Postcard from Villa Reykjavík: Part One

An empty fish factory used as an exhibition space on Reykjavík's harbour

By Laura McLean-Ferris

The smart apartments have never been lived in. They were meant for someone else. The kitchens are brand new and untouched, the proportions thoughtful. Reykjavík built many apartments for people who never moved in, and now several of them are being used as spaces for Villa Reykjavík, a project initiated by Warsaw’s Raster Gallery, in which 14 European galleries have moved into abandoned spaces in the Icelandic capital for the month of July. It’s worth naming the galleries, as they are few, so: joining Raster from Warsaw are Foksal Gallery Foundation, alongside Galerie Jocelyn Wolff (Paris), IBID Projects and Hollybush Gardens (London), Hunt Kastner (Prague), Tulips & Roses (Vilnius), Jan Mot (Brussels), Johann König and Croy Nielsen (Berlin), Rodeo (Istanbul) and Zero (Milan), working together with two local galleries, i8 and Kling & Bang from Reykjavík. It is a festival of sorts, involving galleries, artists and musicians, taking advantage of the fact that, in July, it never really gets dark in Iceland. The project is ostensibly a reaction of galleries to the competitive, restrictive atmosphere of art fairs. However, putting the whys and wherefores of the project to one side for a moment, here are some notes from the opening night of exhibitions. 

After arriving to intensely blue skies and settling in with some lobster soup (I decline the whale skewers) in Saegreifinn, a busy wooden fish shack by the harbour, the weekend’s events start in a reasonably traditional vein, with gallery openings split over two evenings. Openings on the first night are in the downtown area, near the harbour, and near i8 gallery, which opens with Trace, an exhibition by Elín Hansdóttir, who has created a large mirror-clad wooden concertina wall in the gallery space. A 16mm film projects onto this series of mirrors, appearing only as coloured light on the dusty glass surfaces until passing through holes in the concertina to find its final projection on a circular screen behind.

Elín Hansdóttir's film Trace at i8 gallery

Elín Hansdóttir's beautiful film is based on American choreographer Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance (1891). A billowing costume tracks a dancer’s movements, like the ribbons used in rhythmic gymnastics, and the film has been tinted with otherworldly colours so that the dancer changes shade continually. Long-exposure photographs taken from the projected film are shown on the walls, dividing the film into a refracted set of stilled movements. The dancing figure in these images occasionally appears like a glowing deep-sea creature or a bright insect.

Nearby are several temporary spaces in the empty luxury apartment buildings. Visitors to the Venice Biennale, particularly those projects and pavilions outside the Giardini, in the city’s old palazzi and grand buildings, will recall the faded glamour and sunken, damp luxury of the architecture, and the particular atmosphere it adds to those exhibitions, whatever they may be. In Reykjavík, however, the luxurious, abandoned spaces date from a period around 2007, when it lived a moment as the ultimate chic city destination of the rich. Minimalist flats and apartments, some contrasting oddly with the more native style of wooden houses around this small, low-slung city, sprung up in the past few years, but have remained empty since the Icelandic banks tanked in 2008. This adds a tone that is almost the opposite to that in Venice; the buildings tell of detritus that is brand new.

Installation view of the Foksal Gallery Foundation's exhibition at Villa Reykjavik 

Of the shows held in these spaces, Foksal Gallery Foundation’s exhibition stands out as an example of deft, site-specific curating drawing on the energy of such waste, picking up on themes of rubbish and degradation that reappear continually during the week. The floor is covered in bin-liner black plastic, by Piotr Janas, whose Poster/Picture (2010) works line the walls, like collages of art detritus, imagery of paint, dirt, art advertisements and fabrics, many struck through with a thick dash line. Monika Sosnowska’s sculpture of an empty metal frame for a street bin has a direct relationship with this floor, as though everything in the room could be scooped up like junk and slung into the bin. Cezary Bodzianowski’s sculpture of chairs upturned on a table, with lightbulbs attached to the bottom of the chair legs like a set of birthday candles on a cake, keeps feet magically and safely off the floor. And in Anna Molska’s film, a woman in a black headpiece snakes around a floor on her front. A voiceover comments hysterically on the action, as though the speaker were witnessing a giant black mamba (“Oh Jesus, here she comes, here she comes”), while two small windows showing performances of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music (1972), one in colour and one in black-and-white, play in the top right-hand corner of the film. God knows what this is about, but it is mesmerising, the slithering body becoming a sort of absurd creative entity created by a form of needless restriction (as in Reich’s music).

Installation shot of Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller's Flotsam and Jetsam exhibition for Croy Nielsen

Up the road, in a red wooden house, which also seems to have been converted into a new uninhabited property, is Raster’s group show, ruminating on luck and perception, with Jan Simon’s A Survey of Lotto Systems (2009), in which he employs different handbooks in order to win the lottery. Croy Nielsen’s exhibition, Flotsam and Jetsam, by Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller, looked like it might be a modernist-inspired sculpture show of the most fashionable sort, but in fact revealed itself on a nearby video to be a collection of unusual instruments waiting to be played. A record player sings the sculpture’s dull bell tune. In the basement, behind a brand-new kitchen marked only by dust, Milan’s Zero gallery curated a series of films based on surreal journeys in space – through the sewers, as in Hans Schabus’s Western (2002), or in a boat that flies through the sky, in Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s Volver (2008).

Michael Sailstorfer, T 72 (Sand) (2008)

The rest of the evening’s openings took place in a large empty fish factory on the harbour. The ground floor housed, most dramatically, Johann König’s exhibition with Michael Sailstorfer’s huge T 72 (Sand) (2008), a dummy inflatable tank with an automated pump attached, so that it rises proud and ridiculous, and then sinks flat and soft in turn. Johannes Wohnseifer’s industrial text paintings, taking their warlike phrases from film and popular culture, accompany, looking appropriate in the rusty, metallic factory architecture. In a large room behind this one is Hollybush Gardens, showing a perfectly installed projection of Johanna Billing’s film I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009), featuring amateur Romanian dancers and students enlivening streets and spaces with their movements.

Installation shot of Johanna Billing's I'm Lost Without Your Rhythm (2009)

The film, which has been seen reasonably widely in Britain, has no narrative structure, save a song, My Heart, and the aesthetics are almost Sesame Street-like in their casual cast of youthful characters. The teenage faces, however, and their traces of individuality in dress and expression, are open to a dramatic narrative tension drawn from the viewer’s experiences of youth.

Installation shot of Emre Hüner’s film Juggernaut (2009)

Upstairs, in the factory’s more managerial spaces – former control rooms and offices (with requisite porthole architecture) – is an extensive group show curated by Rodeo gallery, entitled Tropical Iceland, based on the imaginative space that an island destination can occupy. Gülsün Karamustafa’s Bosphorus 1954 (2007), prints framed as though they might have come from a local museum, depict a magical moment when icebergs floated out of the Black Sea and blocked the Bosphorus strait, leaving those who needed to get across to clamber over the floes. Emre Hüner’s film Juggernaut (2009) imagines the future as seen from the 1940s, promising new horizons but, with its sinister footage of businessmen discussing plane models and Disneyfied images of war, seeming to predict only destruction.