The Demented Diamond of Kling & Bang´s Confected Video Archive
At the show’s entrance visitors will be greeted by the Demented Diamond Confected Video Archive by the artists’ cooperative Kling and Bang – dense and colourful like their hometown Reykjavik. They project a specifically chosen selection from their up-to-date archive of Icelandic video art on multiple-facetted, shiny surfaces. After this brash caleidosopic installation, an airy space with individual works conjures the vastness of the Icelandic landscape:
Delicate flowers are blooming on volcanic soil, minutely painted in oil with a hairfine brush by Eggert Pétturson. A distant ship-motor is heard in the minimalistic piece composed by Tumi Magnusson. Ragnar Kjartansson‘s model of a monument commemorates the fishermen lost at sea: a father and his son, both with a knife and a fish. The late work of the 1989 deceased sculpturer evokes the life of the fishing families with unobtrusive wisdom. At the same time it addresses the theme of generations so present in a country where first names are handed down over centuries: Grandson Ragnar Kjartansson jr. as well as his father Kjartan Ragnarsson contribute pencil drawings of the surf. The cabinet installation by Margrét Blöndal also alludes to the sea with flotsam of wood, plastic, foam. Together with spare color accents they spread a loose, fragile, strange net of associations. Across the hall, Gudmundur Thoroddsen’s young vikings are playing basketball.
The three participating artists from Switzerland drew inspiration from Icelandic landscapes: For years, Silvia Bächli has spent precious weeks in Tumi Magnussons summer house, looking and drawing. Thomas Heimann uses Icelandic pigments for a wallpainting which tempers the room with its suggestive shades. Nic Bezemer has searched and found the essence of a unique topography in abstracted nature studies.
In diverse techniques – painting on canvas or wall, drawing, sculpture, room- or audioinstallation – renders a very subjective impression of the place named Iceland. Grown out of a research by two participating artists and nourished by existing friendships, it offers a virtual escape to an unknown region, reflected in distinctive works of art.
