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| A kassen - 1857 - Reykjavik Arts Festival |
| A kassen - 1857 - Listahátíð í Reykjavík |
| 19. 05. 2012 - 16. 06. 2012 |
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OPENING SATURDAY 19th OF MAY AT 5 pm.
(I)ndependent People: Collaborations and Artist Initiatives
1857, A Kassen, Kling & Bang,
Kling & Bang serves as a venue, collaborator and partner in crime for the large-scale exhibition ‘(I)ndependent People’; the visual art focus of Reykjavík Arts Festival 2012 taking place in several venues in Reykjavík during the summer of 2012. Several projects within this exhibition will be realised over the course of the exhibitions. Both projects housed in Kling & Bang´s venue on Hverfisgata play with the temporal and physical parameters of a traditional exhibition format. With humour and technical sensitivity both groups are in dialogue with Kling & Bang’s trajectory of previous exhibitions; referencing the conceptual minimalism of the 1960’s, Performance and Pop art.
In January 2012, 1857 sent a message in a bottle from Senegal, in the hope that the North Equatorial Current and Gulf Stream would bring it to Iceland in time for the opening on May 19th 2012. The artists claim that the bottle contains a short note with the curator’s email address and phone number, inviting the finder(s) to represent the group in Reykjavík, all expenses paid. If no one claims the prize, the artists will set out to seek the bottle. In Norway, where 1857 runs a gallery located in a former lumberyard in the Grønland area in Oslo, a research institute has been contacted to analyse the relevant winds and currents in an attempt to calculate the bottle’s most likely route across the Atlantic. In the venue, we find evidence of their actions, but whether project begins or ends in May, depends on the winds and currents.
A Kassen consists of the four Danish artists Christian Bretton-Meyer, Morten Steen Hebsgaard, Søren Petersen and Tommy Petersen. They often work with performativity in their installations and architectural interventions. Characteristic of their work are actions or interferences that discreetly transform the exhibition space or simple gestures that reflect complex processes. At times, these actions are so subtle that they risk not being noticed, but, if you are attentive enough, you might catch sight of incremental shifts that function with an absurd sense of humour and deploy an element of surprise. Being a multifaceted artist-run space operating with negligible funding and producing high-quality exhibitions by using the knowledge contributed by members of the group, in terms of logistics, carpentry, etc Kling & Bang’s attitude is crucial to the execution of A Kassen’s contribution to the exhibition ‘(I)ndependent People’. In this exhibition, A Kassen take photos of different, every day objects, like a book or a chair. Each object is then pulverised and mixed with a binding agent to create paint. The liquidised object is finally ‘painted’ onto the wall over an area equivalent to the size of its source material and a framed photo of the same object will be hung next to, or on, the coloured wall surface.
The collective running Kling & Bang often directly participates in the process of creating artworks in collaboration with their exhibitors. Within the festival, they will on the one hand serve both a producer and venue, by offering their premises to 1857 and A Kassen, and on the other as author, or artists’ group, by presenting an installation comprised of a video archive consisting of artists’ work in the Reykjavík Art Museum.
Text by the curator, Jonatan Habib Engqvist. For more info see: www.independentpeople.is
http://independentpeople.is/info/
A kassen website:
http://akassen.com/
1857 website:
http://www.1857.no/
Kling & Bang gallery
Hverfisgata 42
IS-101 Reykjavik
Iceland
Open Thursday-Sunday from 2-6 pm. |
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Grandagarður 20 - 101 Reykjavík
kob@this.is |
