Postcard from Villa Reykjavík, Part 2

Theresa Himmer's Volcano #01 (2008) on the side of Kling & Bang Gallery

By Laura McLean-Ferris

With a garden party outside Kling & Bang gallery on the agenda for the second night of openings at Villa Reykjavík, the drizzle that arrives during the day is a disappointment. When I mention this, though, I am repeatedly warned by Icelanders that the weather must be ignored at all costs. The openings tonight are very slightly further up town, clustered around Kling & Bang’s Hverfisgata space, which has a sequin sculpture of volcano lava by Theresa Himmer hanging down the side of it (there are two more of these around town). Artists Anna Hrund Masdottir and Sigríður Tulinius have created The Garden Project, in which they garden on the abandoned and run-down spaces around the gallery. The empty lot next door is filled with flowers, and now the pair are growing vegetables and food on the roof.

Arnfinnur Amazeen, Darkness Carried In (Again), (2010), Installation view at Kling & Bang Gallery

The exhibition at Kling & Bang is Darkness Carried In (Again), by Arnfinnur Amazeen, and the gallery space is filled with a wallpaper of contrasting two-colour prints based on the No Smoking sign. In this space there is to be no smoking, no hotdogs, no ice cream and, it would seem, no fun. In a small side room is a traditional jumper with a knitted slogan proclaiming that normality is the new avant-garde (an idea perhaps backed up by the vegetable garden on the roof).

 Cloud and Lightning performing at Kling & Bang gallery garden party. Click play to listen.

The soggy garden party kicks off with appropriately melancholy music from the ethereal folk duo Cloud and Lightning, who are here from Stockholm with artist Johanna Billing, who runs a small leftfield record label called Make it Happen.

A leaning broom at Naesti Bar, Tulips and Roses exhibition venue        

One of the more conceptual contributions from galleries participating in Villa Reykjavík came from Jan Mot Gallery, which purportedly, at the behest of Pierre Bismuth, evaporated some Belgian rainwater into the atmosphere. I missed this happening, whenever it did. I did try to check out the equally slippery project from Vilnius’s Tulips and Roses gallery, but when I went to see the show, I found myself instead in a Spanish bar, where people were watching the World Cup. As there was no art in sight, I backed out awkwardly, feeling that I had made a mistake or chosen the wrong time to visit. I went back later, though, to watch the World Cup final – seeing as Spain were playing in the final, it seemed like the right place to go. When I got there I ran into many of the other artists and gallerists from the project, as if by collective happenstance. I picked up a small folded leaflet titled ‘I want to say straight away that my name is Robert Duncan, just in case any of you entered the wrong hall’, with hand-drawn illustrations that had been left on the bar. It featured small sentences from contributing artists pointing to elements in the room around the bar, such as a propped-up broom, and this seemed to sum up my initial out-of-place feeling, and subsequent relief: ‘The first sentence is a promise, just like a threshold is a promise of a house.’

Perhaps, considering this tension between expectations and realities, now is a good time to talk about what Villa Reykjavík seemed to promise. Warsaw's Raster gallery, who had employed this model once before in 2006's Villa Warsawa, had certainly set out with a collaborative, non-commercial spirit in mind. However, there was an atmosphere around the project that I wasn’t sure I had encountered before, because it was almost like a biennial run by gallerists. Was it a trip away for gallery owners  – a chance for them to flex their own curatorial muscle in a space outside the usual trappings and booths of art fairs and commercial spaces? If the regular grumbling about curators among the group was anything to go by, perhaps the desire to work in this way came from galleries who wanted to see if they could do things better. Is the question, as the project puts it, of ‘curatorially-led galleries that are pushing the agenda forward’ a serious one? At some point everyone must have used the gallery system as a subconscious tool for navigating the artworld in a way that is not advisable, for example in an unfamiliar country. It’s a way of cutting research corners, and surely one that dragged commercial and public organisation into an embrace so tight that both appeared to be pulling in the same direction. Is this a new step for commercial galleries pushing the artworld agenda? Or will they break off to go somewhere else entirely?


Postcard from Villa Reykjavík Part 1 can be read here.