OPENING
Among Gods and Mortals: Icelandic Artists in Varanasi
February 8th 2025 at 15:00
Time, and space in which to work are two essential conditions for creativity. For visual artists, the studio is a sanctuary, a personal realm for contemplation and industry. This exhibition is the result of a project that posed the question: What happens when artists are transported to a studio far away from the comfort zone of the familiar?
Among Gods and Mortals offers a view into the experience of six accomplished and well-established Icelandic artists whose works shown here were conceived in connection with recent stays at Kriti Gallery and Anandvan Residency, in Varanasi, India. Situated in a verdant garden in a private enclave, the residency compound comprises individual studios with sleeping accommodations and a common dining room – all within one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in human history. The residency is at once a workplace and base camp for excursions into the many-layered worlds of Varanasi (also called Banaras), the spiritual city known in the Hindu faith as the “abode of the gods,” with its many temples and shrines devoted to fervent worship. Varanasi is a city of extremes, of the endless parade of life teeming in the streets and the solemn mourning of the dead at the cremation pyres along the sacred Ganges River.
Photographer and writer Einar Falur Ingólfsson was the first of the six artists to travel to Varanasi, in 1999. His friend, the Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, later introduced him to Navneet Raman and Petra Manefeld (gracious hosts and founders, in 2007, of Kriti Gallery), and Ajay Pandey, the learned historian who guides the artist in residence through the city, inflecting the tours with insights into India’s culture. Eventually, over the course of several return visits, Einar Falur got the idea to bring a group of artists from Iceland to Kriti to see what might emerge from their time spent in the holy city.
It is hard to imagine two more disparate landscapes and cultures than those of Iceland and India. On the one hand there is Iceland, located in the sub-Arctic, sparsely populated, geographically and historically remote, and of relative cultural homogeneity; and India, on the other hand, bordering on tropical latitudes, densely populated, ancient, and layered with a complex history at the cross-roads of diverse cultural influences.
The Icelanders who traveled to Varanasi were following in the footsteps of a long line of artists seeking inspiration and enlightenment there. Yet their purpose was not to illustrate or interpret what they found; rather, it was to allow the intense sensorial experience of the travel to India to wash over them, to see where it might lead within their own practices.
Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir
When Sólveig traveled to India for the first time, in 2023, she had already been working on drawings that explored the expressive potential of simple calligraphic lines. For much of her time at Kriti she explored the winding streets of the Varanasi, closely attending to the continuum of everyday life, such as the endless linear flow of the Ganges, or the undulating profiles of the sacred Gangatiri cows, which she sketched during her stay. Upon returning home to Reykjavík, Sólveig decided to use a roughly textured hemp paper and India ink to create her 8-panel drawing. She took a course in Chinese calligraphy and trained in the technique of controlling a thick brush to form bold, meandering lines. Seen together the drawings form a horizontal line across the sheets of paper. Later, it occurred to her that the source of the Ganges in the glaciers of the Himalayas rhymed, in a way, with the glacial rivers of Iceland. Her fascination with the ubiquitous cows was another rhyme, connecting the cow divinity of the Hindu tradition with the mythical Auðhumla, the nourishing primal cow in the creation narrative of the Prose Edda. Auðhumla became the title of the series of drawings. A series of sculptures entitled Betula (Birch) is a kind of counterpoint to the two-dimensional, horizontal line drawings. Formed from whittled birch branches and anchored to wooden bases, their delicate lines of the branches rise vertically like tendrils of smoke.
Margrét H. Blöndal
Traveling to India for the first time in October 2024, Margrét also thought of universal archetypes that occur across space, time, and human experience. The energy of Varanasi awakened a reflection onto her own past, mirrored in what she observed around her. “I travelled back in time externally and internally. It was beautiful. It was intense. The wide spectrum of life is accepted, and its bareness is clear or pure or sharp or raw. … The works are made in the midst of sensing the humidity, beauty, intensity, sound, sacredness, and nurture.” The paintings in the exhibition were all created in her Kriti studio over the course of a month. Margrét had brought with her a water-soluble oil paint but was initially unhappy with its consistency. It was only after being given a bottle of Ayurvedic oil for back pain that she tried mixing it with the pigment. Applying it to paper, working on the floor, she discovered that the pigment behaved with the just the fluidity she needed, some brushstrokes leaving a delicate oily bleed along the edges of the lines. “I knew as one knows that this particular oil would be the key into the works and that is exactly what happened.”
Eygló Harðardóttir
Eygló first stayed at the Kriti Residency in 2020, for the past years has been making and exhibiting work influenced by her stay there. As an artist, she is deeply engaged with the elemental sources of materials she uses and has studied both papermaking and the “alchemy” of making paint. For her residency in 2024 she brought with her a set of pure pigments – lapis lazuli, malachite, verdigris, rose madder, turquoise, indigo — acquired in Jaipur, where she also had visited the studio of the acclaimed artist S. Shakir Ali, who offered insight into the miniature painting tradition. “The works I made have a direct reference to this tradition when it comes to material. I used traditional miniature brushes to achieve the delicacy and finesse of the strokes and historical natural pigments from plants, semi-precious stones etc.”
The painting series Raga – Tilbrigði í lit /Colours of Raga was inspired by a concert of raga music that took place one night in the palace next to the Kriti studios, where the musicians and audience sat close together. During the concert Eygló was moved to make delicate pencil drawings using the technique automatism, the process of drawing without glancing at the paper. Raga literally means coloring, or tinging, or dyeing, and it refers to the improvisational aspect of classical Indian music, which is structured along melodic motifs. The experience of drawing in response to the music inspired the circular shapes that form the both the paintings, and a sculpture, Áhrif/Impact, constructed of thin copper sheets, etched with lines.
Einar Falur Ingólfsson
Throughout much of his career as a photographer, Einar Falur has explored notions of time, whether in multi-year projects where he has retraced the paths of earlier photographers and artists to understand how the landscapes they depicted have changed, or when, most recently, he documented the daily changes in the weather over the course of a year. In Varanasi, “I began to think about the deep and fascinating layers of time that can be seen everywhere, whether in the buildings built on top of each other over centuries, in peeling paint layers on house walls, or in culture and human life.” Einar Falur has spent several months in Varanasi over the years, recording the passage of time in two series. There are the “timelines” that comprise color photographs shot with a medium-format camera, where the same view taken at the same angle year after year shows the accretions of change taking place in the textures and colours of the architecture. Another series encompasses video works shot in a specific location and shown on a continuous loop like moving photographs of life in the streets. “In my work I am also continuously in visual discussions with artists and photographers who have both worked in India before me and affected my way of seeing in various ways. And the work is always a diary of my own life as well, one man in the mass of millions passing by.”
Guðjón Ketilsson
A visit to the archeological site at Sarnath in 2023 left a deep impression on Guðjón. Located on the outskirts of Varansi, Sarnath is the sacred site of Gautama Buddha’s first teaching, according to the Lalitastara sutra. The site is notable for its many carved votive stone stupas. “The cylindrical stone forms, each one unique, no two alike, all of which are in their own way abstract images of Buddha, aroused in me associations with some of my earlier works.” In much the same way that Guðjón had explored architectural and human forms in the past, he embarked on a new series of pencil drawings on rough paper that played with the idea of the stupa form, though without directly emulating it. Returning to Iceland, these studies of cylindrical shapes extended to an extraordinary series of wood sculptures made with a lathe, resulting in 25 unique structures, painted in varying shades of saffron and installed on pedestals. The saffron hues “appeared to me literally everywhere in Varanasi. In retrospect, I visualize countless variations of the color. When Indians talk about the color saffron, they are not necessarily talking about one specific color with precision, but the name “saffron” covers all kinds of color tones from pale reddish yellow to orange.” Other works in the exhibition include two large-scale photo collages composed of a vibrant and dizzying array of images taken in the streets of Varansi. These images are compositions, very much inspired by the clear and colorful Indian miniature paintings.
Sigurður Arni Sigurðsson
In his paintings, Sigurður Arni explores the use of shadow in rendering the illusions of receding perspective and three-dimensionality on the canvas surface. In a sense, he challenges what painting is, breaking it down into basic elements where the background of the canvas (the base of the painting) is part of the visual structure and the color surface. During his stay in India, in 2023, his eye was naturally drawn to the sight of bodies on the planar field of the landscape, and to the juxtapositions of both subtle and intense color. “The women cutting grass in the fields were dressed in beautifully woven red and sky-blue silk, in stark contrast to the pale grass. The gardeners in the public parks were elegantly adorned in orange jackets, like blooming summer flowers, while the beggar at the door blended so seamlessly with the clay-colored ground that he was barely visible. One is constantly reminded of these contrasts: wealth and destitution, fertility and barrenness, the magnificence of spirit in craftsmanship and design versus the basest instincts and poorest conditions of human existence, life and death.” The extreme contrasts of India led Sigurður Arni to rethink the canvas, leaving edges bare (unprimed) for the first time to create a kind of frame integrated within the confines of the paintings’ borders. Thus, the images of flat, rectangular fields of color with perforated holes seem to float on the naked canvas. “What is new and intriguing for me in these works is the bareness of the concept. A certain dimension and space are created, which is simultaneously exposed and deconstructed. Something is formed, but what forms it also destroys it at the same time. It builds up and breaks down.”
Curator: Pari Stave
OPENING
Bær – A Place
February 8th 2025 at 15:00
Bær / A Place
Markus Baenziger (US), Barbara Ellmann (US), Katia Klose (DE), Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir (IS), Debbie Westergaard Tuepah (CA), Mike Vos (US)
A PLACE presents a group exhibition of six international artists brought together in 2022 during an artist residency at Bær Art Center in Höfðaströnd in Skagafjörður, Iceland. The artists are, Barbara Ellmann, Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir, Mike Vos, Katia Klose, Debbie Westergaard Tuepah, and Markus Baenziger. The exhibition A PLACE, at Listasafn Árnesinga is a sort of second edition and continuing exploration of this original residency experience from 2022, exploring the lasting connections, influences, and new impressions formed in the practices of each artist as a result of this residency and exhibition.
The artists spent two weeks together at the residency together. A strong connection and a whole formed between these different individuals, and works were created that functioned as a kind of storyline and a connection to the local community. Separate but intertwined artworks were created about each artist’s individual experience of nature, culture and place.
One year later, in summer 2023, an exhibition was presented at the Art Center Bær, showing the works that were produced during the residency period. And now, in this exhibition at Listasafn Árnesinga, A PLACE, presents a blend of works that were included in the previous exhibition, while also presenting new works each artist has developed since this residency. These new works were produced with the residency experience in mind, and we can feel the influence of the natural landscape of Iceland and the community surrounding Bær Art Center strongly in the works.
What connecting themes can be found when six artists, of unconnected and differing backgrounds and localities across the globe, come together in a residency in the remote countryside in Iceland? It becomes inevitable that the stark nature will influence each artist in a commonality across their works, through the connected experience. And when each artist returns to their everyday, how can this experience resonate into their practice?
The artists work with a range of mediums, from photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. There is a strong element of locality to the works, whether photographing local landscapes in Iceland, or utilizing site- specific and found natural materials from specific areas in Iceland in the works. The works still speak strongly together as a whole – what sort of common ground can we see in the practices of these six artists?
Mike Vos, for example, overlays urban landscapes and deteriorated buildings onto scenes of natural beauty across Iceland.
And in the installation by Debbie Westergaard Tuepah, she works with environmentally produced plastic from the area of Hveragerði, local to the town of the LÁ Art Museum, presenting an installation of found and manmade whale bones.
Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir presents conceptual and experimental analogue photography focusing on distinct natural details from the landscape of Höfðaströnd. Katia Klose’´s work explores seaweed from the area, in a vibrant and surreal photographic series. Markus Baenziger collected found materials from around the residency, natural and manmade, using them to create delicate and curious sculptural works. Barbara Ellmann’´s encaustic paintings and abstract sewn drawings reveal the natural elements of Iceland in a topography of movement and shifting tides.
The remote locality is essential to each of the works. From distinct and uncommon backgrounds, the artists were brought together in this moment, producing work together during the residency with the common thread of the influential natural landscape and experience of the Höfðaströnd area.
Markus Baenziger is a Swiss born artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He has shown extensively in the U.S. as well as internationally. He is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship award, and his work was featured in solo exhibitions at the Edward Thorp Gallery, NYC, the List Gallery, Swarthmore College; the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NYC, and numerous group exhibitions including the Rose Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Walton Arts Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. His work has been widely reviewed, and can be found in the collection of the Walker Art Center, MN, and numerous private collections.
My first response to the stunning landscape surrounding Bær was to simply go on walks and take in the experience. Eventually I came across various small pieces of plastic, fragments of fishing nets, and other flotsam washed up at the shore.
I started to collect them together with other materials from nature and created a series of small sculptures. They are inspired by the brightly colored rope that I found absorbed into the ground and entangled with the sea grass, or the small fragments of plastic tossed with the stone pebbles on the shore. I see these works as a reflection on the intersection of nature and the man-made world. They establish a dialogue between the beauty of our natural environment and our forceful positioning within nature, which is constantly absorbing the physical remnants of our presence.
www.markusbaenziger.com
Barbara Ellmann lives and works in New York. She’s exhibited work for forty years at venues including the Katonah Museum of Art, the Parrish Art Museum, Montclair Art Museum, and the Haslla Art World Museum. She has been selected for residencies at Yaddo, the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Haslla Art World Museum, and Baer Art Center. She has also produced public works for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority), the City of Summit, NJ, and the Queens Public Library.
Recording memories of places, through observations and inventions, my work allows recognizable imagery to exist alongside pure abstraction within the same multi-panel installation. This series highlights the natural landscape with a focus on how water shapes not only the geography, but also one’s social, economic, and spiritual experience of life. In Iceland, I experienced a place where nature takes center stage in a way that feels both ancient and alive, thrilling and frightening in its power. A sense of geological time is written into the landscape features. The snow compacted to glacial ice might have fallen there over a thousand years ago, and yet an eruption might bring up lava from the core of the earth and lend new features to the ever-changing contours of the place. My known sense of ground had been a kind of neutral, static constant, whereas the dynamism of the landscape here felt like an inversion of time conflating past and present, a turning of an hourglass, and a startling reminder of interdependence. www.barbaraellmann.com
Katia Klose, born in East Berlin (Germany), lives in Leipzig. She studied graphic design at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin, photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and photo editing at the Ostkreuzschule Berlin. She has been selected for several residencies in France, Germany and Iceland and got schoolarships in Germany, Australia and Canada. She has shown extensively in the Germany and EU as well as internationally.
Katia Klose photographic work examines reality in all of its sensual and poetic qualities. Natural forms are reconfigured and re-examined when staged by the photographer as her subjects. Through documenting the environment in this way, her images reveal the hidden connections between human existence and nature. The series Sseaweed (the hide) uses seaweed found on the black sand beach around Bær and arranges these specimens so they may seem unreal or surreal. Presented as negatives with varying shades of grey, blue and sienna, the images from the series : iInversive act as a form of disengagement from reality. The mountains are otherworldly, somewhat muted and magical.
www.katiaklose.com
Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir is a fine art photographer based in Reykjavíik who only works in analogue photography, especially in historic techniques in her darkroom. Jóna’´s work is strongly influenced by Icelandic folktales, where hidden creatures and beings lurk, eager to reveal themselves and stir our imagination. This fascination with the unseen, is beautifully reflected in her soft and dreamlike images. Her dedication to black and white analogue photography, allows her to create images that evoke a sense of timelessness and introspection.
Her images often transcend stark reality as she strives to present them from unique perspectives that challenge conventional norms. Employing traditional and alternative photographic processes such as palladium, bromoil and silver gelatine, require meticulous craftsmanship. The sacred space of her darkroom becomes integral to her creative journey, where she immerses herself in the transformation of film into tangible prints. It is within this realm that magic happens, where happy accidents and boundless imagination find their expression.
www.jonaphotoart.is
Debbie Westergaard Tuepah is a Canadian artist working primarily in sculpture. She exhibits internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards. Notable exhibitions include Surrey Art Gallery, The Reach Gallery Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, and Bellevue Washington’s Sculpture Biennial.
Roaming Bær gave me space to consider the precariousness of the world, collect detritus, and study the detrimental impact of plastics on living organisms. Found plastics bore evidence of degradation into microplastics and nanoplastics, which exist in water, sediments, air, rain, and ice; and the bodies of humans and other creatures. Combined with the discovery of cetacean vertebrae and animal bones, this relationship between plastics and life materialized strongly in my work. In Tender Rituals VI, 3D printed whale vertebrae hover over dark pebbles, but the materials are in question. Bones that seem plastic are compostable and biodegradable, while the pebbles are in fact recycled plastics that are destined for reuse: both are materials of hope from forward-thinking companies. Tender Rituals IV ’s cetacean bones and worn metal fishing floats connect the work to fishing related litter such as nets, while Tender Rituals VII incorporates a degraded fishing float enveloped in an animal bone. Both embody the relationship between plastics and living creatures.
www.debbietuepah.com
Pebbles in Tender Rituals VI were generously provided by Pure North Recycling in Hveragerði.
Mike Vos is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR. Drawing inspiration from various literary movements and themes, Vos uses traditional and experimental 4×5 film techniques, multi-channel video, field recordings and instrumentation to craft complex narratives that advocate for the preservation of wild spaces. Constantly pushing the capabilities of film photography, analog video and sound, Vos creates immersive experiences to draw viewers into surreal representations of physical places. Vos has exhibited work and attended artist residencies across the United States, Mexico, Canada and Iceland. In 2024 he was awarded a fellowship with The Sitka Center for Art & Ecology in Oregon and released his debut monograph ‘Somewhere in Another Place’ through Buckman Publishing.
www.mikevos.com
Curator: Daría Sól Andrews.
ARTIST TALK
Bær – A Place
February 9th 2025 at 14:00
Curator Daria Sól Andrews talks to artists of the exhibition Bær / A Place
Markus Baenziger (US), Barbara Ellmann (US), Katia Klose (DE), Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir (IS), Debbie Westergaard Tuepah (CA), Mike Vos (US)
A PLACE presents a group exhibition of six international artists brought together in 2022 during an artist residency at Bær Art Center in Höfðaströnd in Skagafjörður, Iceland. The artists are, Barbara Ellmann, Jóna Þorvaldsdóttir, Mike Vos, Katia Klose, Debbie Westergaard Tuepah, and Markus Baenziger. The exhibition A PLACE, at Listasafn Árnesinga is a sort of second edition and continuing exploration of this original residency experience from 2022, exploring the lasting connections, influences, and new impressions formed in the practices of each artist as a result of this residency and exhibition.