Guided tour around the exhibition Rolling Line
– Thursday 20th April, 8pm
– Nýlistasafnið, 2nd floor, The Marshall House
– Grandagarður 20, 101 RVK
The Living Art Museum cordially welcomes you to a guided tour of the exhibition Rolling Line, which opened on March 18th in the Marshall House, Grandagarður 20, 101 Reykjavík.
Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir, director of the Living Art Museum and co-curator of the exhibition Rolling Line, will offer a guided tour of the exhibition on Thursday, First Day of Summer, April 20th at 20:00.
The tour is free of charge.
Happy Hour at Marshall Restaurant & Bar until 9pm.
Rolling Line spans more than a decade of work and documentation by artist Ólafur Lárusson (1951 – 2014).
Ólafur was a prolific artist and an active participant in the Icelandic art scene, which had come to a crossroad in the middle of the seventies; the same time his fascination with the camera had led him to bold experiments with the device as documentation, and also a platform to explore the boundaries of the medium. Ólafur was in the group of fellow art students who resigned from their studies at The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (MHÍ) in 1974 in a push against stasis and headed off to the Netherlands to pursue further education at the notable Atelier ´63 in Haarlem.
After graduating from the school in 1976, Ólafur moved home to Iceland the same year and accepted an invitation to teach in the Department in Transition (Deild í mótun), a new department at MHÍ later called the Living Art Department (Nýlistadeild), and where he would teach film making.
Ólafur was one of the founding members of The Living Art Museum and a significant contributor to the progress of performance in Iceland.
This is the first time that Ólafur´s works are presented together to this extent, an attempt to open up a comprehensive view of the artist’s most productive years.
The exhibition has gathered works from the collections of The Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland and The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum (Safnasafnið), amongst those in private collections and with Ólafur´s friends and contemporaries.
The Living Art Museum would like to invite you to a one night screening of works by Duncan Campbell, Rachel MacLean og Beagles & Ramsay, Thursday 6th april, between 8 – 9 pm. The artists John Beagles & Graham Ramsay will be present for the screening.
Against the backdrop of significant political change and uncertainty in the UK this screening will bring together three artists based in Scotland working with video. The various works in this show delve into aspects of politics and national identity, along with an exploration of individual and collective agency. Some are more direct interventions into historical and political discourses, whilst others operate in more allusive and oblique ways.
DUNCAN CAMPBELL works in many ways including constructing documentary-like narratives from archival footage. He often builds up profiles of significant public figures, while interspersing found film with material he shoots himself. In several of his films Campbell has investigated subjects and people closely associated with Northern Ireland and the country’s social and political history, revealing a side to the subject not commonly portrayed in the mainstream media.
Campbell’s 37-minute film Bernadette (2008) portrays socialist and former Northern Irish MP Bernadette Devlin during the 1960s and 1970s. When elected at the age of twenty-one, Devlin became the youngest female Member of Parliament ever to have been elected to Westminster. Campbell’s depiction of Devlin reveals the dynamics of documentary film making itself. He blurs fact and fiction and mixes archival and new footage to construct and unravel representations of his subject. Making use of the distance that the passage of time allows, he creates a portrait of Devlin that is free from the political partisanship that has surrounded many depictions of her.
In 2013 Campbell represented Scotland at the 55th Venice Biennale, and won the 2014 Turner Prize.
RACHEL MACLEAN
The supersaturated, candy-coloured worlds of Rachel Maclean’s films are created with the help of green screen technology. Populated by shifting, ghoulish characters – each one played by Maclean – they are inspired by fairytales, horror films and TV talent shows and offer a sharp critique of contemporary culture. For this show she would present The Lion and The Unicorn (12mins) 2012.
The Lion and The Unicorn is a short film inspired by the heraldic symbols found on the Royal Coat of Arms of the United Kingdom, the lion (representing England) and the unicorn (representing Scotland). The film uses these representations of both alliance and opposition to explore the myriad, convoluted and often contradictory constructions of cultural identity that make up the unstable definitions of what it means to be Scottish or part of the Union with England.
The video features three recurrent characters: the lion, the unicorn and the queen. These figures seem to emerge from disparate genres, including shadowy historical reconstruction, playful nursery rhyme and pragmatic TV interview. Inhabiting the rich historical setting of Traquair House in the Scottish Borders, they are seen drinking North-sea oil from Jacobite crystal, dividing up the pieces of a Union Jack cake and inciting conflict over the mispronunciation of Robert Burns.
Rachel Maclean will represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2017.
BEAGLES & RAMSAY
Molar (5:35mins 2014) features a semi-tranquilised voice that appears to be suffering from a crumbling brain and slumped dentistry. As such the video shares similarities with earlier work where characters and objects ventriloquize social and cultural pathologies, and are implicated in the complex struggle to carve out a space for personal and political agency.
As with much of Beagles & Ramsay’s work the tone, timbre and content of the voice in Molar oscillates between the melancholic, reflective and intoxicated, to the manic and accusatory. The voice reflects something of the subjective experience of shifting between feelings of combativeness, impotence and complicity. Their interest in 3D animation comes from a long-standing engagement with popular forms as they aim to create works capable of communicating with a wide range of publics, and also because of a desire to explore how such forms can be defamiliarised with unconventional content.
John Beagles and Graham Ramsay have exhibited internationally at venues including the Venice Biennale; MoMA PS1, New York; the Migros Museum, Zurich; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the ICA, London; and the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
They have also curated numerous exhibitions over the past twenty years.
The event is open for all and free of charge.
