SMOKING SCHEDULE
29 June – Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir (IS), Mehraneh Atashi (IR), Eggert Pétursson (IS), Loidys Carnero (CU), Hreinn Friðfinnsson (IS)
6 July – David Bernstein (US), Brynhildur Þorgeirsdóttir (IS), Geirþrúður Einarsdóttir (IS), ), Gylfi Sigurðsson (IS), Anna Hrund Másdóttir (IS), Guðmundur Thoroddsen (IS)
13 July – Lars TCF Holdhus (NO), Yosuke Amemiya (JP), Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir (IS) Žilvinas Landzbergas (LT), Eloise Bonneviot (FR)
20 July & 27 July – LAST SMOKING LOUNGE
Darri Lorenzen (IS), Gustav Wideberg (SE), Juan-pedro Fabra Guemberena (UY/SE), Yaima Carrazana (CU), Yazan Khalili (PS)

Elections were held for both primary board and alternate board positions.

Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir will continue as the director of the museum, with the newly elected primary board members Anna Líndal, Birkir Karlsson, Kristín Rúnarsdóttir and Sam Rees.

For the alternate board, Claudia Hausfeld and Þóranna Björnsdóttir were elected to continue, along with new member Bára Bjarnadóttir.

Board members from 2015 to 2017 included Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir (Director), Claudia Hausfeld, Logi Bjarnason, Rebecca Erin Moran and Þóranna Björnsdóttir.

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.

On June 2nd The Living Art Museum will release Án titils / Untitled, a publication of the works, archival material and contributions made by artist Ólafur Lárusson (1951-2014), one of the museum’s founding members.

The book follows the exhibition Rolling Line, now occupying The Living Art Museum in the Marshall House until June 11th.

Án titils / Untitled includes a large selection of archive material from Ólafur´s studio, acquired by the museum last year as a gift on behalf of the artist by his family.

The book also includes an introductory text by Halldór Björn Runólfsson, and interviews with Ólafur´s friends and contemporaries, including Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Hildur Hákonardóttir, Kees Visser, Kristján Guðmundsson, Magnús Pálsson, Níels Hafstein, Rúrí, Sigurður Guðmundsson and Þór Vigfússon.

The artist´s own voice also comes through in fragments of interviews taken with Ólafur and closely connected to a chronology following the life of the artist.

This is the first time that a book is published on Ólafur Lárusson´s work.

The book is edited by Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir and Becky Forsythe, and designed by Studio – Studio, Arnar Freyr Guðmundsson and Birna Geirfinnsdóttir.

We hope that this publication and the exhibition Rolling Line, which span a decade of Ólafur´s practice, contribute to a better understanding of the artist and his work.

The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum will host 10 exhibitions this year, with numerous artists including:

Aðalheiður Sigríður Eysteinsdóttir who will exhibit the work Flæðilína, which was done especially for the museum and dedicated to it’s founders. Birta Guðjónsdóttir will exhibit her work Táknskilningur and Harpa Björnsdóttir will exhibit the work FÓRN (SACRIFICE). Sigríður Ágústsdóttir and Ragnheiður Þóra Ragnarsdóttir´s exhibition is titled Vorlaukar and includes ceramicwork, painting and photography.

Matthías Rúnar Sigurðsson and Þorvaldur Jónsson are of the younger generation of artists and are both from Reykjavík. Their exhibition brings together sculptures from the Icelandic dolerite and colourful paintings on plywood.

In the reading room at The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, work from the collection can currently be seen. Hulda Vilhjálmsdóttir exhibits paintings, drawings, bookworks and ceramics. In addition there are pictures by Erla Þórarinsdóttir, Bjargey Ingólfsdóttir and Hálfdán Björnsson.

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.

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.

From there we move on to Mengi, performance venue on Óðinsgata 2 where Rebecca Moran shows a recent piece and an open sculpture tournament takes place and DJ Emotional (Ragnar Kjartansson) plays moods for listening and relaxation. Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir will host a show of .gif animations by various artists. The program finishes with the unveiling of DayBreak, Forever a sound installation by Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson, that will be on view until next Sequences festival, fall 2017.

While this day’s program celebrates the 10 year anniversary of Sequences, it also serves as a bridge to the next festival that will be held in October 2017. The artists showing their works are, for instance, all exhibiting in the next Sequences and the curator’s involvement testifies to her commitment and interest in creating strong connections to the Icelandic art scene and artists and in exploring the cultural life of the city before and leading up to Sequences VIII. The anniversary program can thus be said to be a prelude to the ten day festival to come.

Margot Norton is Associate Curator at the New Museum in New York.

At the New Museum, she has curated and co-curated solo exhibitions with artists Judith Bernstein, Pia Camil, Sarah Charlesworth, Roberto Cuoghi, Tacita Dean, Ragnar Kjartansson, Chris Ofili, Goshka Macuga, Laure Prouvost, Anri Sala, and Erika Vogt, and group exhibitions “The Keeper,” “Here and Elsewhere,” and “NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star.”

She also organized the retrospective exhibition “Llyn Foulkes,” which traveled from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and worked on the exhibitions “Ghosts in the Machine,” “Chris Burden: Extreme Measures,” and “Jim Shaw: The End is Here.”

Curators Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir, Director of the Living Art Museum and Collection Manager Becky Forsythe have titled the exhibition Rolling Line, the namesake to a photographic work Ólafur completed in 1975. The artist himself is seen somersaulting through nature within Rolling Line, and the work references the possibility of a continuous line always ending in a circle. This reflection is well related to the core of the exhibition, which aims to shed new light on the process and period of the artist, from 1971 when he started as a student in The Icelandic College of Art and Craft, until the early eighties when Ólafur began to turn away from one of his main mediums, the photograph.

Ólafur Lárusson was born in 1951 and raised in Austur-Meðalholtum, South Iceland and in Hlíðar – 105 Reykjavík. He studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Craft, now Iceland Academy of the Arts, from 1971-74 and subsequently in Haarlem, Holland, where he graduated from Atalier ´63 in 1976. Ólafur was an extremely prolific and productive artist during the seventies and played a key role in shaping the priorities of the icelandic art scene at that time. He was amongst the last artists to be accepted into the SÚM Gallery movement, a founding member of the Living Art Museum, and the first indications of the museum were stored in his studio on Mjölnisholt prior to when the board of Nýló received the facilities at Vatnsstígur 3b in 1980.

The Living Art Museum received the keys to the female lavatories at Bankastræti 0 at the year end of 2014 and then began the transformation into an exhibition space in collaboration with the architectural firm kurtogpi. Architect Helgi Sigurðsson designed the lavatories, which were formally opened on the National Holiday, June 17th in 1930. The operations underground were reduced considerably at the turn of the century and the facility was finally closed in the year 2006.

The city of Reykjavík had a large interest in restoring the operations in the space underground, but with a different purpose. The city reached out to the board of the Living Art Museum and invited the museum to take over the space rent-free for a year to install exhibitions underground, with the hope of reviving the space once again.

The lavatories are preserved under the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, which proved to be a considerable challenge for architects Ásmund Hrafn Sturluson and Steinþór Kára Kárason, in working with the preexisting structure, while addressing the new role of the space.