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X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://old.icelandicartcenter.is
X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Icelandic Art Center
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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20220618
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20220725
DTSTAMP:20260530T074649
CREATED:20220614T151611Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220803T160456Z
UID:23698-1655510400-1658707199@old.icelandicartcenter.is
SUMMARY:Grounded Currents
DESCRIPTION:Artists: Maryse Goudreau\, Hugo Llanes\, Zinnia Naqvi\, Sigrún Gyða Sveinsdóttir\,\nMarzieh Emadi & Sina Saadat\nCurator: Þorbjörg Jónsdóttir \nOpen daily except Mondays 2:00 – 5:00 PM \nEavesdroppers \nI lived in Iceland for over a decade but—dismissively—never went whale watching until back in\nReykjavík this spring. With my eight-year-old as alibi\, I bought two tickets for a boat on Faxaflói\nBay; I packed sandwiches\, binoculars\, and low expectations. Onboard\, we studied posters in the\nlower decks with their familiar and exquisite wildlife illustrations by Jón Baldur Hlíðberg\, a keen naturalist who once described to me the activity of modern birdwatching (traditionally a no-girls-allowed endeavour) as an evolutionary extension of the hunt. Perhaps that’s the real reason I was sceptical about whale watching: even though it is posited by the tourist industry as an eco-friendly\nalternative to whaling\, it still had the air of a seek-and-consume pursuit. I didn’t need to go out and hassle whales; for me\, it was enough to know they were there. \nYou can tell where this is going\, right? That once I saw actual\, animate humpback whales\nspouting and fluking in Faxaflói Bay\, my cynicism melted away and I was transformed by the\nencounter? Well\, maybe. It was indeed surprisingly magical. But the pleasure was an odd one—a\nvoyeuristic one. We saw no breaching\, only backs and tails\, tantalising suggestions of behemoths\nbelow. The guide\, a marine biologist\, counted over the loudspeaker for us the minutes between\ndives; we all somehow held our breath for eight and a half minutes with the whales until they\nsurfaced again. Despite spending nearly all of their lives underwater\, whales need to come up to\nbreathe\, and that is what the whale watching industry capitalises on. Breathing. Our boat was close\nenough that I could look into the creatures’ blowholes as they expelled the air from their\nvoluminous lungs. Humpbacks\, being baleen whales\, have two blowholes\, like two nostrils. It is an\naberrant thing to gaze into someone’s nostrils and find some gratification there\, and an awkward\nthing to admit to it. And yet that is what I did\, and what I am confessing. \nThere is a similar spark of uncanny voyeurism igniting the works in Grounded Currents as\nthe artists here are looking\, reaching\, across some divide or another. And here I am reaching for a\nword that doesn’t seem to exist in the English language\, because I don’t mean voyeurism in the\nsexual sense; I don’t mean surveillance with its usual connotation of espionage; I don’t mean\nobservation in a neutral\, methodological manner. But watch\, as Zinnia Naqvi strives to understand\nher encounter with an uncomfortable exchange between her middle-class aunt and a domestic\nworker\, a recent immigrant with a family crisis. Naqvi’s The Translation Is Approximate rehashes\nthe conversation she witnessed and recorded some eight years previous\, exploring her relationship\nwith the power dynamics between the two women—and between herself and this scene that became\nthe subject of an earlier artwork. To whatever extent there is “voyeurism” here\, it is\, perhaps\,\nmotivated by sympathy\, and a desire to narrow or at least interpret socioeconomic and cross-cultural gaps. \nIn Marzieh Emadi and Sina Saadat’s videos and animations\, we also see stretching across\nrifts and voids. Quite literally\, in the case of Rope Walker: a tiny figure crosses a tightrope above\ndozens of scenes of live footage filmed in the night-time streets of Vienna—a patchwork quilt of\ndrivers\, passengers and pedestrians monitored\, anonymously\, and stitched together into a\nmesmerising blanket revealing the quotidian motions of everyday urban life. In other works\, Emadi\nand Saadat focus inwards\, reaching from the conscious into the unconscious and back\, in dreamlike\nimagery touching on the surreal. Sometimes\, they even watch sleepers sleeping\, and as viewers of\ntheir work\, we become accomplices. Sigrún Gyða Sveinsdóttir\, on the other hand\, gives voice to the\nwatched in Hlaupa\, a video installation based on an operatic performance in which four trolls reveal the burden of being observed. Extending back into Icelandic folklore in order to interrogate\ncontemporary crises of climate and society\, Sveinsdóttir sets the stage for her narrators to tell the\ntale of another troll who gave up running from the petrifying light of the sun and allowed herself to\nturn to stone. Was this a willing self-sacrifice\, or a surrender under duress? I imagine an eerie\nresonance between that hardened troll and a character conjured by Agnes Obel when she sings in\nher own haunting voice: “They say every sin will have a thousand eyes / To guilty fools with guilty\nminds / But I must be cruel to be kind / Deep within my head of stone…” \nWe know from physics that observed phenomena sometimes change their behaviours simply\nby virtue of being watched. Protons and electrons aside\, is it even possible to faithfully observe\nanother sentient\, self-aware being like a whale without disrupting its ways? Certainly not on an\nintrusive whale-watching boat on Faxaflói Bay\, but probably neither through subtler scientific\nmeans—if only because whales are already drowning in the overwhelming noise of human\nactivities. “Aquatic animals are immersed in sound\,” explains biologist David George Haskell in his\n2022 book Sounds Wild and Broken . “Sound flows almost unimpeded from watery surrounds to\nwatery innards. ‘Hearing’ is a full-body experience. […] Having lived most of my life inland\, many\nhours’ drive from the sea\, I have seldom seen or heard whales. But the whales hear me. They are\nimmersed in the sounds of my purchases from over the horizon every day of their lives.” Artist\nMaryse Goudreau\, however\, lives right on a North Atlantic bay in Quebec\, and much of her practice focuses on the lives and sounds of her local beluga whales. She reverses the dynamic Haskell\ndescribes\, immersing participants and viewers in belugas’ calls and even the drumming of their\nhearts; she asks collaborators to interpret the meanings in these sounds from across the chasm of\nspecies lines. In her multi-channel video Beluga Constellation \, Goudreau imagines a future in\nwhich cetaceans’ songs—their “data”—outlive and replace human technologies. I wonder\, then\,\nwhether those whales would take some pleasure in eavesdropping on us. \nEavesdropping: perhaps that is the word I have been grasping for\, the common activity in\nwhich these currents are grounded. In the context of contemporary technology and big data\nsurveillance\, “eavesdropping” connotes something less insidious and more analogue\, a harmless\nlistening-in\, a curiosity driven by a desire to be part of what’s happening on the other side of the\nwall. These artists brought together in Hjalteyri invite us to witness their acts of well-meaning\nwitnessing. And Hugo Llanes grounds it to the north Iceland–local by dropping anchor in\nEyjafjörður\, peering in on the creatures who normally swim past the Factory undetected. The jaws\nof the Atlantic wolffish he has etched on the seashells in his site-inspired installation have emerged\nfrom the artist’s longstanding interest in power dynamics\, from the legacy of colonialism in his\nnative Mexico to the domination of humans over other animals. Llanes heard that regular divers in\nEyjafjörður took interest in a certain wolffish because they noticed she seemed to be curious about\nthem\, even to recognise them. And why wouldn’t she? We’re all curious\, whether about the people\nwhose language or circumstance we can’t quite understand\, about the inner dreamscapes we can’t\nseem to grasp\, about the creatures whose sounds spark excitement but not comprehension. Even\,\nsimply\, about the breathing mechanisms of those creatures\, familiar and mysterious all at the same\ntime. \n—Shauna Laurel Jones\,\nart historian and environmental writer
URL:https://old.icelandicartcenter.is/exhibition/grounded-currents/
LOCATION:The Factory in Hjalteyri\, Brekkuhús 3b\, Hjalteyri\, 601\, Iceland
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://old.icelandicartcenter.is/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Marzieh-Emadi-Sina-Saadat-Es-gibt-allerdings-Unaussprechliches-nr1-scaled.jpg
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