SKÍRNIR - The Icelandic Literacy
Society, 2022
Text by:
Markus Þór Andrésson & Dorothée Kirch
Society, 2022
Text by:
Markus Þór Andrésson & Dorothée Kirch
I keep on looking
On the art of Elín Hansdóttir
It’s hard work enjoying art. I always forget that. I’ve seen enough now. I should
stop, take a break. The artworks collide with one another. I mix up the details,
blending installations, paintings, and sound works together.
In 2004, Elín Hansdóttir held an exhibition at the Árnesinga Art Museum in Hveragerði.
Although it was her first solo show in a public museum, she struck a note that has
resonated in her practice ever since. The show was entitled You. Hansdóttir addressed
each viewer directly, as if to divert attention away from herself and her own concerns
and instead towards you, what stirs inside you.
The exhibition made it apparent that this young artist could easily take
command of a large space and activate it through multifaceted interventions.
Hansdóttir’s show included a number of different works inviting participation or
interactivity as visitors approached them.
For example, walking onto a yellow plastic sheet towards a lamp suspended over
the middle would turn on the light. Viewers could sit on a black amoeba-shaped bench,
spin in circles and watch the gallery—carpeted from wall to wall in pale pink—rush by.
Stepping into a demarcated area in the middle of the gallery, guests would be surprised
by a sort of sound shower, an aural experience undetectable elsewhere. An accordion-
like wall was either green or white, depending on the direction from which visitors
approached.
The exhibition included other smaller-scale works which, alongside the larger
ones, expressed the artist’s special sensitivity to material, colour, and space. With an air
of playfulness, Hansdóttir introduced a number of different ideas, each of which could
have stood alone in its own exhibition. A survey of her career since You shows her
decision to explore specific ideas with each new work of art. Her art assumes different
guises, from installation and sculpture to photography and video. It has developed in
such a way that her pieces are ever more complex—their execution more extensive and
their content more ambiguous—while their presentation has simultaneously become
clearer, more purposeful and thus, to some extent, simpler. The fundamental note she
struck at Árnesinga has remained lucid and pure: Hansdóttir addresses me, inviting me
to enjoy her works on my own terms.
When I walk down an empty corridor between two galleries, certain works force
themselves into my memory; others, in their gentleness, remain as quiet as a mouse.
I can’t say whether I like them or not. Opinions take time. Artworks set something
in motion here and now, or not at all. Some ignite a glow that seems to burn out
immediately, but then smoulders beneath the surface until it suddenly becomes a
fire. Some flare up in an instant with sky-high flames but are quickly consumed,
leaving nothing behind. Others blaze steadily, like in a fireplace. Practically built
from good materials that last a long time. And yet others send sparks out into the
void. These sparks cool before they land. After a few days, weeks, months, or more,
some works of art will become travelling companions, whilst others will have said
farewell.
The twentieth century witnessed an about-face regarding perspective in art. This
reversal has a long and complex history, but in sum, the emphasis has shifted from the
artist and the object to the viewer and their experience. Art historians such as Michael
Fried analysed these changing currents about half a century ago in connection with the
development of minimalism, describing the theatricalisation of art (Fried, 1967, p. 13).
The exalting experience of true and meaningful works of art was turning into a kind of
event where audiences were aware of themselves in the context of meaningless objects.
Warning bells rang from conservative corners, but the die had been cast, and the role of
the viewer would continue to grow towards the end of the twentieth century (by means
of minimalism, conceptualism, feminism, relational art, and other contemporaneous
movements) and would take flight in the twenty-first.
Behind this progress lay a postmodernist ideology concerned with pluralism,
deconstruction, and re-centring. The work of art was no longer a finite object with fixed
dimensions and an immutable core, but part of a subjective experiential process.
Meaning and consequence seemed to multiply towards infinity along with the number
of viewers. Although art historians had previously referred to active aspects of
reception, they made a clear distinction between the creative role of the viewer and that
of the artist. In his 1934 book Art as Experience, for instance, philosopher John Dewey
argues that both artist and audience must be active—to view an artwork as a constant
phenomenon would be to deny one of art’s intrinsic values. For Dewey, however, the
roles are clear cut: the artist creates and the viewer interprets, just as a chef cooks and a
gourmet tastes (Dewey, 1939, pp. 35–57). What was added to the equation later, as
Fried points out, was the role of external context. Not only did art and audience meet,
but they did so at a certain time and in a defined space. Art’s anchored hierarchy was
unmoored, with unforeseen consequences. The development was such that at the 2003
Venice Biennale, the curators of the main exhibition called it Dreams and Conflicts: The
Dictatorship of the Viewer. The idea presented in the subtitle says much of the artworld
zeitgeist at the beginning of the current century, regardless of what was shown at the
exhibition in question (Bonami, 2003).
The same spring as this bold statement was made in Venice, a graduate
exhibition was held at the Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús by the BA students in fine
art at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. 1 Already, for her degree show, Elín Hansdóttir
created an installation that would have seemed strong as a new work today after a two-
decade career. Anonymous Column emerged fully formed, its author’s character clear,
the artist’s stance resolute. Hansdóttir took on this exhibition space—a former
warehouse—that had opened only three years before: the immense Hafnarhús, with its
thick walls and numerous columns supporting its massive floors.
In the next gallery are two octagonal columns. Strong supports. Twins. They stand
side by side. Too close to one another. I walk around them, look at them from all
angles. Déjà vu, a reflection, a misconstruction. An uninvited guest? Knocking on a
column, it sounds hollow. Then I see tiny handles on one edge. I look around me. No
clues. Before I touch them, I look over my shoulder again. Can I, may I, or not? Two
sides of the column open and I slip inside before anyone can stop me. I stand on an
octagonal floor barely larger than me, and I see myself vanish a hundred times, a
thousand times, into infinity. A tiny hall of mirrors. The work of art, the doppelganger, has swallowed me. I have disappeared into its bowels, or maybanother dimension. The door closes behind me and I fall down the rabbit hole.
Hansdóttir’s solo exhibition, You, ensued a year later at the Árnesinga Art Museum,
followed by numerous works offering audience participation and relating directly to
their surroundings. Jumping ahead, one of her most recent installations, Fractal, was
made in spring 2021. Hansdóttir was again invited to exhibit at the Reykjavík Art
Museum – Hafnarhús, and it was as if she came full circle since her graduation in 2003.
Instead of inviting viewers to enter a closed column, she locates them outside it, all
around it. Fractal revolves around a central column, once again a replica of the
octagonal pillars that feature in several of the museum’s galleries. However, it is a
foreign object in Gallery E, whose two rows of eight columns are quadrangular. It is not
enough for Hansdóttir merely to add one octagonal column; a few quadrangular ones
erected here and there amidst the existing pillars disrupt the gallery’s symmetry. On the
walls around the installation, a series of six photographs shows different perspectives of
the central octagonal column. The eye immediately discerns differences from one photo
to the next, as no two were taken in the same space. Each was shot in its own model of
the gallery, which Hansdóttir built multiple times at different scales. The photos are
identical in size, but the textures and proportions of the floors, ceilings, columns, and
walls differ between them. The distortion of scale becomes even more ambiguous as
each photo offers a new perspective. At the same time, the effect makes the actual space
in which the viewer stands seem foreign, even unreal.
Hansdóttir’s artworks are not characterised solely by their shape, colour, and
choice of material. Nor do they hold a neutral mirror to their audiences and thus
become directly about them, about you, about me. Even less are they meant to convey
specific content conceived by their author. The idea that Hansdóttir introduced right at
the beginning of her career has remained her purpose to this day: she incites a reaction
from her audience, prompts viewers to participate, and alters their perception of their
environments. Hansdóttir’s works always hinge on synergistic factors to activate them,
and the presence of the viewer is certainly key. In addition, they concern themselves
with process and progress, time, space, and laws of nature that push them over the edge
to the inscrutable and unpredictable.
As previously stated, Hansdóttir’s columns from 2003 and 2021 offer us as
viewers experiences on our own terms. Her art allows us to see ourselves perceiving.
She makes the familiar foreign, without losing a connection with the here and now. On
the contrary, she makes time and place an integral component of her work, as important
a tool for her artistic practice as oils and canvas are for the painter (to borrow a cliché).
Few have managed to grasp the significance of these elements in art of recent decades
as curator Miwon Kwon in her discussions of the history of site-specific art. She traces
the development of such art through different stages since the autonomous artwork
became the site for the creation of meaning and value—whereby, within the framework
of the near-vacuum that was the modern, white-walled gallery, meanings would not
budge. In the sixties and seventies, art became contingent on its physical environment
and its experience in a certain location, at a certain time. Then the idea of the
culturally and socially immaterial place arises. Art explodes out of the gallery, and the
notion of place is transferred to contexts of discourse and daily life. Artists move
from one set of circumstances to another to create site-specific works based on a variety
of factors, material and immaterial, that become integral to the experience of their
work. Kwon goes so far as to talk about a self-referential turn, as works of art and
artists’ CVs become sites in their own right. Her analysis is a reminder of the perpetual
balancing of power between artist, viewer, and place/context (Kwon, 2002, pp. 3–9).
The corridor in front of me consists of light and shadow. I walk around a corner;
the corridor leads me upwards and downwards. It narrows and widens again. I
walk through walls of darkness and bump into a plaster wall. Then I feel my way
forwards, fingertips first. I assume the light leads the way and try to follow the
source, but it is scattered; I can make out a beam here, a glow there. The light licks
the edges, gathers in a corner, makes streaks. Then the corridor continues in a new
direction. And the light plays tricks on my perception. I become weightless. I don’t
know whether I’m going up or down, turning left or right. I fall and fly all at once
around the last corner. Then I’ve reached the end of the corridor. A door.
Hansdóttir has always trodden purposefully but carefully when it comes to the weight
of place and space. Purposefully, so that as a viewer, we trust her with where she leads
us in the experiential process. We enter into an unwritten agreement with her and her
art because she presents it with gentle assurance. Carefully, because she ensures that
each intervention is appropriate to the environment, the site, and the context. In this
sense, Hansdóttir’s art could be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there are
pieces she develops in close conversation with the circumstances at hand, where she
conscientiously selects the means by which she is able to present critical and enriching
contributions—where she feels she has something to add, so to speak. On the other
hand, there are works in which she chooses to exclude external contingencies and
create an insular world subject to the laws of its own internal context. There are
certainly also examples of her work where the boundaries of this division are less than
obvious.
Much time has passed since artist and critic Brian O’Doherty first published his
essays on the interplay between art and the gallery space, but his ideas are still thought-
provoking. Among other things, he raises questions about the extent to which artists
construe their work to conform to public spaces and the ideology that art institutions
espouse. Galleries and institutions have a covert yet clear influence on art history and
practice, and vice versa. Charting the history of curatorial practice, O’Doherty reminds
us that the idea of a neutral exhibition space is a modernist invention that does not
hold water and has little in common with contemporary art (O’Doherty, 1976, pp.
24–30). Around the same time as the development of the discourse laying the
foundation for O’Doherty’s contributions, artists began to challenge the ideology of the
art world through institutional critique. Artists engaged directly with the architecture
and activity of museums and dealt symbolically with the art institution and prevailing
ideology at large. The work that ensues does not follow the accepted belief that art is
created outside institutional walls, then sampled for display inside “neutral” spaces. It is
a vital contribution to maintaining critical dialogue between art and the institutions to
which audiences should have ready access. Art and environment are closely linked; they
influence one another. Many of Hansdóttir’s installations call attention to the role of the
institutions in which viewers experience her work. They are part of, and they continue,
the institutional critique inherited from previous generations of artists. Hansdóttir’s
aforementioned column installations are a perfect example, as the architecture and
environment of the galleries become an opportunity for her to address art practice and
reception in a larger context.
How can an institution like a museum reflect the diversity, the melting pot, of art
if its activities are limited to the architectural possibilities it offers at any given time?
How can the institution be opened for unrestricted creation and experience?
Hansdóttir memorably attempted to answer these questions with her exhibition
at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2015. Suspension of Disbelief
consisted of an extensive installation in one gallery and a film in another. The artist had
already familiarised herself with a number of special effects developed throughout the
history of photography and film, especially before the age of digital post-production. For
this show, she worked with reflections, distorted scales, forced perspective, and other
techniques that are often in themselves simple optical illusions. A glass matte painting
in the middle of a room depicts a scene from a certain point of view; standing in the
right place (and looking through a camera), the painted scene becomes integrated into
its surroundings and changes the reality of the space. As a viewer, you soon lose your
way. Perception becomes relative, as there are no rules in the space to guide you; there
is a room built inside the gallery whose floors, walls, and ceilings seem asymmetrical,
and you stumble between real and illusory columns. This installation is the set of a film
shown in a nearby gallery. There, through a series of scenes, the camera captures the
multiple perspectives offered by the set. The accompanying sound design by Úlfur
Hansson lends the film an overall air of perpetual uncertainty and expectation.
Inevitably, the viewer is tempted to move between the two realities of the installation
and the film, illusion and reality—a reality that is gradually transformed. Hansdóttir’s
game is not least about pretending not to get away with deceiving the audience, but
rather getting them to join in on the work and take the spectacle for what it is. Even if
you quickly see what lies behind the curtain (in fact, there are no curtains), you enjoy
the work as much as you did before because you are willing to accept its preconditions.
This special interplay that Hansdóttir has been so successful with—getting viewers to
meet her halfway, surprising them, and leaving them to discover the process—has been
and will remain her signature.
An overexposed room greets me. White, powdery, light grey. My eyes adjust to the
brightness and I slowly recognise shapes that appear. Fragments lie on the floor.
White, matte, split pieces. Fist-sized—child-sized. A few steps closer and my eyes
manage to make out more things. Parts that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that
has broken apart. I walk amongst stones, fragments, bits. They shrink and are
gradually stacked on top of one other. Then I see the first shape nearly in complete
form. A rectangular block with broken corners on which a smaller block leans, and
behind it another, still smaller, and on and on to the beginning. Oversized dominos.
The smallest is no bigger than a pack of cigarettes; the largest stone, who knows?
It’s in pieces. In the silence I can imagine how the stones crashed into each other.
Until finally, the giant falls, heavy and unassuming, and shatters on the ground. Or
were they ever whole? The stones, the giant? Each fragment is cut with geometric
precision, the surfaces unscathed. Not a speck of dust to be seen. The ruins lie there
like the idea of a process that may or may not have taken place. The proportions
are too big to be real, broken too perfectly to have been broken, and yet they lie
there. A digital hypothesis in the real world. Geometric, tangible, made of plaster.
As soon as Hansdóttir’s earliest works established her interest in material space and
environment, she turned audience expectations on their head when she introduced
Book Space in 2006. This work is an ongoing process that the artist quickly set in motion
and has cultivated ever since. It consists of bound books of the same size, each of whose
cover, spine, and pages are blank. They are arranged, hundreds and thousands at a time,
on selected library shelves, where they are available for anyone to use as a place for
expression through drawing or text. Over the years they have been filled page by page,
book by book, and have travelled internationally between public libraries as well as
libraries in schools, museums, prisons, and more. With this work, Hansdóttir opened up
a broader understanding of the concept of space: although her art is for the most part
closely related to the environment and the material world, an important aspect is also
the function of subjective space. Along with architecture and design, Hansdóttir’s
concept of space includes language, consciousness, narratives, memories, and
relationships. Collaboration also plays an important role, as many of the artist’s works
have been made in the space that her conversations and collaborations create.
Behind the ruins, coloured surfaces shine in my direction. Neon green, pastel pink,
red, black, ochre, grey, olive green. Surfaces are divided with points and lines
according to a precise rule. The colours define the surfaces as a line defines two
parts of a domino. Same form, same principle. On the one hand, three-dimensional
and huge; on the other, two-dimensional and coloured. Both overexposed in a room
with no roof.
Although Hansdóttir is not interested in storytelling per se, progress—and thus a kind
of narrative—nevertheless plays a major role in her work. She seems fascinated by
principles in which one thing follows another in the algorithms found everywhere in
nature. Her work has included references to the Voronoi diagram, a system for
partitioning a surface based on equidistant measurements between two points. She has
also made use of the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number in the series is the sum
of the two preceding numbers. These are doctrines guiding overtone series, hypotheses
explaining how chaos arises in natural processes within a closed system. The golden
ratio, spirals, arches, gravity, spiral staircases, mathematical sets and sequences,
shadows, decay—innumerable phenomena involving progress or occurrence through
processes or laws of nature. Hansdóttir emphasises these aspects, distils them, and
explores their relation to human existence, both physically and conceptually.
Simulacra from 2016 is a series of photographs installed in the same space they
portray. The exhibition space in i8 Gallery is a symmetrical, easily read rectangular
room, with windows and an entrance on one side and a support column roughly in the
middle. However, Hansdóttir managed to make visitors doubt their own perception
when comparing the photos with their surroundings. In place of the column, she
presented a pedestal—a nod to the modernist tradition, in which the plinth played a key
role in distinguishing art from its environment. A large bouquet of flowers hovers over
the pedestal as if in an invisible vase. The perspective in the series of nine photographs
circles around this illusion as the flowers droop, their petals falling between one image
and the next and finally withering before the viewer’s eyes in this memento mori.
Narrative, whether linear or discontinuous—or both at the same time, as in
Simulacra—can be said to be foundational to human thought. Hansdóttir invites viewers
to enter into her work, participating in and/or shaping its narrative. An encounter with
her art is always a process contingent upon time and space, a narrative that unfolds
when the viewer reflects upon their own experience and perception of what the artist
brings to the table. At the same time it becomes a memory, a kind of story one tells
oneself, emphasising certain parts of the narrative based on one’s understanding of
reality. Speculations about the nature of memory emerge widely throughout
Hansdóttir’s work, especially considering the importance of spaces and places in the
functioning of memory. She repeatedly exposes instabilities in various givens about
reality—that is, in what most of us tend to consider infallible certainty.
Colours are hidden in the light.
Coloured shadows. A corridor where the shado that follows or leads me is not black, but where there are three shadows followin and leading me. Magenta, cyan, and yellow. Light and darkness are both colourful Bright and dim. Visible and invisible. Opposites concealing and revealing everything at once. The invisible light that shows everything. The palpable
darkness that covers everything. Images of visible light. Shadows in the snow that
fall in three colours on sparkling crystals. A new territory of light. The photograph.
Hansdóttir’s artistic twists and turns in time, space, perception, narrative, and memory
exist to bring us closer to the world. She understands how art can prompt us to
reconnect with our environment, and she works in the spirit of phenomenology and
other theories directing our attention to the body. Her art highlights the value of
engaging mentally and physically with our surroundings—being one in and with the
environment. The artist thus follows a similar path as contemporary thinkers such as
Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, who points out how human corporeality shapes our connection
to reality. Þorgeirsdóttir maintains that we connect to the world around us not only
through language, science, religion, and philosophy, but above all through our bodies
and lived experience. By listening, watching, and touching, we feel our own vulnerability
and foster empathy. As obvious as they may seem, these are nonetheless compelling and
challenging ideas. They are, moreover, gratifying, now that human reality is increasingly
digitised and new approaches are needed in discourses on pressing common concerns,
such as environmental issues (Þorgeirsdóttir, 2015, pp. 65–80).
Pictures, five hundred of them. Roughly A4. Hung one above another, side by side in
a cylindrical space. Black and white. An urban landscape. Close-ups. In the
background, you can make out the substrates of asphalt, gravel, debris, concrete
blocks, manhole covers, grass, and soil. There are rubber bands on top. They have
been lost, dropped, discarded. A ring that is almost never round. A deformed circle,
twisted and knotted. I walk slowly along these pictures stretching into the sky. The
curvature of the space leads me onwards, image after image, circle after circle.
After a while I just see the shape. One picture tells only half the story, but five
hundred become something else, and more. They become a system for organisation,
or try to offer an overview—of what, I don’t precisely know. Patterns, symbols,
perhaps an assertion about writing. Maybe the meaning is also hidden in the
search itself. Here we gathered and searched. Maybe for the system, maybe for
diversity. Or is this an overview? An attempt at connection?
Hansdóttir’s work can be seen in a larger context as part of a sea change. Her focus is art
itself, its creative process, its language, its means of communication—this is the artist’s
platform and specialisation. There, Hansdóttir can experiment with weaving together
bodily and conceptual experiences, without having to distinguish between the two. In
art, as elsewhere, there is now a greater emphasis on human existence not as based on
values rooted in dualism, but rather as a more nuanced synthesis of intellect and emotions, mind and body, reality and fiction. Hansdóttir adds an unequivocal message
into that mix with her art that speaks to us, to me, and to you.
At the centre of the space, surrounded by the pictographs, there is a barely
noticeable, miniscule, gold-plated clover. It has five leaves. Hansdóttir herself says,
“Art practice is like that: it’s the urge to look for that four-leaf clover. And once you
find it, then what? Then you keep on looking” (Naqvi 2022: 12). I turn back to my
travel companions—the photographs, the coloured shadows, the geometric
fragments, the dark corridor, the little hall of mirrors, and so on, much
further—and I do the same. I keep on looking.
References
Bonami, Francesco. 2003. Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer – The
50th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Venice: Marsilio.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.
Fried, Michael. 1967. “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer): 12–21. Reprinted in
Fried, 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Naqvi, Erum. 2022. “Merkingarþrungin bil og bilin á milli merkingarinnar: Hughvarf
listamannanna Elínar Hansdóttur og Úlfs Hanssonar” [Meaningful spaces and the
spaces between meanings: Elín Hansdóttir and Úlfur Hansson]. In Ad Infinitum,
exh. cat., Gerðarsafn – Kópavogur Art Museum.
O’Doherty, Brian. 1976. “Inside the White Cube,” essay series in Artforum. Republished
as O’Doherty, 1986. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Þorgeirsdóttir, Sigríður. 2015. “Heimspeki líkamans og heimspeki í líkamanum og hvers
vegna hugsun er ekki kynlaus” [Philosophy of the body, philosophy in the body
and why thinking is not neuter], Hugur, 27: 65–80.
Þorgeirsdóttir, Sigríður. 2019. “Að verða byrjendur aftur í heimspeki: Líkamleg,
gagnrýnin hugsun” [To be a beginner again in philosophy: Embodied critical
thinking], conference presentation at Hugarflug, Iceland University of the Arts,
15 February. Lecture based on Donata Schoeller and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir,
2019. “Embodied Critical Thinking: The Experiential Turn and Its Transformative
Aspects,” philoSOPHIA: Journal of Continental Feminism 9(1): 92–109.
On the art of Elín Hansdóttir
It’s hard work enjoying art. I always forget that. I’ve seen enough now. I should
stop, take a break. The artworks collide with one another. I mix up the details,
blending installations, paintings, and sound works together.
In 2004, Elín Hansdóttir held an exhibition at the Árnesinga Art Museum in Hveragerði.
Although it was her first solo show in a public museum, she struck a note that has
resonated in her practice ever since. The show was entitled You. Hansdóttir addressed
each viewer directly, as if to divert attention away from herself and her own concerns
and instead towards you, what stirs inside you.
The exhibition made it apparent that this young artist could easily take
command of a large space and activate it through multifaceted interventions.
Hansdóttir’s show included a number of different works inviting participation or
interactivity as visitors approached them.
For example, walking onto a yellow plastic sheet towards a lamp suspended over
the middle would turn on the light. Viewers could sit on a black amoeba-shaped bench,
spin in circles and watch the gallery—carpeted from wall to wall in pale pink—rush by.
Stepping into a demarcated area in the middle of the gallery, guests would be surprised
by a sort of sound shower, an aural experience undetectable elsewhere. An accordion-
like wall was either green or white, depending on the direction from which visitors
approached.
The exhibition included other smaller-scale works which, alongside the larger
ones, expressed the artist’s special sensitivity to material, colour, and space. With an air
of playfulness, Hansdóttir introduced a number of different ideas, each of which could
have stood alone in its own exhibition. A survey of her career since You shows her
decision to explore specific ideas with each new work of art. Her art assumes different
guises, from installation and sculpture to photography and video. It has developed in
such a way that her pieces are ever more complex—their execution more extensive and
their content more ambiguous—while their presentation has simultaneously become
clearer, more purposeful and thus, to some extent, simpler. The fundamental note she
struck at Árnesinga has remained lucid and pure: Hansdóttir addresses me, inviting me
to enjoy her works on my own terms.
When I walk down an empty corridor between two galleries, certain works force
themselves into my memory; others, in their gentleness, remain as quiet as a mouse.
I can’t say whether I like them or not. Opinions take time. Artworks set something
in motion here and now, or not at all. Some ignite a glow that seems to burn out
immediately, but then smoulders beneath the surface until it suddenly becomes a
fire. Some flare up in an instant with sky-high flames but are quickly consumed,
leaving nothing behind. Others blaze steadily, like in a fireplace. Practically built
from good materials that last a long time. And yet others send sparks out into the
void. These sparks cool before they land. After a few days, weeks, months, or more,
some works of art will become travelling companions, whilst others will have said
farewell.
The twentieth century witnessed an about-face regarding perspective in art. This
reversal has a long and complex history, but in sum, the emphasis has shifted from the
artist and the object to the viewer and their experience. Art historians such as Michael
Fried analysed these changing currents about half a century ago in connection with the
development of minimalism, describing the theatricalisation of art (Fried, 1967, p. 13).
The exalting experience of true and meaningful works of art was turning into a kind of
event where audiences were aware of themselves in the context of meaningless objects.
Warning bells rang from conservative corners, but the die had been cast, and the role of
the viewer would continue to grow towards the end of the twentieth century (by means
of minimalism, conceptualism, feminism, relational art, and other contemporaneous
movements) and would take flight in the twenty-first.
Behind this progress lay a postmodernist ideology concerned with pluralism,
deconstruction, and re-centring. The work of art was no longer a finite object with fixed
dimensions and an immutable core, but part of a subjective experiential process.
Meaning and consequence seemed to multiply towards infinity along with the number
of viewers. Although art historians had previously referred to active aspects of
reception, they made a clear distinction between the creative role of the viewer and that
of the artist. In his 1934 book Art as Experience, for instance, philosopher John Dewey
argues that both artist and audience must be active—to view an artwork as a constant
phenomenon would be to deny one of art’s intrinsic values. For Dewey, however, the
roles are clear cut: the artist creates and the viewer interprets, just as a chef cooks and a
gourmet tastes (Dewey, 1939, pp. 35–57). What was added to the equation later, as
Fried points out, was the role of external context. Not only did art and audience meet,
but they did so at a certain time and in a defined space. Art’s anchored hierarchy was
unmoored, with unforeseen consequences. The development was such that at the 2003
Venice Biennale, the curators of the main exhibition called it Dreams and Conflicts: The
Dictatorship of the Viewer. The idea presented in the subtitle says much of the artworld
zeitgeist at the beginning of the current century, regardless of what was shown at the
exhibition in question (Bonami, 2003).
The same spring as this bold statement was made in Venice, a graduate
exhibition was held at the Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús by the BA students in fine
art at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. 1 Already, for her degree show, Elín Hansdóttir
created an installation that would have seemed strong as a new work today after a two-
decade career. Anonymous Column emerged fully formed, its author’s character clear,
the artist’s stance resolute. Hansdóttir took on this exhibition space—a former
warehouse—that had opened only three years before: the immense Hafnarhús, with its
thick walls and numerous columns supporting its massive floors.
In the next gallery are two octagonal columns. Strong supports. Twins. They stand
side by side. Too close to one another. I walk around them, look at them from all
angles. Déjà vu, a reflection, a misconstruction. An uninvited guest? Knocking on a
column, it sounds hollow. Then I see tiny handles on one edge. I look around me. No
clues. Before I touch them, I look over my shoulder again. Can I, may I, or not? Two
sides of the column open and I slip inside before anyone can stop me. I stand on an
octagonal floor barely larger than me, and I see myself vanish a hundred times, a
thousand times, into infinity. A tiny hall of mirrors. The work of art, the doppelganger, has swallowed me. I have disappeared into its bowels, or maybanother dimension. The door closes behind me and I fall down the rabbit hole.
Hansdóttir’s solo exhibition, You, ensued a year later at the Árnesinga Art Museum,
followed by numerous works offering audience participation and relating directly to
their surroundings. Jumping ahead, one of her most recent installations, Fractal, was
made in spring 2021. Hansdóttir was again invited to exhibit at the Reykjavík Art
Museum – Hafnarhús, and it was as if she came full circle since her graduation in 2003.
Instead of inviting viewers to enter a closed column, she locates them outside it, all
around it. Fractal revolves around a central column, once again a replica of the
octagonal pillars that feature in several of the museum’s galleries. However, it is a
foreign object in Gallery E, whose two rows of eight columns are quadrangular. It is not
enough for Hansdóttir merely to add one octagonal column; a few quadrangular ones
erected here and there amidst the existing pillars disrupt the gallery’s symmetry. On the
walls around the installation, a series of six photographs shows different perspectives of
the central octagonal column. The eye immediately discerns differences from one photo
to the next, as no two were taken in the same space. Each was shot in its own model of
the gallery, which Hansdóttir built multiple times at different scales. The photos are
identical in size, but the textures and proportions of the floors, ceilings, columns, and
walls differ between them. The distortion of scale becomes even more ambiguous as
each photo offers a new perspective. At the same time, the effect makes the actual space
in which the viewer stands seem foreign, even unreal.
Hansdóttir’s artworks are not characterised solely by their shape, colour, and
choice of material. Nor do they hold a neutral mirror to their audiences and thus
become directly about them, about you, about me. Even less are they meant to convey
specific content conceived by their author. The idea that Hansdóttir introduced right at
the beginning of her career has remained her purpose to this day: she incites a reaction
from her audience, prompts viewers to participate, and alters their perception of their
environments. Hansdóttir’s works always hinge on synergistic factors to activate them,
and the presence of the viewer is certainly key. In addition, they concern themselves
with process and progress, time, space, and laws of nature that push them over the edge
to the inscrutable and unpredictable.
As previously stated, Hansdóttir’s columns from 2003 and 2021 offer us as
viewers experiences on our own terms. Her art allows us to see ourselves perceiving.
She makes the familiar foreign, without losing a connection with the here and now. On
the contrary, she makes time and place an integral component of her work, as important
a tool for her artistic practice as oils and canvas are for the painter (to borrow a cliché).
Few have managed to grasp the significance of these elements in art of recent decades
as curator Miwon Kwon in her discussions of the history of site-specific art. She traces
the development of such art through different stages since the autonomous artwork
became the site for the creation of meaning and value—whereby, within the framework
of the near-vacuum that was the modern, white-walled gallery, meanings would not
budge. In the sixties and seventies, art became contingent on its physical environment
and its experience in a certain location, at a certain time. Then the idea of the
culturally and socially immaterial place arises. Art explodes out of the gallery, and the
notion of place is transferred to contexts of discourse and daily life. Artists move
from one set of circumstances to another to create site-specific works based on a variety
of factors, material and immaterial, that become integral to the experience of their
work. Kwon goes so far as to talk about a self-referential turn, as works of art and
artists’ CVs become sites in their own right. Her analysis is a reminder of the perpetual
balancing of power between artist, viewer, and place/context (Kwon, 2002, pp. 3–9).
The corridor in front of me consists of light and shadow. I walk around a corner;
the corridor leads me upwards and downwards. It narrows and widens again. I
walk through walls of darkness and bump into a plaster wall. Then I feel my way
forwards, fingertips first. I assume the light leads the way and try to follow the
source, but it is scattered; I can make out a beam here, a glow there. The light licks
the edges, gathers in a corner, makes streaks. Then the corridor continues in a new
direction. And the light plays tricks on my perception. I become weightless. I don’t
know whether I’m going up or down, turning left or right. I fall and fly all at once
around the last corner. Then I’ve reached the end of the corridor. A door.
Hansdóttir has always trodden purposefully but carefully when it comes to the weight
of place and space. Purposefully, so that as a viewer, we trust her with where she leads
us in the experiential process. We enter into an unwritten agreement with her and her
art because she presents it with gentle assurance. Carefully, because she ensures that
each intervention is appropriate to the environment, the site, and the context. In this
sense, Hansdóttir’s art could be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there are
pieces she develops in close conversation with the circumstances at hand, where she
conscientiously selects the means by which she is able to present critical and enriching
contributions—where she feels she has something to add, so to speak. On the other
hand, there are works in which she chooses to exclude external contingencies and
create an insular world subject to the laws of its own internal context. There are
certainly also examples of her work where the boundaries of this division are less than
obvious.
Much time has passed since artist and critic Brian O’Doherty first published his
essays on the interplay between art and the gallery space, but his ideas are still thought-
provoking. Among other things, he raises questions about the extent to which artists
construe their work to conform to public spaces and the ideology that art institutions
espouse. Galleries and institutions have a covert yet clear influence on art history and
practice, and vice versa. Charting the history of curatorial practice, O’Doherty reminds
us that the idea of a neutral exhibition space is a modernist invention that does not
hold water and has little in common with contemporary art (O’Doherty, 1976, pp.
24–30). Around the same time as the development of the discourse laying the
foundation for O’Doherty’s contributions, artists began to challenge the ideology of the
art world through institutional critique. Artists engaged directly with the architecture
and activity of museums and dealt symbolically with the art institution and prevailing
ideology at large. The work that ensues does not follow the accepted belief that art is
created outside institutional walls, then sampled for display inside “neutral” spaces. It is
a vital contribution to maintaining critical dialogue between art and the institutions to
which audiences should have ready access. Art and environment are closely linked; they
influence one another. Many of Hansdóttir’s installations call attention to the role of the
institutions in which viewers experience her work. They are part of, and they continue,
the institutional critique inherited from previous generations of artists. Hansdóttir’s
aforementioned column installations are a perfect example, as the architecture and
environment of the galleries become an opportunity for her to address art practice and
reception in a larger context.
How can an institution like a museum reflect the diversity, the melting pot, of art
if its activities are limited to the architectural possibilities it offers at any given time?
How can the institution be opened for unrestricted creation and experience?
Hansdóttir memorably attempted to answer these questions with her exhibition
at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2015. Suspension of Disbelief
consisted of an extensive installation in one gallery and a film in another. The artist had
already familiarised herself with a number of special effects developed throughout the
history of photography and film, especially before the age of digital post-production. For
this show, she worked with reflections, distorted scales, forced perspective, and other
techniques that are often in themselves simple optical illusions. A glass matte painting
in the middle of a room depicts a scene from a certain point of view; standing in the
right place (and looking through a camera), the painted scene becomes integrated into
its surroundings and changes the reality of the space. As a viewer, you soon lose your
way. Perception becomes relative, as there are no rules in the space to guide you; there
is a room built inside the gallery whose floors, walls, and ceilings seem asymmetrical,
and you stumble between real and illusory columns. This installation is the set of a film
shown in a nearby gallery. There, through a series of scenes, the camera captures the
multiple perspectives offered by the set. The accompanying sound design by Úlfur
Hansson lends the film an overall air of perpetual uncertainty and expectation.
Inevitably, the viewer is tempted to move between the two realities of the installation
and the film, illusion and reality—a reality that is gradually transformed. Hansdóttir’s
game is not least about pretending not to get away with deceiving the audience, but
rather getting them to join in on the work and take the spectacle for what it is. Even if
you quickly see what lies behind the curtain (in fact, there are no curtains), you enjoy
the work as much as you did before because you are willing to accept its preconditions.
This special interplay that Hansdóttir has been so successful with—getting viewers to
meet her halfway, surprising them, and leaving them to discover the process—has been
and will remain her signature.
An overexposed room greets me. White, powdery, light grey. My eyes adjust to the
brightness and I slowly recognise shapes that appear. Fragments lie on the floor.
White, matte, split pieces. Fist-sized—child-sized. A few steps closer and my eyes
manage to make out more things. Parts that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that
has broken apart. I walk amongst stones, fragments, bits. They shrink and are
gradually stacked on top of one other. Then I see the first shape nearly in complete
form. A rectangular block with broken corners on which a smaller block leans, and
behind it another, still smaller, and on and on to the beginning. Oversized dominos.
The smallest is no bigger than a pack of cigarettes; the largest stone, who knows?
It’s in pieces. In the silence I can imagine how the stones crashed into each other.
Until finally, the giant falls, heavy and unassuming, and shatters on the ground. Or
were they ever whole? The stones, the giant? Each fragment is cut with geometric
precision, the surfaces unscathed. Not a speck of dust to be seen. The ruins lie there
like the idea of a process that may or may not have taken place. The proportions
are too big to be real, broken too perfectly to have been broken, and yet they lie
there. A digital hypothesis in the real world. Geometric, tangible, made of plaster.
As soon as Hansdóttir’s earliest works established her interest in material space and
environment, she turned audience expectations on their head when she introduced
Book Space in 2006. This work is an ongoing process that the artist quickly set in motion
and has cultivated ever since. It consists of bound books of the same size, each of whose
cover, spine, and pages are blank. They are arranged, hundreds and thousands at a time,
on selected library shelves, where they are available for anyone to use as a place for
expression through drawing or text. Over the years they have been filled page by page,
book by book, and have travelled internationally between public libraries as well as
libraries in schools, museums, prisons, and more. With this work, Hansdóttir opened up
a broader understanding of the concept of space: although her art is for the most part
closely related to the environment and the material world, an important aspect is also
the function of subjective space. Along with architecture and design, Hansdóttir’s
concept of space includes language, consciousness, narratives, memories, and
relationships. Collaboration also plays an important role, as many of the artist’s works
have been made in the space that her conversations and collaborations create.
Behind the ruins, coloured surfaces shine in my direction. Neon green, pastel pink,
red, black, ochre, grey, olive green. Surfaces are divided with points and lines
according to a precise rule. The colours define the surfaces as a line defines two
parts of a domino. Same form, same principle. On the one hand, three-dimensional
and huge; on the other, two-dimensional and coloured. Both overexposed in a room
with no roof.
Although Hansdóttir is not interested in storytelling per se, progress—and thus a kind
of narrative—nevertheless plays a major role in her work. She seems fascinated by
principles in which one thing follows another in the algorithms found everywhere in
nature. Her work has included references to the Voronoi diagram, a system for
partitioning a surface based on equidistant measurements between two points. She has
also made use of the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number in the series is the sum
of the two preceding numbers. These are doctrines guiding overtone series, hypotheses
explaining how chaos arises in natural processes within a closed system. The golden
ratio, spirals, arches, gravity, spiral staircases, mathematical sets and sequences,
shadows, decay—innumerable phenomena involving progress or occurrence through
processes or laws of nature. Hansdóttir emphasises these aspects, distils them, and
explores their relation to human existence, both physically and conceptually.
Simulacra from 2016 is a series of photographs installed in the same space they
portray. The exhibition space in i8 Gallery is a symmetrical, easily read rectangular
room, with windows and an entrance on one side and a support column roughly in the
middle. However, Hansdóttir managed to make visitors doubt their own perception
when comparing the photos with their surroundings. In place of the column, she
presented a pedestal—a nod to the modernist tradition, in which the plinth played a key
role in distinguishing art from its environment. A large bouquet of flowers hovers over
the pedestal as if in an invisible vase. The perspective in the series of nine photographs
circles around this illusion as the flowers droop, their petals falling between one image
and the next and finally withering before the viewer’s eyes in this memento mori.
Narrative, whether linear or discontinuous—or both at the same time, as in
Simulacra—can be said to be foundational to human thought. Hansdóttir invites viewers
to enter into her work, participating in and/or shaping its narrative. An encounter with
her art is always a process contingent upon time and space, a narrative that unfolds
when the viewer reflects upon their own experience and perception of what the artist
brings to the table. At the same time it becomes a memory, a kind of story one tells
oneself, emphasising certain parts of the narrative based on one’s understanding of
reality. Speculations about the nature of memory emerge widely throughout
Hansdóttir’s work, especially considering the importance of spaces and places in the
functioning of memory. She repeatedly exposes instabilities in various givens about
reality—that is, in what most of us tend to consider infallible certainty.
Colours are hidden in the light.
Coloured shadows. A corridor where the shado that follows or leads me is not black, but where there are three shadows followin and leading me. Magenta, cyan, and yellow. Light and darkness are both colourful Bright and dim. Visible and invisible. Opposites concealing and revealing everything at once. The invisible light that shows everything. The palpable
darkness that covers everything. Images of visible light. Shadows in the snow that
fall in three colours on sparkling crystals. A new territory of light. The photograph.
Hansdóttir’s artistic twists and turns in time, space, perception, narrative, and memory
exist to bring us closer to the world. She understands how art can prompt us to
reconnect with our environment, and she works in the spirit of phenomenology and
other theories directing our attention to the body. Her art highlights the value of
engaging mentally and physically with our surroundings—being one in and with the
environment. The artist thus follows a similar path as contemporary thinkers such as
Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir, who points out how human corporeality shapes our connection
to reality. Þorgeirsdóttir maintains that we connect to the world around us not only
through language, science, religion, and philosophy, but above all through our bodies
and lived experience. By listening, watching, and touching, we feel our own vulnerability
and foster empathy. As obvious as they may seem, these are nonetheless compelling and
challenging ideas. They are, moreover, gratifying, now that human reality is increasingly
digitised and new approaches are needed in discourses on pressing common concerns,
such as environmental issues (Þorgeirsdóttir, 2015, pp. 65–80).
Pictures, five hundred of them. Roughly A4. Hung one above another, side by side in
a cylindrical space. Black and white. An urban landscape. Close-ups. In the
background, you can make out the substrates of asphalt, gravel, debris, concrete
blocks, manhole covers, grass, and soil. There are rubber bands on top. They have
been lost, dropped, discarded. A ring that is almost never round. A deformed circle,
twisted and knotted. I walk slowly along these pictures stretching into the sky. The
curvature of the space leads me onwards, image after image, circle after circle.
After a while I just see the shape. One picture tells only half the story, but five
hundred become something else, and more. They become a system for organisation,
or try to offer an overview—of what, I don’t precisely know. Patterns, symbols,
perhaps an assertion about writing. Maybe the meaning is also hidden in the
search itself. Here we gathered and searched. Maybe for the system, maybe for
diversity. Or is this an overview? An attempt at connection?
Hansdóttir’s work can be seen in a larger context as part of a sea change. Her focus is art
itself, its creative process, its language, its means of communication—this is the artist’s
platform and specialisation. There, Hansdóttir can experiment with weaving together
bodily and conceptual experiences, without having to distinguish between the two. In
art, as elsewhere, there is now a greater emphasis on human existence not as based on
values rooted in dualism, but rather as a more nuanced synthesis of intellect and emotions, mind and body, reality and fiction. Hansdóttir adds an unequivocal message
into that mix with her art that speaks to us, to me, and to you.
At the centre of the space, surrounded by the pictographs, there is a barely
noticeable, miniscule, gold-plated clover. It has five leaves. Hansdóttir herself says,
“Art practice is like that: it’s the urge to look for that four-leaf clover. And once you
find it, then what? Then you keep on looking” (Naqvi 2022: 12). I turn back to my
travel companions—the photographs, the coloured shadows, the geometric
fragments, the dark corridor, the little hall of mirrors, and so on, much
further—and I do the same. I keep on looking.
References
Bonami, Francesco. 2003. Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer – The
50th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Venice: Marsilio.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Minton, Balch & Company.
Fried, Michael. 1967. “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum (Summer): 12–21. Reprinted in
Fried, 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Naqvi, Erum. 2022. “Merkingarþrungin bil og bilin á milli merkingarinnar: Hughvarf
listamannanna Elínar Hansdóttur og Úlfs Hanssonar” [Meaningful spaces and the
spaces between meanings: Elín Hansdóttir and Úlfur Hansson]. In Ad Infinitum,
exh. cat., Gerðarsafn – Kópavogur Art Museum.
O’Doherty, Brian. 1976. “Inside the White Cube,” essay series in Artforum. Republished
as O’Doherty, 1986. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Þorgeirsdóttir, Sigríður. 2015. “Heimspeki líkamans og heimspeki í líkamanum og hvers
vegna hugsun er ekki kynlaus” [Philosophy of the body, philosophy in the body
and why thinking is not neuter], Hugur, 27: 65–80.
Þorgeirsdóttir, Sigríður. 2019. “Að verða byrjendur aftur í heimspeki: Líkamleg,
gagnrýnin hugsun” [To be a beginner again in philosophy: Embodied critical
thinking], conference presentation at Hugarflug, Iceland University of the Arts,
15 February. Lecture based on Donata Schoeller and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir,
2019. “Embodied Critical Thinking: The Experiential Turn and Its Transformative
Aspects,” philoSOPHIA: Journal of Continental Feminism 9(1): 92–109.