Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.05.2017, Blaðsíða 25

25The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 07 — 2017
to a sharp corner where there was a
fantastic lighting situation. It was
bright enough to see the structure, but
dark enough for the edges to blur out
and disappear. I had no sense of dis-
tance, and it fascinated me.”
That moment would become the
trigger for another large scale work
that came to fruition three years later
at the Maribel Lopez Gallery in Berlin,
entitled ‘Path’. Visitors would ring the
doorbell, and enter an unexpected and
discombobulating corridor, dimly lit
through horizontal and vertical slits.
“The lighting created a shadow play,”
says Elín. “Once your eyes adjusted,
you’d start seeing the structure. Ev-
erything got inverted—you might
think you’re supposed to turn right,
then walk into the wall. People came
out the same door they went in, but
thought they were on the other side of
the building.”
The piece travelled next to Iceland’s
National Gallery, tripled in both scale
and, as it would turn out, in effect.
“One person broke through the wall
and ran out of the fire escape,” says
Elín. “They never found them. Anoth-
er—a renowned writer, Þór Vilhjálms-
son—kicked through the wall. He was
a critic, and a black belt. He was so
angry. He didn’t think this was art, he
thought it was bullshit. It was a won-
derful response.”
EMBRACING THE UNKNOWN
This momentary escape from real-
ity—when the viewer is taken by sur-
prise by a visual effect, an architectur-
al interference, or the realisation that
they’re looking at something other
than they first thought—is a thread
that runs throughout Elín’s work.
“It’s like waking up,” says Elín.
“That’s what interests me: figuring
out situations that can surprise us.
A lot of what we experience in daily
life, we expect to happen. We lose our
sense of alertness—walking down
a stair, knowing you’ll turn left and
walk down a hill. It’s interesting try-
ing to shake up the usual way of seeing
things. It has a lot to do with embrac-
ing the unknown, whatever that is.
Even I don’t know what these works
will produce or what kind of experi-
ences they will be.”
Producing such experiences touch-
es on some bigger questions, such as
how able we are to navigate the unfa-
miliar, how we cope with change, and
even, through the widest possible lens,
how we relate to death. “I like to think
about that bigger picture,” says Elín.
“What I experienced in the dark space
of ‘Path’ was that, because there was
nothing to focus on visually, all the
attention was drawn
to myself, and my
thoughts, my fears—
everything. The envi-
ronment draws atten-
tion to yourself.”
THE COLLAPSE
This theme was
echoed again in ‘Par-
allax’, a piece made in
2009. Whilst prepar-
ing for an exhibition at
the Reykjavík Art Mu-
seum, Elín was con-
fronted by the realities
of Iceland’s financial
collapse. “I was really
confused,” she explains. “I didn’t want
to just exhibit something, given what
has just happened.”
The situation made her ask some
core questions about the value and
purpose of art, especially in con-
trast to other government-funded
programmes like healthcare. “I was
thinking about the role of museums,
and asking what their purpose was,”
Elín recalls. “So I decided to draw at-
tention to the space itself, and its po-
tential as a place to discuss these is-
sues in society.”
The resulting artwork was based
on a photograph of a house in Haf-
narfjörður, taken by her father in the
70s, in which a modern frontage was
placed over a traditional wooden house
in an ineffective attempt to mask what
lay behind.
“It felt so symbolic for Iceland,” says
Elín. “It’s so surreal to put up a mod-
ernistic front and not consider that if
you take five steps to the right, you see
the old wooden house. It’s symbolic for
the superficiality of image.”
The piece also contained a room
that appeared normal on the accom-
panying live video feed, until someone
moved through the space, at which
point a perspective trick was revealed.
“I was really interested in scale, and
shifts of scale, and power relations,”
says Elín, “and how they can smoothly
change without you noticing.”
The show also brought home the
power of art as a driver for grass-
roots discourse. “I think art is a social
force,” says Elín, “not this hierarchi-
cal, market-driven place. We all own
these spaces. They should be a place
we all have the right to use, to question
these systems that we have put up.”
BRICK SPIRAL
Elín came face to face with the socio-
political and socioeconomic aspects of
art again in 2012 when, during a resi-
dency in a village in Morocco, she was
invited to take part in the Marrakech
Biennale. The cura-
tors were from outside
of the country, and
wanted to connect the
artists with locals in
downtown Marrakech.
“It was a beau-
tiful idea,” says Elín,
“but I wondered if
they’d be able to pull it
off without being pa-
tronising towards the
locals. I said I wanted
to make a project in
the village where I
lived. It was problem-
atic at first, but in the
end they realised what
I wanted to do and supported it.”
Elín had arrived with just a very
basic toolbox, but took the challenge
head-on. She enlisted eight local ma-
sons from the village, where houses
were constructed from sunbaked mud
bricks. “It’s a very different culture,”
she recalls. “Men and women don’t eat
together, they eat in separate rooms.
There are strict rules on gender roles
and how you behave in public. It wasn’t
easy for me to come in—a blonde for-
eign woman with blue eyes—and hire
eight men, tell them what to do, and
try to gain their trust.”
Between Elín’s French language
skills and lots of improvisation, she
got the workmen on board to create
a tall spiral of mud brick walls with
large mirrors on the inside. “They
asked about why I was doing it, and
who it was for,” says Elín. “I was fac-
ing the fact that the cost of the piece
was the same as they earned in a year,
and these people are struggling to feed
their kids. It raised heavy questions
about why I was doing it. For me, the
work became about the process of be-
ing confronted with these questions of
purpose.”
Elín fondly remembers the atten-
tion of some local children during the
spiral’s construction. On the first day,
three showed up, then ten. Soon Elín
and the workmen were surrounded
daily by up to fifty local children, all
fascinated by what was happening.
“They didn’t know what I was doing,
and neither did I,” smiles Elín. “In the
end, the spiral became a place to meet.
It was a magnet—an excuse to start a
dialogue. And that’s what’s most im-
portant.”
CLUES APPEAR
Once again, Elín had succeeded in
starting an experimental process that
yielded unexpected results.
“Each piece teaches me something
through the process of making it,” she
says. “I often don’t understand the
works until many years later. I don’t
have that distance yet, somehow. I feel
like I’m in my teenage years of creating
work, and I don’t think there’ll come a
time when it all becomes clear. I don’t
have an aim, really—I look forward to
the surprises. Projects are more like
gifts that open up ways of living and
thinking.”
“It’s an adventure,” she finishes.
“Like trekking on a map that’s just
white. And as you go along, the land-
scape builds up around you gradually,
and clues appear. And I’ll probably
never figure it out, in the end.”
Share this article: gpv.is/elin
“Projects
are like
gifts that
open up
ways of
living and
thinking.”
'Mud Brick Spiral,' Marrakech Biennale
'Untitled' white tunnel, Reykjavík Arts Festival, Ísafjörður
'Simulacra,' i8, Reykjavík