During a guided tour of Leaky Bodies, Shared Worlds: Works from the Bunkier Sztuki Collection in Kraków at Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús, a member of the audience remarked that forests and deer seem exotic to Icelanders. The conversation took place in front of a work by Bartosz Kokosiński. The exhibition brings together works by […]
LIGHT. YOKO ONO’S IMAGINE PEACE TOWER ON VIÐEY
In July 1964, a book was published in Tokyo in an edition of just five hundred copies. Titled Grapefruit, it was written and published by Yoko Ono. Rather than stories, it contained more than 150 short instructions, some calling for action, others to be carried out entirely in the imagination. In one of them, Cloud […]
ALVAR AALTO. THE HUMANIST DIMENSION OF MODERNISM
Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto is one of the most important figures of twentieth-century modernism. His work encompassed almost the entire human environment, from buildings and interiors to furniture, lighting and everyday objects. One question kept resurfacing across his work: what is the relationship between architecture and the person who experiences it? Aalto developed […]
SIGURÐUR GUÐJÓNSSON. VEIL.
A DEEPER ORDER The camera remains still. Before it lies the black expanse of Skeiðarársandur, yet the landscape is never quite the same from one moment to the next. Wind carries fine grains of sand across the surface, lifting, concentrating, and dispersing them. Black gives way in places to areas of near white. Streaks and […]
JAMES MERRY – BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD
At the entrance to Metamorphlings at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík is Green Man – the first mask James Merry made for himself. The earlier ones had been created with other people in mind. During the Artist Talk, Merry describes it as the „cover” of the exhibition and says that, of all the […]
MAIA RUTH LEE. WHAT DO WE TAKE WITH US?
What do we actually take with us when we spend our lives moving from one place to another? Maia Ruth Lee has been responding to this question for more than a decade. With suitcases, ropes, pieces of metal, canvas, family films and signs resembling an alphabet that cannot be read. In her work, migration does […]
ENNIO MORRICONE. BEFORE THE CAMERA ROLLED
While filming Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone played Ennio Morricone’s music on set before shooting began. The actors heard it as they performed, moving to its rhythm. It reversed the usual order of things: the music was not added to a finished image. The image was created in the presence of […]
The Last First. John Snorri and K2
John Snorri Sigurjónsson was fourteen when he first read about K2. It was 1987, just months after one of the deadliest seasons in the mountain’s history. In the summer of 1986, thirteen people died on K2, among them British climbers Alan Rouse and Julie Tullis. According to Iceland Review, the article Snorri may have come […]
TREMORS / SKJÁLFTAR – ODYSSEAS CHLORIDIS
TREMORS / Skjálftar brings together three projects by Odysseas Chloridis: Enceladus, Voice of Rocks and Burning in Water. Photography is the starting point, but Chloridis rarely leaves the image untouched. He works with the photograph as a physical object, using different printing processes, collage, drawing, cutting and direct interventions into its surface. Enceladus, for example, […]