September 29th, 2008 | 2008, works
Everybody is doing what they can – Reykjavík Art Museum – 18.09 – 02.11-2008
Installation view Everybody is doing what they can, in the center of the image; recording of a portrait of Methúsalem (Dúi) Þórisson is starting
Fyrir sýninguna Allir gera það sem þeir geta ákváðum við að skapa virkt rými í A sal Listasafns Reykjavíkur þar sem við fengjum einstaklinga úr mismunandi geirum samfélagsin til okkar í myndbandsupptökur. Við settum upp upptökuver og tókum upp portrett/viðtöl við fólk þar sem það ræddi um sjálft sig, hvaðan það er og samfélagið útfrá uppvexti sínum, námi, störfum og reynslu.
Frekar enn að velja hina “hlutlausu” leið, notuðum breytilega (litaða) lýsingu, reyk, confetti og ábreiður (sem við vörpuðum yfir módelin) sem truflandi þætti, en líka til að undirstrika að mynd er alltaf sköpun, bygging og afbygging – hversu “ósýnileg”, meðvituð eða ómeðvituð sem hún er.
Á sýningunni gefst gestum kostur á að upplifa þessa hópmynd. En sökum heildar-tímalengdar þess efnis sem sett er fram á sýningunni, verður fólk að velja og hafna og þar með setja saman sýna eigin hópmynd og um leið upplifun af verkinu.
Libia Castro og Ólafur Ólafsson
(English version coming soon)
Camera-, sound-, light- and editing-assist: Hafsteinn Gunnarsson, Hendrik Linnet og Kristinn Loðmfjörð
(Scroll down for list of participants and text by Hafþór Yngvason director of Reykjavík Art Museum)
Halldór B. Runólfsson director of The Icelandic National Gallery being portrayed in the studio, to the right a glimpse of the projected portrait of journalist and publisher Hjálmar Sveinsson
Installation view, portraits of Ósk Vilhjálmsdóttir, artist and environmentalist and Pétur H. Ármannsson, architect and theoretician
Video-still from the portrait of Pétur H. Ármannsson, architect and theoretician
Video-still from the portrait of Katrín Jakobsdóttir, parliamentarian of the Green Left party in Iceland
Elda Thorisson-Faurelien, coffee-house owner, photograph taken during recording
Installation view, on left screens with various portraits, on right preparation for shooting in the studio
Various portraits, a.o. Þorsteinn Hilmarsson, Björn Þorsteinsson, Henry Alexander Henrysson, Andri Snær Magnason, Þórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir, Grímur Atlason, Guðrún Pétursdóttir and Linda Guðmundsdóttir.
Libia and Ólafur preparing a recording with Methúsalem (Dúi) Þórisson,
in background portrait of Andri Snær Magnason.
Introduction
“Everybody is doing what they can”* by Libia Castro
and Ólafur Ólafsson is the first in a new series of
exhibitions at the Reykjavik Art Museum—Hafnarhus
where the interrelationship between the museum and
the public space outside its walls is critically reexamined.
There is a longstanding convention in modernist
art practice to isolate art from the outside world. Fine
art is commonly considered an activity of its own kind,
a special sphere of human interests that transcends
everyday life and social concerns. The poet Rainer Maria
Rilke expressed this aesthetic conviction well in a 1903
essay, stating that “art must not demand or expect aught
from outside; it should refer to nothing that lay beyond
it, see nothing that was not within itself; its environment
must lie within its own boundaries.”
The urge to overcome this isolation has long been
a motivating force for explorations of new forms in
contemporary art. It has, as the German writer Peter
Bürger has emphasized, always been the goal of the
avant-garde to bring art into association with life praxis.
This new exhibition series at Hafnarhus offers a platform
for such explorations, with the goal of demystifying the
role of art in the life of the city.
In their most recent work, Libia Castro and
Ólafur Ólafsson play with the format and context of
exhibitions, questioning protocols and experimenting
with alternatives to conventionally staged shows. As in
many of their previous exhibitions, they seek to make
the boundaries of the exhibition space porous enough
to allow it to become infused with the reality outside.
But this time, rather than gathering all their materials
for the exhibition before the opening day from “outside”
the exhibition venue (whether it be the immediate
surroundings or the culture and place where a project
is realized), they turn the exhibition itself into a site for
research—or a sculptural think-tank—where the visitor
is a spectator but inevitably a participant of the process
as well.
Libia and Ólafur have shaped the exhibition space
at Hafnarhus into a production and presentation site,
including a recording and editing studio, where they
conduct screen tests publicly throughout much of the
exhibition’s duration. The screen tests, which involve
individuals from different backgrounds and social
positions, are conducted with the aim of creating an
image of the site’s social and cultural context while, at
the same time, reflecting on the nature and form of “a
field portrait” and on what the artists refer to as “speaking
models” and “actors in reality.” During the show these
screen tests will also be “broadcasted” back into the city’s
diverse neighborhoods by means of a peripatetic video
projection onto various city walls.
The approach that Libia and Ólafur bring to this
work continues their longstanding engagement with
social and cultural concerns, such as urban identity,
globalization and cultural differences. The aim for the
“field portraits” is not only to portray the people living in
a specific cultural, social and economic environment but
also to engage with the (social) dynamics of locality to
reactivate and reveal its current concerns. As so often
before, their approach proceeds along a dialectical path.
Like many artists in the last two decades, they choose
to involve diverse groups of people in their work. In this
way, their methods follow along the lines of what the
French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud has called
“relational art,” which he described as “an art taking as
its theoretical horizon the realm of human interaction
and its social context, rather than the assertion of an
independent and private symbolic space” (1996). Thus
Libia and Ólafur often spend long periods staying on
site and cooperating with local communities, activist
groups, and immigrants and migrant workers, creating
social encounters and dialogues that further a sense of
community. But their work tends to be less ambiguous
and more explicitly critical than “relational art.” This is the
other route of the dialectical path. Whatever the medium
they choose in each instance—sculpture, installation,
photography, video, sound—their work readily takes the
form of public intervention, where they infiltrate social
situations or create temporary spaces that function as
sites of contestation. In this regard, Libia and Ólafur are
a part of a growing international group of artists that has
emerged in the last few years, artists who are working
in a socially engaged way but who have gone beyond
“relational art” to develop new forms of public address
that have sometimes been described as a new form of
realism. As Fernando Francés, Director of CAC Málaga,
has written about Libia and Ólafur’s work:
A constant element is their critique of the world today, and
in which humour co-exists alongside aspirations for social
improvement in a scenario full of dynamism … With their
works, the artists attempt to take the spectator to new realms
of reflection and to question truths that are generally accepted
as absolute without reasonable doubts ever being raised as to
their veracity.
Since beginning their collaboration in 1997, Libia
and Ólafur have created site-related projects in various
countries, including Cuba, Turkey, the Netherlands,
Denmark, Germany, Belgium, the U.S. and Italy as well
as in their native countries of Spain and Iceland. Their
work has been exhibited at major international venues,
such as Manifesta 7 (2008), CAC Málaga (2007), The
Reykjavik Art Festival (2005), De Appel CAC Amsterdam
(2004) and The 8th Havana Biennial (2003), and has
been reviewed in publications such as Contemporary
(UK), Untitled (UK), Art.es (ES), Artecontexto (ES), Art in
America (USA), Metropolis M (NL) and Sjónauki (IS), as
well as in numerous catalogues and other specialized
publications. Libia and Ólafur have been nominated
for prestigious art awards and invited to various art
residency programs internationally. They maintain
residences in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Berlin,
where they are currently attending the residency
program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Germany.
— Hafthór Yngvason, Director, Reykjavík Art Museum
* The title of the project derives from a talk between Libia
and her father on life’s (and people’s) impulses and motor
to survive, without a moral or ethical judgment. The talk was
triggered by a severe drama caused by a family member
suffering from a paranoid schizophrenia and a society
unwilling to fully recognize and deal with such an illness.
Participants:
Agnes Ósk Þorgrímsdóttir
Andri Snær Magnason
Annþór Kristján Karlsson
Ásmundur Ásmundsson
Benedikt H. Bjarnason
Björn Þorsteinsson
Edda Rós Karlsdóttir
Einar (Beggi) Guðmundsson
Elda Thorisson-Faurelien
Elín Helga Steingrímsdóttir
Grímur Atlason
Guðrún Pétursdóttir
Halldór B. Runólfsson
Henry Alexander Henrysson
Hjálmar Sveinsson
Jón Gnarr
Jóna Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir
Katrín Jakobsdóttir
Linda Guðmundsdóttir
Magnús Árni Skúlason
Methúsalem Þórisson
Ósk Vilhjálmsdóttir
Pétur H. Ármannsson
Regína Bjarnadóttir
Sigriður Þorgeirsdóttir
Sigrún Ólafsdóttir
Sigurður Skúlason
Tinna Laufey Ásgeirsdóttir
Tómas Már Sigurðsson
Valgarður Bragason
Zuzanna Tokarczyk
Þorsteinn Hilmarsson
Þórunn Sveinbjarnardóttir