Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.05.2016, Page 41

N 30
2016
Reykjavík
Arts Festival
Dance, dance, dance
at Reykjavík Arts Festival
Play
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Shantala Shivalingappa
@ National Theatre of Iceland — 31 May, 7:30 pm
CalmusWaves
A dance piece created in real time
@ Reykjavík City Theatre — 26 May, 9:00 pm
FlexN Iceland
Street dance from Brooklyn & Manchester
@ Brim, Geirsgata 11 — 21 May, 8:00 pm
Founders & Partners of Reykjavík Arts Festival artfest.is
“Come with me. To the beginning,
to the chaos, where everything is,
but also nothing,” proclaims sculp-
tor Elín Hansdóttir, faux-dramat-
ically, her voice bouncing around
the Ásmundursafn sculpture mu-
seum. She cuts a diminutive, el-
egant figure in the pristine white
space as she reads from the text, by
curator Dorothée Kirch. It’s an un-
usual, lyrical accompaniment for
Elín's new exhibition, ‘Disruption’,
which contrasts her work against
that of Ásmundur Sveinsson, the
sculptor who built and populated
the museum in which we stand.
The two artists make for an in-
teresting pairing. Ásmundur was
born in 1893, and lived for almost
a century, passing away in 1982,
when Elín was just two years old.
“He grew up on a farm in the coun-
tryside in the early 1900s,” says
Elín, “and then I’m a contempo-
rary artist. But we found out from
reading his interviews that we're
actually dealing with the same
problem. Artists nowadays are
looking for the same thing they
were 100 years ago, if you look at
the core. You keep looking for it…
but I don’t think there’s even a way
of grasping it, even though you
know it’s there. It’s a search.”
Chain reaction
This search has led Elín’s work
through many different shapes,
sizes and media. The first piece on
show is a 3D animation, showing a
small, white domino falling over
to knock over a bigger one, which
knocks over a bigger one, and so
on, until, in the end, a monolith
falls, shattering into geometric
pieces as it hits the ground.
“This is a 3D rendering,” she
says. “The first domino is life size,
but in theory, it could collapse an-
other one that’s almost double its
size. So they gradually grow until
the last three big ones fracture
when they drop, into a Voronoi
tessellation, named after the Rus-
sian mathematician. You can find
these everywhere in nature, from
the micro scale to the macro scale.
It’s when a surface breaks at the
weakest point. For example, inside
a cluster of bubbles you can find
the tessellation. Or the pattern on
giraffes, or a mud surface crack-
ing. There are interesting ways to
use this algorithm, for example
to see how humans might behave.
I imposed it onto this utopian,
artificial space, in virtual reality.
These shapes break in a way which
could never happen in reality.”
The rise and fall
The biggest space of the museum
contains those same dominoes,
brought to life by an application
that fed the design into a robot,
which then cut them out. “I was in-
terested in making something for
a sculpture museum that wasn’t
touched by human hands,” says
Elín. “But then, after the first step,
we spent three weeks plastering
them! So, in the end, the human
hand was indispensable."
This work, entitled “COLLAPSE,”
is the show’s centrepiece, and
seems intentionally plural and
open-ended in its meaning—a fact
that’s accentuated as Iceland’s cur-
rent governmental problems cast
a decidedly political shadow over
the work. “There are many sys-
tems now that are collapsing, be-
cause they don’t serve society how
we thought they would,” says Elín.
“It’s an interesting time. A time
of reevaluating. It’s a reoccurring
theme—it’s not the first time the
system has collapsed. It happens
again and again throughout his-
tory. Maybe capitalism is today's
Roman Empire. And right now, it's
collapsing.”
See ‘Disruption’ at Ásmundursafn until
September 9th.
SHARE: gpv.is/core
Mutual Core
‘Disruption’ finds the red thread
between two Icelandic sculptors
By JOHN ROGERS Photos by ART BICNICK
Art Time travel41
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 5 — 2016