18/5/2012
(I)ndependent People
Different venues, Reykjavik
A large-scale collaborative international visual arts project that involves many of Reykjavik's exhibition spaces, museums, galleries and public space during the Reykjavik Arts Festival 2012. Focusing on contemporary visual art from the Nordic and Baltic countries, it asks if and how collaboration can operate in continual negotiation between contesting ideas and desires, yet allowing unplanned and transformative action.
Curated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist
Project Manager: Kristín Scheving
Reykjavík Arts Festival 2012 announces (I)ndependent People, a large-scale collaborative international visual arts project that will involve many of Reykjavík’s exhibition spaces, museums, galleries and public space during the festival season and throughout the summer. Focusing on contemporary visual art from the Nordic and Baltic countries, (I)ndependent People asks if and how collaboration can operate in continual negotiation between contesting ideas and desires, yet allowing unplanned and transformative action.
Whether they have been working together for a long time or been composed to undertake a temporary collaboration, all the artists participating in this project do so as part of a joint venture. Artists’ collectives, partnerships, workshops and exchanges permit an investigation of artistic subjectivity and authorship, allowing knowledge to be acquired so that it may be shared with others. Both thematically and performatively, the construction, intention and focus of this exhibition may be seen to parallel the notion of a ‘third space’ (Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994).
This allows seemingly incommensurable differences to be negotiated, rendering meaning ambivalent and warping the mirror of representation. In turn, cultural knowledge is revealed as a hybridised, open and expanding code. Such an intervention – made possible through exchange between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions in Iceland and abroad – quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenising, unifying force. This further relies on participants relinquishing their subjectivity, or momentarily placing it in parenthesis; in this way, artists create the specific uncertainty that makes the third, other, hybrid identity possible. Through this process, a position is generated at which the in-between of collaboration can potentially become a site for social and cultural transformation – a locus around identities, at which becoming can resist the impetus toward homogeneity.
Often labelled as either ‘alternative’ or ‘independent’, several of the participating groups address questions concerning the structure of the mediated (art) world. By moving beyond ideas of national representation, concepts of public and private, author and audience, this context might provide a nuanced discourse about commonality. By describing a place between subjectivities, ideologies, interests and structures, the temporary, in-between space created in Reykjavík can become a proposition for unimagined ideas to be examined, planned and constructed. This position has been portrayed as a vessel without sharp contours – as ambiguous, vague and indefinable; however, these are the very qualities that often make contemporary art worthy of hope. Or, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, “The space in between things is the space in which things are undone, the space to the side and around, which is the space of subversion and fraying, the edge of any identity’s limits. In short, it is the space of the bounding and undoing of the identities, which constitute it”. (Elisabeth Grosz, Architecture From Outside, MIT Press, 2001).
The extensive project brings together 29 artist-collectives with the collaboration of over 100 participants. (I)ndependent People is curated by Swedish curator and theorist Jonatan Habib Engqvist and made possible through exchange and collaborative undertakings between a cluster of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and institutions. Venues include Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland, The Nordic House, Kling & Bang, The Living Art Museum, The Icelandic Sculpture Association and ASÍ Art Museum, together with public space in Reykjavík and off-site events. Saturday May 19 will be dedicated to openings of the exhibitions with receptions and events at the venues from morning to evening and Sunday May 20 will host an international seminar.
The complete programme is on the web site.
Media Contact
For further information and interviews, please refer to the following contacts:
Dorothée Kirch
Icelandic Art Center
+ 354 690 49 60
doro@icelandicartcenter.is
Kristín Scheving
Reykjavík Arts Festival
+354 845 38 05
kristin@artfest.is
Openings, Saturday, 19th of May, 2012 from 10:00
International Seminar, Sunday, 20th of May, 2012 13:00
Venues
The Reykjavík Art Museum
19th of May – 2nd of September
Goksøyr & Martens
Institutt for Degeneret Kunst
The Leyline Project
Knitting House by Elin Strand-Ruin & The New Beauty Council
Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir & Hlynur Hallson
Kling og Bang
Anonymous
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas + 4.333
The Icelandic Love Corporation
Útúrdúr
Raflost & Steina
The Living Art Museum
19th of May – 15th of July
Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson
The National Gallery of Iceland
19th of May – 2nd of September
No Gods, No Parents (UKS)
Box
NÝLÓ + Archive of Artist Run Initiatives
AIM Europe
Sofia Hultén & Ivan Seal
IC-98 with Mikael Brygger & Henriikka Tavi
Kling & Bang
19th of May – 10th of June
1857
A Kassen
The Nordic house
19th of May – 17th of June
Superflex
The Awareness Muscle team
Learning Site
The Icelandic Sculptural Association
19th of May – 10th of June
Endemi
ASI Art Museum
19th of May – 1st of July
IC-98
Wooloo
Rúrí & Gunnlaugur M. Einarsson
Center for Icelandic Art
19th of May – 3rd of June
M.E.E.H