceland. Sigurðardóttir´s works are in the collections of all major art museums in Iceland as well as in art collection in the Nordic countries, Belgium, England, Switzerland and Germany. Sigurðardóttir graduated with an MA degree from the Glasgow School of Art (2004) and a BA degree from the Iceland Academy of the Arts (2001).
Mikael Lind (b. 1981) lives and works in Reykjavík. He has released four LPs as well as numerous digital releases, both independently and in collaboration with others. He has played his music in many concert venues in Iceland and in many parts of Europe. Lind has a Master’s degree in electronic music production from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
The Artists want to thank Artists´ Salary Fund for their support.
https://siggabjorg.net
June 15th at 15:00
Artist talk.
Artist talk with Kristinn Már Pálmason May 9th 2024.
Kaþarsis / Gallery 3 / March 2nd – August 25th 2024
Kristinn Már Pálmason shows paintings that are large in size and fizzing with life. Almost in motion, they draw us in like a whirlwind – so much is happening on the picture plane. We see a range of geometrical shapes, manifestations of diverse symbols, and allusions to semiotics of past and present, figurative and abstract drawings, along with some handwritten words, and elsewhere natural shapes. In Kristinn’s paintings the light comes from within and shines outwards. He uses a combination of spray technique, ink drawing and paint to create an ambiguous world of diverse objects and forms that seem to float around each other within the picture plane. Kristinn’s work is very musical, with sharp, gripping swings between crescendo and diminuendo, chaotic rhythm and a turbulent energy that seems to vibrate, making our pupils expand. And underneath is a heavy beat. In these visually complex paintings, chaos is not a force to be tamed but an integral part of a visual work of art. The world of Kristinn’s art is organized and at the same time fragmented, a sort of visual cacophony that has its zone in the overtones of consciousness, like the zone where dreams appear to us.
Kristinn Már Pálmason (b. 1967) lives and works in Reykjavík. His works have been exhibited widely abroad and in most major art museums and art spaces in Iceland. He has engaged in various art related projects and co-founding art galleries in Reykjavík, such as Anima (2006 -2008) and Kling & Bang (from 2003). Pálmason graduated with an MA degree from The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (1998) as well as studying at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts (1990-1994).
The Artist wants to thank Artists´ Salary Fund and Visual Art Fund for their support.
June 15th 2024
14:00
Artist talk.
Artist talk with Erla S. Haraldsdóttir on June 15th at 14:00
Gallery 4 – My Mother´s dream – 2nd of March – 25th of August 2024
My Mother’s Dream: The Recent Work of Erla S. Haraldsdóttir
The unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united—a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints.
—Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967)
In Writing and Difference, French philosopher and theoretician Jacques Derrida clarifies his concepts of the trace and the supplement. He speaks of the “unconscious text” as an ideal where meaning and force are conjoined, and yet spectrally absent—file cabinets filled with copies of “originary prints.”
Erla Haraldsdóttir’s autobiographical and autoethnographic project My Mother’s Dream revolves around a dream that her great-great grandmother had when she was a teenager. It consists of a book with the diary entry with which the artist’s great- grandmother records her mother’s dream and of a series of large-format paintings and smaller sketches that illustrate sequences from a kinswoman’s dream from around the year 1858.
The dream unfolds as a series of encounters with “hidden people,” as elves or fairies are called in local Icelandic belief. The book contains a facsimile of the diary entries, a photograph of the artist’s great-great-grandmother and great-grandmother, and translations of the dream into a matrix of languages that Haraldsdóttir has encountered in her lived experience in recent years, namely, English, Swedish, Icelandic, German, and isiNdebele (a Bantu language of South Africa). Dominant and minoritarian languages form a basis for different readings and transcriptions—Derrida’s “originary prints”— and this text of the unconscious is likewise valorized by the artistic process of its translation into pigment on canvas, or paper, or wall. Text and textile merge as family matters, women’s work, and what C. G. Jung would call an archetypical dream that taps into the collective unconscious are coming into focus. The familial and private thus strives towards the collective public and symbolic. But it doesn’t end there, as My Mother’s Dream has a reverse side My Dream, consisting of blank pages that invite readers to record their own unconscious dreamscapes.
The dream deals with birthing: the husband of a “hidden woman”/fairy mother seeks the help of a young girl (the dreamer) for his wife who is going into a difficult labor. The girl agrees to assist and in return is promised the gift of an intricate Icelandic traditional folk costume. But the fairy mother provides an injunction: the girl must never speak of this sequence of events in waking life. Naive as she is, she fails to heed this advice and is visited again later by the furious fairy mother, who takes back the folk costume. This traumatizes the dreaming girl to such an extent that she refuses to undergo confirmation, an important rite of passage into adulthood for Icelandic teenagers. How does the dream end? Twofold: after reconciling with the dreamer, the “hidden woman” tells her a secret blessed word for times of trouble; on her deathbed, the dreamer recounts her dream to her daughter, she did not reveal the secret of the blessed word of the “hidden woman” while retelling the stories of her encounters with her.
The distant, fairytale-like, unconscious material of these dreams is probed for the contents of this exhibition. It presents a new large-format painted diptych of the “hidden woman”/fairy mother before and after the great-great-grandmother incurs her wrath. It also includes a mural that sits between the two parts of the painting. The English translation of My Mother’s Dream appears in a new series of works on paper that are illuminated manuscript pages in seven parts. A large-format painting, My Mother’s Dream, where the dream is recorded as a blown-up illuminated manuscript page, is presented for the second time after an exhibition at Nörrtalje Konsthall in 2021. Additionally, there are several inkjet prints of female reproductive organs merging with Icelandic folk costumes in a variety of colors. Last but not least, Haraldsdóttir is exhibiting for the first time a series of oil paintings of dream sequences and natural landscapes from Iceland in small square-format paintings.
Thus, the pure traces of an original unconscious writing take shape in a painting of the unconscious, an autoanthropology of the unconscious, and a questioning of the self, kinship, womanhood, and language.
Haraldsdóttir studied at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and the San Francisco Arts Institute and has a degree from the Valand Academy of Fine Art in Gothenburg, 1998. Born in Reykjavík, she currently lives and works in Berlin and Johannesburg.
Text by: Craniv Boyd
June 15th 2024
15:00
Introduction to the artwork of Gígja Reynisdóttir and workshop.
Artist Gígja Reynisdóttir will be presenting her work and directing a workshop on Saturday, June 15 from 3-4 p.m.
After the presentation of her works, a workshop will be held where guests will have the opportunity to express themselves in creating composite collages and/or drawings of different leaves, dried flowers and golden leaf. The workshop will take approx. 1 hour.
Nature, especially the plant kingdom, is a prominent theme in Gígja Reynisdóttir’s works. She intertwines natural materials and subjects that concern her, but the complexity of human and social aspects is especially important to her.
Gígja graduated with a BFA degree from Academy Minerva in Groningen in 1997 and an MFA degree from Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2000. She has since lived and worked in the Netherlands.
On the one hand, Gígja’s work is divided into sculptures and collage, and on the other hand, delicate pencil and pastel drawings. Recently, she developed a special technique that allows her to transform leaves into material that can be drawn on.
In her surroundings in northern Holland, Gígja collects various types of leaves for her works, both from the wild but also from garden and indoor plants. The drawings are delicate pencil or pastel drawings, often of birds or animals but also portraits of people.
The plant leaves she chooses as material are often from inconspicuous wild plants that we humans usually pay little attention to.
More information can be found at www.gigjareynisdottir.com