Sculpture and text work, 2020.
Photographs, paper and mixed media.
The solo exhibition More than a thousand words was presented in Akureyri Art Museum in 2020. The exhibition consisted of a photographs, sculpture and text work. Photo credit Vigfús Birgisson.
More than a thousand words
This is an island and therefore Unreal.
W.H. Auden (Journey to Iceland, 1937).
A picture says more than a thousand words.
A picture says more than a thousand years.
A picture says more than a thousand Icelandic years.
An Icelandic picture says more than a thousand Icelandic years.
(Nursery rhyme, not old.)
Any idea can be grasped in a few words, even the idea about Iceland. Only a few words are needed – a thousand words at the most. Which is a funny thought since you need one hundred thousand words to finish a doctoral thesis, but then you grasp all doctoral thesis in Iceland and anything else beyond that, in less than a thousand words.
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You start with a journey. Possibly headless, in the backseat of a Saab 99 sometime in the early part of the 80’s with a cassette stuck on Svo skal böl bæta by Tolli and Megas. Considerably later in your life you are possibly looking through the front windshield. Even earlier, at Holtavörðuheiði going north. You never care how much a hot dog costs, still you notice that the price seems to change frequently. On the other hand, remembering the weather mostly being the same – most often. All these memories will at some point take you to a glacier that used to be called Klofajökull and you realize that everything depends on Bárðarbunga.
We need to talk about Vatnajökull, I said the other day without having the faintest idea about how to bring that discussion to an end.
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-In Iceland we are always conserving something or other.
-We are always conserving some existence.
That thing about the existence is not strange. The same goes for men, horses, dogs, yes and plants too: Nothing wants to die. That thing with Iceland is however peculiar, since we are never conserving the same Iceland, it changes constantly. The changes are as constant as the shape of the universe.
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What if all that we consider ethnic is long since dutifully flaunted on special occasions but everyday experience directly and constantly connected to international currents? What if everything that makes us human is not particular but universal? What if landscapes are the last “ethnic” symbols whilst the land itself is disappearing into google-ness, new names in English and photos for reviewing, which is for ourselves, by now a rare experience.
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One can write several words to perfectly fathom something, but nobody cares to read it. Icelanders love short sentences, to grasp the essence in a very few words, to make the whole meaning available in one sentence. The Sagas presented in two words: Farmers brawled. Could one grasp a Summer Night or Hallgrímskirkja in two words?
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That which is ethnic is food, things, people, events, literature, art, history, symbols and the symbolic. Formal, organized, moulded. The giant, fragile inner life of individuals is however rarely ethnic. Or is it? Do ethnic virtues or uniquely Icelandic emotions exist? Can we start to talk regularly about ethnic flaws on the Sunday program? Are certain flaws a part of our characteristics? Yes, and what is that we?
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Japanese has many famous words that are un-translatable. One of the most famous Portuguese word is Saudade. We also have a few: Hungurmorða, niðursetningur, ómagi and dúndrandi hressleiki.
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The other day I heard an Icelander sum up Icelanders as Small, weird and fun. Can’t confirm that though. The other day I heard a reporter on RÚV – News for Children, claiming that an artist had summed up visual art as a game of ideas. Can find these news, but not google the quote.
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Six statements on what Iceland is.
#1 Iceland is a journey.
#2 Iceland is a plant.
#3 Iceland is a print or (even better) a manuscript.
#4 Iceland is a language and, especially, words.
#5 Iceland is a photograph.
#6 Iceland is a memory, of the country of course, its characteristics and history. The ideas which haunt you on that day when you ponder on what Iceland is. Pictures and memories that pop up, connected to the past and therefore history, whether it be particular or gone down in history as the History of Iceland. Iceland is a theme, unique cairns in the individual memories of everyone who have died into this soil or a major event on the giant screen at Ingólfstorg Arnarson.
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This exhibition doesn’t only revolve around the bookish national sport depictions, it revolves around the connection between words and pictures. It’s about phrases that seem in themselves meaningless (yet somehow true) and forgotten pictures/memories. How does one illustrate Icelandic pain? It there something Icelandic about pain – is it not universally human? Or isn’t there something really Icelandic in the ways it sometimes manifests, like when one falls into winter-depression but comes back from it in May, madly cheerful? And what if you face the text Icelandic Fear or use it as a headline with any photo whatsoever, do you see the photo in a different way without the text?
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These phrases create tension on their own, something unusual, something contradictory, even something that strikes you as chaotic or sounds absurd. The core that matters in being a human being aren’t necessarily all Icelandic, even though it couldn’t be anything else. We constantly live in a certain paradox which will never be resolved, we’ll always be both international and Icelandic.
And the phrases interwoven with the pictures create yet another dynamic: something dramatic, something funny, something political.
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This exhibition is about the connection between words and pictures - language as a picture-tool, pictures as text or words. Meaning, and its deconstruction. To stop in front of what we see (are seeing, nearly) every single day.
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This exhibition revolves around meaning and meaninglessness. And the softness that comes along when these issues are addressed in the right way. When one stops talking and turns off the words.
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Time is just memory mixed with desire (Tom Waits).
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The connection between words and pictures. This connection is constantly being created every single day, in every published newspaper or published website all year round everywhere in the world. Then we head on, then comes the next day. And we of course constantly connected to that which we read every day into the connection between words and pictures.
Special thanks to: Hjálmar Stefán Brynjólfsson