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22/2/2008

La Duree

National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik

The exhibition “La Durée” is an attempt to bring two major Icelandic artists in conjunction with a foreign one, and thus modify the common habit which segregates the one from the other. The National Gallery of Iceland feels that this is the best way to confront an art culture which is both local and international, and acknowledges no mental restrictions, but sees itself as belonging in any place, any time, regardless of its origins. The content of the exhibition emphasizes unequivocally that “La Durée,” the duration of time, which the French philosopher Henri Bergson defined as the basis of human independence and formation, is a universal phenomenon without limits.

The exhibition brings together Swiss artist Emmanuelle Antille and Icelanders Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and Guðný Rósa Ingimarsdóttir. In 2003 Emmanuelle Antille represented her country at the 50th Venice Biennale, with her video work Angels Camp (2001-2003). Antille has long been renowned for her daring works focussing on the immediate environment, where the interaction of family and friends takes on the air of ancient rites; or youngsters make a place for themselves in suburban buildings like some exotic tribal group. Her work poses urgent questions about the state of culture and everyday life in modern society.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 with her Versations Tetralogia, which attracted great attention for its remarkable combination of imagery, music and theatre. The Icelandic pavilion in the Giardini was transformed to resemble a barn, and visitors were invited into a journey through time in a mysterious mystical world, a place between sleeping and waking, where characters and actors from past centuries mixed with ghosts and monsters at a musical level. Thus the observer could pass from a cinematic progression to a musical experience in a symbolic world that took on a whole new form.

In 2005 Guðný Rósa Ingimarsdóttir was one of those who represented Belgium at an exhibition of ARCO art in Madrid. Visitors became acquainted with her unique world, which is generally manifested silently and subtly through drawings which seem to come into being with neither beginning nor end. Her handling of the material in her most recent works is often based on many different layers of texture, brought out by a scalpel from beneath a net pattern, so that what lies beneath is revealed in an equivocal and ambiguous manner, to disappear once more inwards into time and space, which flow silently on like ice floes beneath the surface of the visual world.

National Gallery of Iceland
Frikirkjuvegi 7 - Reykjavik
Admission free

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