 |
#1 [May 2005] |
Back to Contents | Print Article
Reykjavík Arts Festival 2005
After three decades, the Reykjavík Arts Festival announces its first festival dedicated to contemporary visual arts. It will focus on the legacy of Dieter Roth, the German-born Swiss artist who spent a large part of his life in Iceland, and who influenced both established and younger artists.
 |
Dieter Roth with Björn Roth, Eggert Einarsson |
The first part of the Festival’s program is a major Dieter Roth exhibition, which was curated by Björn Roth, the son of the artist. It is featured at two of Iceland’s largest museums: The National Gallery of Iceland and Reykjavík Art Museum, as well as in Gallery 100°, a renowned gallery. A year after another international retrospective of the work of Dieter Roth, the exhibition will shed new light on his work and practice.
 Jonathan Meese "Erzreligion Blutlazarett", 1999 Frankfurter Kunstverein Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin Photo: Jochen Littkemann |
 John Bock “Skipholt”, 2005 Courtesy Kling & Bang gallery |
 Libia Pérez de Siles de Castro and Ólafur Árni Ólafsson “Wir wünschen Ihnen einen angenehmen Aufenthalt”, headphones with migrant stories Witte de With, Rotterdam 2004 Courtesy of the artists |
 Christoph Schlingensief “Animatograph” (Model), 2005 Courtesy of the artist |
The exhibitions will be on view from May 14 to August 2005. Opening weekend: May 14 and 15, 2005.
***
The first Reykjavik Art Festival dedicated to visual art will open in May 2005. This international exhibition brings attention to Iceland as a site of cultural production and coincides with the staging of the first major exhibition of the work of Dieter Roth in his adopted homeland. In recognition of the significance of Roth in Iceland and for recent contemporary art practice, his work provides the thematic inspiration for the Festival’s exhibition. Material Time/Work Time/Life Time brings together both Roth’s contemporaries and a recent generation whose work could be said to share the artist’s interest in collapsing the boundaries between art, life, and materiality.
The Swiss/German Roth made Iceland his home from the 1950s indelibly marking the artistic climate and locating this land that bridges Europe and the Americas as a distinctive site of the avant-garde. Roth was copious in his chosen media: he was, amongst other activities, a painter, filmmaker, poet, musician, and designer; and this abundance of production is reflected in the permeation of his artistic practice into all areas of his work, life and environment. The three overlapping temporal spheres that ordered and inflected Roth’s production provide the title and framework for the Festival. Material Time/Work Time/Life Time determines the selection of work commissioned and included, which suggest an influence and conscious or unconscious continuation of aspects the artist’s heterogeneous project.
For Roth, the time of work, the process of making or thinking, his studio surroundings, and the structure of his practice were all part of what constitutes an artwork. Similarly, his domestic life, friends, children, and numerous homes or adopted residences did not merely inform his production but were intrinsically part of it. Finally, materiality and its vast scope for chronology—from the daily process of decay, to the history of civilisation, and the geological time of place—feature prominently in Roth’s work, and often point to a melancholic, perhaps dystopic view of existence as an endless struggle to order the ephemeral debris of the world and thereby attempt to overcome an inevitable slide towards ruin.
|
 Élin Hansdóttir “You”, 2004 Listasafn Árnesinga |
 Ragnar Kjartansson “The Great Unrest”, 2005 Courtesy of the artist |
 Gabriela Friðriksdóttir "2Headed God", Drawing Courtesy of the artist |
 Anna Líndal “In the Backyard” – 2003 video as screen saver, coffee cup, linen, sugar, thread Dimensions Photo: Spessi Courtesy of the artist |
For this exhibition we have brought together over 30 Icelandic and international artists to respond to the theme of the exhibition. The majority of the artists are creating new works that take into account the given situation, the legacy of Roth, and the particularities of an Icelandic context. In the spirit of Roth’s inclusiveness, many venues have agreed to work together to bring about this ambitious project that will encompass not only the Reykjavik area but ring the country mapping the cultural landmarks of this island.
Text by Jessica Morgan
To subscribe to LIST, send a mail to list@cia.is.