INTERCURSE WITH THE COLLECTION

You are welcome to join us at The Living Art Museum on Saturday April 10th to meet the seven young, Icelandic artists, who have been invited by the museum to select works from its collections to be exhibited. They have explored the collection over the past three weeks and install the works of their selection for Saturday.

The artists are: Björk Viggósdóttir Etienne de France Harpa Dögg Kjartansdóttir Kristín Rúnarsdóttir Magnús B. Hafsteinsson Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir Þorvaldur Jónsson

They have selected about 20 works by Icelandic and international artists and have installed them in collaboration with the museum. Their selection of works will be added to the previously selected works of museum board members, for the exhibition “Intercurse with the collection”, which opened on March 11th 2010.

“.. at the outset of the twenty-first century museums have had to grapple with the notion of being both guardians of culture and participants in the construction of this culture. As well as being a recorder of history, the museum is in great part a producer of that history.” L.Buck & J.Greer, “Owning art-The contemporary art collector´s handbook”, p. 246 (Cultureshock Media Ltd. 2006)

The Living Art Museum is the oldest non-profit artist-run organization in Iceland, founded in 1978 by a group of artists, with the aim to salvage the contemporary art of the time and act as a living platform for exhibitions and events.

Originally the members of the Association of The Living Art Museum were to donate two works and then later one per year, which was then changed to every five years because of scarce storage facilities. The collecting has not been formally active for several years but the collection policy is now being revised.

The collection now holds about 2.000 works, three times more works than were registered in the beginning of 2008, when the board at the time started fully registering the collection and archive of the museum.

The current board took post in October 2009 and started its collaboration by relocating to the location at Skúlagata 28 and preparing the space for the multi-layered activity of the museum, at once a collection-, research- and exhibition space, as well as a living venue.

This exhibition is the current board´s „first date“ with the collection. Each member of the board selects works from his/her personal interest and curiosity of the works, some of which have seldom or not at all been shown before.

The collection is based on donations and contains a great number of important works by Icelandic and international artists. A part of the collection also contains student works, works made in various workshops, works that have been left behind and works that might be parts of happenings or installations.

In her article Things without words, written for the catalog Dialogues with the collection in 2000, art theorist Eva Heisler writes about the collection: „ The collection of the Living Arts Museum began with seventy-odd objects associated with SÚM. These were objects given to the museum by Níels Hafstein who had rescued them from the abandoned SÚM gallery [Icelandic artist group, 1965-1972] where they had been left behind as rubbish.“ and elsewhere in the same article Eva writes: „The collection is mocked for its flotsam and jetsam. But that flotsam and jetsam is offered as evidence of the Museum’s reverence for the irreverence of the SÚM spirit.“ “Things without words” by Eva Heisler. From the exhibition catalogue Dialogues with the collection, the Living Art Museum, Jan, 2000.

The eternal challenge of the museum is a struggle of forgetfulness vs. history, and the historical significance that a collection based upon donation can have. A collection acquired non-selectively by a museum does not necessarily reflect the best, most progressive or most radical art, although the museum aims to continue to be a living platform for and an active participant in the mediation of progressive, uncensored contemporary art. Such a collection however reflects a condition, development and international collaboration at the museum in the past 32 years.

It is our role as artists, curators, art theorists, art historians, historians and other professionals go cast light upon the collection as a whole, and its individual works, allowing this history to be mediated according to the changing times, for it to stay alive within and beyond the art historical context.

The board of The Living Art Museum 2010: Birta Guðjónsdóttir Gunnar Már Pétursson Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir Páll Haukur Björnsson Tinna Guðmundsdóttir

INTERCURSE WITH THE COLLECTION
ausgewählt von: Björk Viggosdottir, Etienne de France, Harpa Dögg Kjartansdottir, Kristin Runarsdottir, Magnus B. Hafsteinsson ...