The Pavilion of Iceland
54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson
Iceland at the 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Reykjavík, Iceland, 17 March 2011:
The official Icelandic representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia will be the Spanish-Icelandic duo of Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, whose collaborations explore the political, socio-economic, and personal forces that affect life in the present day. Their work, which has taken them to cities around the world, and often develops out of their personal interactions with people and places, can be characterized as an artistic interpretation of culture and the complex relationships that compose it. Castro and Ólafsson's exhibition for Venice, Under Deconstruction, will explore current socio-political issues in Iceland and elsewhere, using video, performance, sculpture, sound, and music interventions. The 2011 exhibition is organized by the Icelandic Art Center in Reykjavík, Iceland, under the commissionership of Dorothée Kirch, and is curated by Ellen Blumenstein.
Within the Pavilion of Iceland, located at the Palazzo Zenobio at the Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael in Dorsoduro, Castro and Ólafsson will present a musically-inflected video installation, Constitution of The Republic of Iceland (2008-2011). In conjunction with this work, the artists will also present a Venice-based iteration of their ongoing project, Your Country Doesn't Exist (2003-present), which will consist of a video registration of a performance in Venice, on view in the Pavilion, and a sound intervention broadcast regularly via public loudspeakers at a public space in the city.
For Constitution of The Republic of Iceland, Castro and Ólafsson worked together with Icelandic composer Karólína Eiríksdóttir to create a score to which the Icelandic Constitution could be performed with soprano, baritone, piano, double bass, and a mixed chamber choir. The composition was first publicly performed in March 2008 in Iceland, six months before the collapse of the country's banking system. The video to be presented in Venice is of a recent performance of the work staged and broadcast on Icelandic TV and at Hafnarborg Cultural Centre in Hafnarborg, Iceland, in February of this year.
Under Deconstruction will also include a new Venice-based iteration of the artists' ongoing project Your Country Doesn't Exist, which started in 2003 at Platform Garanti CAC in Turkey, as a Dada- and Surrealism-inspired assemblage sculpture, and has also been presented in the Netherlands, Austria, Iceland, the United States, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, among other countries. For the project, Castro and Ólafsson have traveled around the world spreading the statement “Your Country Doesn't Exist” through visual modes of communication such as wall-drawings, billboards, and TV advertisements. In Venice, Castro and Ólafsson will present this work as a sound and video-based public intervention. Preceding the Biennale, the artists will record a public performance in Venice in which the statement, “This is an announcement from Libia and Ólafur: Your country doesn't exist, your country doesn't exist” is sung in a variety of languages from a gondola traveling throughout the canals of the city. The artists' song will come together in disharmony with the traditional Italian serenades being sung to tourists on nearby gondolas. The video of this public performance will be displayed within the pavilion, while the audio recording of the song will be broadcast at a public space to be announced at a later date.
Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson: Under Deconstruction will be on view from 10:00 to 20:00 from 1 June through 3 June 2011. From 4 June through 27 November 2011, the exhibition will be open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 to 18:00.
About the Artists
Libia Castro (b. Madrid, Spain) and Ólafur Ólafsson (b. Reykjavík, Iceland), aptly referred to as “citizens of the world”, met in the Netherlands in 1997 and have been collaborating since. In exploring the relationships among art, everyday life, sociopolitical issues, and cross-cultural issues, Castro and Ólafsson have built up a strong body of work using a variety of media, including documentary video, sound and multimedia installation, public performance, sculpture, and photography. They have developed a conceptual approach to art-making that is characterized by a sense of play, transgression, and inventiveness.
Both artists received their M . A . in visual arts from The Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands, where their partnership together was formed. From the onset, their work has garnered critical attention in the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, and abroad. They have shown in international exhibitions at major museums, contemporary art centers and galleries around the world, and in 2009 they were awarded third place in the prestigious Dutch art prize, Prix de Rome, for their video Lobbyists. Their work is included in such collections as C A AC in Sevilla, Spain, The National Gallery of Iceland, and Kverneland Sammlung in Berlin, Germany. The artists currently live and work in Berlin and Rotterdam.
About the Curator
Berlin-based curator Ellen Blumenstein (b. Kassel, Germany) joins with with Castro and Ólafsson to create a dynamic, multi-national team for the 2011 Pavilion of Iceland. Blumenstein worked as a curator for Kunst-Werke, Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, from 1998-2005 and has curated various international exhibitions and projects in museums and galleries throughout Europe, the United States, and South America, including Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition, with Klaus Biesenbach and Felix Ensslin, at Kunst-Werke, Institute for Contemporary Art, in 2005; The Human Stain — Conceptual Art from the Collections of CGAC , at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela in 2009; and Gordon Matta-Clark, at B DA Gallery, Berlin in 2010, among many others. Blumenstein is also co-founder of the curatorial collective, T H E OF F IC E , through which she has curated several exhibitions and performances.
Ellen Blumenstein received her B . A . in German language and literature studies, musicology, and journalism from University of Hamburg, and her M . A . in German language and literature studies, musicology, journalism, communication studies, and art history from the Free University of Berlin. She is currently working to complete her dissertation at Ruhr Universitat, Bochum, Germany.
About the Commissioner
Dorothée Kirch (b. Erlangen, Germany) has served as Director of the Icelandic Art Center since March 2010. Prior to this appointment, she worked as a freelance curator and cultural worker on contemporary visual arts exhibitions, events and documentaries in Iceland and abroad. She served as co-curator, along with Markus Thor Andresson, of the Pavilion of Iceland in the 53rd International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia in 2009. She has also worked as a curator for 114 Steps, Sassa Trülzsch Gallery, Berlin in 2009; Stray Beacons, as part of the Reykjavik Arts Festival in 2009; and Reykjavik Experiment Marathon with Hans Ulrich Olbrist and Olafur Eliasson in 2007-2008.
Dorothée Kirch lived in New York and Berlin before returning to Reykjavik in early 2010. Kirch graduated with a B . A . in studio arts from the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2001, and an M . B . A . from Reykjavik University in 2005.
Iceland in the International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia
Icelandic artists were first presented at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and by 1984 the country had an official presence with a national pavilion. In the last decade, more funding and effort has been expended to support and promote the representing artist, reflecting the growing importance of these international art events on artists' careers. Most recently, Iceland was represented by Ragnar Kjartansson (2009), Steingrímur Eyfjörd (2007), Gabríela Fridriksdóttir (2005), Rúrí (2003), and Finnbogi Pétursson (2001), all artists who exhibit internationally and have developed strong reputations both inside and outside Iceland. Until 2005, the Icelandic artists most often exhibited in a small pavilion designed in 1956 by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto in the Giardini di Castelli exhibition gardens. In recent years, however, the exhibitions were mounted outside the Giardini, in the Palazzo Michiel dal Brusà on the Canale Grande in 2007 and 2009, and in the Palazzo Zenobio at the Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael in Dorsoduro this year.
