Sunday October 24th at 2 p.m., a curator’s and artist talk will take place on Hafnarborg’s fall exhibition Community of Sentient Beings. Director of Hafnarborg, Aldís Arnardóttir, and Hubert Gromny, co-curator of the exhibition, will lead the conversation. Hubert will talk about the exhibition concept, as well as his own work in the exhibition, along with artists Melanie Ubaldo and Gígja Jónsdóttir.
Looking at our connection to the world as a community of sentient beings will allow us to open various paths of investigation, whether it be the relationship between human and nature, human and culture, or human and human. The term sentient being allows us to abandon historically charged definitions, to think of personhood and humans more broadly. At the core of the concept, is an interrogation of the historical and social usage of a category of human, which concerns whom and what we consider part of a community.
Hubert Gromny (b. 1990) is an artist, researcher, curator and writer, based in Reykjavík, Iceland. He graduated with an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, and with BA in philosophy from Jagiellonian University in Cracow in 2015. His works are part of the public collection of Bunkier Sztuki in Cracow. He exhibited in Poland, Iceland, Germany and Mexico. Currently he is working on the intersection of photography, writing and sonic improvisation.
Gígja Jónsdóttir (b. 1991) approaches her subjects through various media such as performance, video, music and installation. Human beings and their staged and actual environment is Gígja’s main theme, as well as the dialogue and the relationship with the viewer. Gígja graduated with a master’s degree in fine art from the San Francisco Art Institute in the spring of 2018. She graduated from the Reykjavík School of Visual Arts in 2016 and from the contemporary dance department of The Iceland University of the Arts in 2013.
Melanie Ubaldo graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Iceland University of Arts in 2016. In Melanie’s work image and text are inextricably linked, where deconstructionist paintings
incorporate text with graffiti-like vandalism oftentimes of her own crude experiences of others preconceptions thus exposing the power of immediate unreflected judgment. She has taken part in various group exhibitions locally and abroad; to name a few Kling&Bang, Hafnarborg, Gerdarsafn, Cycle Music and Arts Festival in Berlin and Argentina. Her work has since been acquired by the Reykjavik Museum for the permanent collection. Melanie is also the cofounder of Lucky 3, a collective of Icelandic artists of Filipino origins.