Reykjavik Art Museum, Icelandic Art Center and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts TALK it through

 The American Embassy in Iceland supports TALK Series

 Luis E. Arreaga, the American ambassador to Iceland, signed a contract with Reykjavik Art Museum, the Icelandic Art Center and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts who are initiating a collaborative lecture program under the title TALK Lecture & Visitor Series. The program is intended to offer an ongoing platform for encounters with art professionals on an international level. Comprising visits by leading figures in the visual arts, this program initiative will bring to the Icelandic art community and to the public at large the burgeoning ideas and diverse practices that shape the dialogue within the international contemporary art scene. The American Embassy in Iceland is the main sponsor for TALK Series 2012.

"The US Embassy is pleased to sponsor this program bringing together the American and Icelandic arts communities" said Ambassador Arreaga. "Art is a universal language and we can all learn from each other."

TALK Transfers

Each series will have a thematic focus, where speakers offer a specific insight to the field. For spring 2012, under the title TALK Transfers, the series places its focus on topics such as work and ethics of the artist, his role and responsibility; and how he transfers roles with different intentions. Participants are Americans Eleanor Heartney, Helen Molesworth and Alanna Heiss, and America based Briton Claire Bishop.

First guest arriving in January

Eleanor Heartney is the first participant in the TALK Series. She will give a lecture on Thursday 26 January 8 p.m, on the topic of art and labour with reference to the exhibition of Santiago Sierra at Reykjavik Art Museum. Heartney is a Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for such other publications as Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and The New York Times. She received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism in 1992.

Events will take place at Hafnarhús - Reykjavik Art Museum and are open to everyone, free of charge. Further information about the program can be found here.

Under Deconstruction

Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson

In the National Gallery of Iceland

January 14 – February 19, 2012

It caught the attention of Venetians last summer – June 2011 – when the Spanish Icelandic duo Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson got mezzo-soprano Ásgerður Júníusdóttir to sing aboard a gondola on the canals of Venice. Your country doesn’t exist (2003-) is a serenade by composer Karólína Lárusdóttir, especially composed for Libia & Ólafur on the occasion of their participation in the Venice Biennale as the Icelandic representatives. While Júníusdóttir interpreted the serenade throughout the city, in several languages, accompanied by a gondolier, the trumpet David Boato and guitarist Alberto Mesirca, her journey was projected on a large screen in the Icelandic pavilion as a high quality video. Above the entrance, a large neon sign with the same title in Italian, Il tuo paese non esiste, brightened the pavilion courtyard.

During 10 years Libia & Ólafur have created several different versions of Your country doesn’t exist, e.g. with the participation of one of the country’s most eminent ambassadors, in form of a painting, which also was a part of the exhibition. The work echoes the videoed composition The Constitution of the Republic of Iceland, which premiered in 2008, also to the music of Karólína Eiríksdóttir. The version, which met the visitors of the Icelandic pavilion by the summer of 2011 was produced in collaboration with the Icelandic Television and Hafnarborg, the Hafnarfjordur Centre

of Culture and Fine Art.

In addition to aforementioned works Exorcising Ancient Ghosts, 2010-11, will premiere in Iceland. The inspiration of the piece derives from the ancient Athenian code, which prohibited all proximity between freeborn Athenians and other inhabitants of the state, such as immigrants, foreign women and slaves. In Venice the work was performed in Italian, in audio, by a Neapolitan woman and a Balinese man, while the couple indulged in intercourse. An English version was presented in other sets of headphones. The audio equipment of the work is centred in a large Greek vase, which attracted an immense sensation when it premiered in Venice.

The exhibition Under Deconstruction was commissioned by the Icelandic Art Center for the Pavilion of Iceland at the 54th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia and curated by Ellen Blumenstein.

A concise catalogue published by Sternberg press and designed by jungundwenig, Berlin accompanies the exhibition.

VÍB, Islandsbanki's Wealth Management, was the main supporter of the Icelandic pavilion in 2013.

Image:

Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson, Your Country Doesn’t Exist, 2011

Neon sign on the facade of the Icelandic Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011

Courtesy of Collezione Tullio Leggeri

Photograph: Lilja Gunnarsdóttir

Words by Haukur S. Magnússon

Photos by Julia Staples