The idea behind Hafnarborg‘s autumn exhibition, Everything at the Same Time, is to look at how young artists take on and confront the freedom in contemporary visual arts. How it is possible to extract meaning from art that can and may be anything at all, a painting, a child‘s toy, papier mâché, a movement, an idea, opera, plaster. On exhibit, will be works of different media, from oil painting to performances, in an effort to unite the scattered notions found in contemporary art.
The aim of the exhibition is not to show a section or an overview of how art is today, but to explore how artists, faced with this freedom, form from it meaning. How art can take any shape, while still speaking the same language. How an oil painting on the wall in someone‘s home is the same art, a part of the same history of art, as mushrooms made to grow in a bright, white exhibition space. How art – and art history – is a compressed thing, where everything exists at the same time.
The participating artists are Auður Lóa Guðnadóttir, Baldvin Einarsson, Bára Bjarnadóttir, Rúnar Örn Marinósson, Sigrún Gyða Sveinsdóttir, Steingrímur Gauti Ingólfsson and Valgerður Sigurðardóttir. The curators of the exhibition are Andrea Arnarsdóttir and Starkaður Sigurðarson.
Andrea Arnarsdóttir took applied studies in culture and communication at the University of Iceland, graduating with an MA degree in 2018. Her graduation project, the exhibition Superabundance at the University, drew quite a bit of attention. After graduation, Andrea went on an internship at the Artipelag, art museum in Stockholm. There she gained an insight into the museum world and the curatorial work, as well as working closely with the museum‘s curator of pedagogy.
Starkaður Sigurðarson has a background both in visual arts and writing, but after graduating from the Iceland University of the Arts, he went on to complete an MFA degree in creative writing at Goddard College in spring of 2018. He has exhibited in many places around Iceland, most recently participating in the exhibition Pressure of the Deep at The Living Art Museum in 2018, in addition to writing for Víðsjá, at the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, penning text for artists and museums, and editing the visual arts publication Stara.
Everything at the Same Time is the ninth exhibition in Hafnarborg‘s autumn exhibition series, where an idea is selected from curators‘ submitted proposals. Previous exhibitions are In Between, 2011, SKIA, 2012, Indications – Building Within a Building, 2013, Track, 2014, The World Without Us, 2015, Experiment – Clay and More, 2016, Painting – Not a Medium, 2017, and Come Rain or Shine, 2018. With the autumn exhibition series, Hafnarborg wishes to open a channel for new ideas, in line with the museum’s mission, to strengthen and support various programmes of art and culture, through different perspectives.