LATENT SHADOW, PT. II
Harbinger gallery, Reykjavík
The second installment of the exhibition and project series Latent Shadow, curated by Claudia Hausfeld and Daría Sól Andrews, presented in Harbinger throughout 2020, opens next Saturday on October 17th. This installment presents a group exhibition with works by Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir, Anne Rombach, Elín Hansdóttir and Chelsey Honders. The four artists present a range of photographic works that explore the manipulation of surfaces and structure, the distortion of context, spaces of transition, the complication of comprehension and the literary meaning of images.
Anne Rombachs work is a curious investigation into the interface between image and language. For her work "titill {k} - Titel {m}", she uses an online dictionary to meander from a German word, its Icelandic translation and the example sentences that are given towards an image that she retrieves from her archive, or vice versa. The pairing of found and translated phrases with her photographs is a wide open playground. Sometimes the words reach into the fictional past or the future of the photograph, sometimes the words can pin the image to some kind of absolute visibility. Her combinations of words and images challenge the way we look at photographs and open for the many different truths they have to offer.
Chelsey Honder's piece “Future Fossil” is part of a larger investigation into the impact of plastic on our environment. In her graduation installation from the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague this year, Chelsey was presenting speculative objects and prints that deal with the emergence of plastic-stone hybrids, or plastiglomerate, in nature.
Elín Hansdóttir presents “PORTAL”, a series of photographs of the same model in different scales. The model’s structure presents a hallway leading in different directions, a transitory space leading somewhere, else. The patterned wallpaper is by William Morris, who traveled to Iceland around 1871, adds to the confusing effect of manipulation of structure and size. In this visual distortion, where visual cues of shrinking and expanding spaces are barely discerned.
Berglind Hreiðarsdóttir's work “Can they sense I’m here” highlights acts of manipulation in the creation of a photograph, which is reverbated in its subject. Berglind pairs an image with a verb, an image of plants, which are isolated and still, an ideal form for capturing the filtering effects of light.
In conjunction with the exhibition, an online screening of works byEmmanuel Lefrant and Aliki Braine will be accessible digitally from October 22 - October 29.
VESSEL
Harbinger gallery, Reykjavík
Does function require a context? In "Vessel", Daniel Reuter explores the interiors of a data center; function is obscured as distinct light sources highlight decontextualized objects and silver textures. Reuter's dibond mounted photographs reflect warehouse complexes of nondescript industrial interiors.
His images contain portrayers of function that are devoid of meaning and abstract in their non-recognizability, commenting on a certain arbitrariness of meaning. A data center stores something, but there is simultaneously nothing to see. These structures support something, we know, but it is absent, global in its sense of non-location. We expect human presence, but it is void in these recognizable mechanical forms, displaced from association. There is an effort to detach these photos from a sense of location – especially within the context of Iceland this is important, a place where an intrinsic connection to our nature and geography is such a strong focus. These interiors you cannot place, and in a literal sense, they show nothing, an objectness without context.
"Vessel" is the first of three installments of the exhibition and project series "Latent Shadow", curated by Claudia Hausfeld and Daría Sól Andrews, presented in Harbinger throughout 2020.
