before - KANNSKI

what has happened?

LJÓSRÁK

13.04.24 - 21.04.24

ARTISTS: Helgi Vignir Bragason, Sid & Jim

Ljósrák reflects on impermanence.

Helgi Vignir Bragason's work take us through the beginning and end of a building’s life. Through photographs, sculpture and found imagery, he makes monuments of the acts of constructing and dismantling the temporality of the structures that shape our lives. In contrast, the sculptures of the artist duo Sid and Jim act as traps for missed daily ephemera; capturing light beams, or stabilizing doodles in steamed mirrors.

The exhibition transforms the gallery into a space where time moves in contradictory ways. It slows to a stop as the mark on a steamed mirror never fades. It speeds to a blur as we witness a building rise and decay.

HVÍSL Í VEGGJUNUM.

16.03.24 - 24.03.24

ARTISTS: Megan Auður, Merik Goma

Hvísl í veggjunum is a show about absence. It is around the spaces that people carve out when the complexity of their experiences extends beyond the stories we know how to talk about.

In her pieces shaped by language and trauma, Megan Auður challenges Icelandic perspectives and language around sexual assault and ptsd. Alongside this work, Merik Goma’s photographs use a rich cinematic language to explore both deeply personal experiences of loss, and the narratives projected on black domesticities and the people within them.

Together, the works invite the audience into imagined worlds while confronting us with the limits of our own.

WHAT WE CARRY

24.02.24-03.03.24

ARTISTS: Chen Yu-Jung, Morgan Levy

What We Carry is an exhibition around the politics held in the body, and in the barriers that those bodies inhabit, transgress, or break. Pairing black and white photographic works with found objects and light sculpture, the exhibition brings together the work of American artist Morgan Levy with that of Taiwanese artist Chen Yu-Jung.

Levy’s photographs show women and queer people in the acts of constructing or dismantling space. Existing in the empowering and precarious moments found in spaces synonymous with masculinity, Levy’s images of these bodies—vulnerable in many ways—highlight tenderness and acts of physicality.

Alongside Levy’s photographs is Chen’s half-real, half-fantastical archive of the life of a Taiwanese man living with HIV. Through light sculptures and installations of personal ephemera, Chen’s work is an uneasy reconstruction of the line between reality and illusion within personal and social consciousness of the stigmatized disease.

Together, the artists create an intimate, almost parallel world that seeks to highlight questions of how we are seen, why, and by whom.

HORSEPLAY

27.01.24-04.02.24

Solo exhibition by Brokat Films (Joanna Pawlowska, Sasa Lubińska). Collaborators include Paweł Włodarski, Niko Płaczek

Campy exhibitionism of self-representation! Erotic melancholy of the free web graphics! Avatars mixed with digital artifacts! And, of course, horses in many shapes!

Horseplay is a mixed-media project in which the artist duo Brokat Films use the metaphor of a horse and digital play to explore body transformations and desire within cyber spaces.

What does it mean to transform oneself into a horse?

What kind of desires and longings are unlocked?

How will our connections, friendships, be redefined?

The duo invited fashion designer Paweł Włodarski and a performance artist Niko Płaczek to collaboratively work on elements of the show and add to the interplay of various artistic mediums: 3D animation, performance, textile installation, text, soundscape and video works.

Horseplay invites you on a journey through the artists’ own bodies. Join us on this escapade, where the metaphor of the horse gallops through a landscape of queer narratives. Enjoy joyous visions of connections and the myriad forms of desire. Experience spectrums of body expression and virtual encounters. Wander through pornographic imaginaries. Expect blurred boundaries, gender intersections, confused human and non-human biology, and emerge beyond binaries.

Exhibition facilitated through Listamannalaun, Rannís

ATTRACT MODE

02.12.23-10.12.23

Artists: Rúrí Sigríðardóttir Kommata, Bob Bicknell-Knight

Experience Attract Mode, a dynamic and ever-evolving universe where you can rise from street-level critic of the female form to closest family of your own imaginary empire. Enjoy new high-performance artistic upgrades and improvements to the religious experience, and emotional expansions ready to enjoy solo or with friends.

Attract mode is a game mode attempting to attract a player to play therefore go into the virtual world of the game console. The attract mode pairs the Icelandic debut of Bob Bicknell-Knight with new work by Rúrí Sigríðardóttir Kommata to investigate the sexual and religious elements of contemporary consumerism. Bicknell-Knight creates half digital, half real works that explore the religious elements of video game culture. Rúrí’s new works casts the light to the female physical presence in relations to commodities such as cars and raises quiestions such as what is commodity? what is candy eyeing? What is a healthy gaze? and many more.

RETRACE // ENDURRAKNING

11.11.23-19.11.23

Artists: Sadie Cook, Soohyun Kim

We do very few things only once. Instead, our lives are a series of repetitions—10,000 times brushing off our teeth, 60,000 meals. Maybe 8 times where one stepped off the sidewalk too soon and leapt back as a car rushed past. Maybe 30 times where one cried so much their voice became horse. And how many times again is each experience duplicated when one imagines the lives of those in the apartments next to yours, or your town, or your country.

Both artists use repetition as an entry point. Sadie works with a personal archive to explore the ghosts of one’s life that haunt one’s home. Soohyun explores the tension between found image archives, replicas, and one’s own body.

TEN THOUSAND MOVEMENTS

21.10.23-29.10.23

Artists: Young Grace Cho, Sigrún Halla Ásgeirsdóttir, Harpa Jónsdóttir, Hannah Subotnick, Heiðrún Sæmundsdóttir

Textile arts are closer to us than any other medium; woven around us from our clothing to the blankets we curl up under to the art on our walls. This exhibition pulls from artists who are drawn to textile from a variety of backgrounds—from conceptual artists interested in the product of domestic layers, to artists working from the language of craft, interested in the beauty, form, and the specific language of sewn, knitted, woven, embroidered, or crocheted work.

As a whole, the exhibition exists between comfort and labor, between art and craft, between value and scraps.

HANDAN HIMINS / BEHIND THE SKY

23. Sept - 1. Oct 2023

ARTISTS: Petra Hjartardóttir, Jasa Baka

Handan himins, Behind the Sky suggests that other realms and animistic realities are present and that we are initiating an opportunity for the audience to experience them. We aim to give a feeling that the sky is reversed on the floor, like over turning a rock to see what lives underneath, the sculptural creatures surface out of the blue.

The title also refers to the slippage that happens when the sky is reflected perfectly in bodies of water and the surrounding area turns into a mass suspended in air. Similar slippage happens when the horizon line between the sky and the ocean becomes unclear and the two merge into one, turning the shoreline into a mountain.

INTERLUDE

26 Aug - 2 Sept 2023

ARTISTS: Daura Campos, Vardit Goldner, Vikram Pradhan

When we (or they, or it) are walled out, then it (or they, or we) lives in the walls. And we carve out spaces on the blade thin edges between things. Strange spaces, where one is conscious but not awake, in white walls that bleed color, swimming without water.

CRIP/CRAP

27 Jul - 6 Aug 2023

Artist: Vena Naskrecka

Congratulations on living. How brave of you to get out of bed. What amazing powers over mind and matter you must have to continue existing each day, everyday, in that body you live in. I don’t think I could ever be you, in that body, in that mind. So brave. But darling, are you sure you need to bring the crutches to church? Are you sure you want to be in a wheelchair for that opening?

The dehumanizing supercrip stereotype focuses solely on disability, rather than a person's identity, experiences, and capabilities. Disabled individuals should be empowered to define their own identities and narratives, free from the pressure to conform to societal expectations or fit into narrow, one-dimensional portrayals.

Using sculpture, performative relics, and photographic documentation, Crip and Crap reclaims both the crip and supercrip. Supercrip herself isn’t a hero for merely living with a disability. Instead, she dawns her spacesuit and saves the planet. Both crip, and hero. Of course, she is also saving herself. People who are the most affected by pollution are people with disabilities.

PERSISTENCE OF THE RHIZOME / TRWAŁOŚĆ KŁĄCZY

18 - 26 February 2023

Artist: Wiola Ujazdowska

What we leave behind after our lifetimes will be decomposed by other species. This work focuses on roots, specifically the rhizome -- a modified subterranean plant stem that sends out roots and shoots from its nodes. Rhizomes are also known as creeping rootstalks or rootstalks. Western European culture circulates the idea of migrants as rootless people. As I observed the ripped out roots of downed trees in forest I grew up next to, I can’t agree. Deracinated roots are a source of life, new ecosystems in and of themselves.

Persistence of the rhizome/ trwałość kłączy is part of Wiola Ujazdowska’s interdisciplinary ph.d research into the interspecies communities that exist, or will exist, in the ruins of our current era, the Anthropocene. These “compost communities” are defined as the collections of organisms that inhabit post-industrial ruins, industry-contaminated areas, post-war zones, and other places connected to the capitalistic system processes of the exploitation of natural resources, human and non-human beings. Ujazdowska’s artistic, or post-artistic, expression encompasses representations of different species within these communities, including nitrification bacteria, fungi and plants, future human or humanoid figures, and animals and their mutations.

Persistence of the rhizome is strongly influenced by the work of interdisciplinary researchers dedicated to alternative futures of capitalism and the deliberations of anthropologist Anna Tsing. The exhibition also revisits Ujazdowska’s Unlimited Labor series (2021to present), in which labor is viewed as interspecies phenomenom.

SKYNRÓF

21-29 January 2023

Artists: Christalena Hughmanick, D Rosen

What do birds hold onto? What do we?

In an installation-based show using Ice, textiles, feathers and other ephemera, artists, Christalena Hughmanick and D Rosen pose questions around perception, ritual, and the meanings of symbols.
Pieces include chicken swings to donated to the Sólheimar Ecovilage as enrichment tools for their chickens ; ice castings based on rituals with Peacocks, roosters, and horses; dyes leaking onto fabric, and hand-stitched textile.

SECOND GLANCES

10-18 December 2022

Artists: Kana Kimura, Logan Bellew, Guðrún Sif Ólafsdóttir, Benedicte Dahm

Books are records, history, individual interpretations of feelings and things. But they are also objects to be held, to change with touch, and to disappear into libraries, trashcans, bedside tables.

In Second Glances, we invited four artists to show book-works that reexamined something taken for granted. Each artists created the ideal context for their work - scattered beneath a poster, hidden in drawers, smashed and eaten, left abandoned on an architect's table.

HOW WILL I GAIN RESPECT FROM DEATH?

5 - 13 November 2022

Artists: David Iñiguez, Hyacinth Schukis

A GUIDE TO BETTER WOUND CLOSURE

22-30 October 2022

Artists: Diljá Þorvaldsdottír, André Ramos-Woodard

But how do we see ourselves? What happens when we show that inner side to someone else? Does it seem silly? Or less bad? Or worse? Does it lead to connecting to someone else? Or getting further away?

Diljá creates muddled, abstract embroidery on silkscreen frames, the same sorts of frames in the same sorts of sizes that queer people have used to create t-shirts for past 70 years. The sorts of t-shirts that said the sorts of things, connected the sorts of communities, that no store in their right mind would sell.

As a Black queer artist, André makes photographs. Angry, and sad, and sometimes giddily celebratory pictures. An image of medication hangs near an image Andre’s blurred body, face tripled, sci-fi and so dark that only eyes and a grinning mouth are clear.

Both artists show work that is boldly navel gaze-y, deliberately non-opaque. Both artists pull apart separate experiences, one as a Black queer person in the American south, and one as a white Icelandic woman delving into her own queer identity for the first time. And both explore a universal experience of queerness, in which isolation, potential violence and potential connection exist as three halves of an overlarge whole.