Projects 2000

FLAKK or that extraordinary sensation of being abroad even when at home

27 May – 13 Aug, 2000 in Nordic House in Reykjavik

curated by
Per Gunnar Tverbakk and Andrea Kroksnes

... the dérive (literally: drifting), a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The derive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness ofpsycho geographi¬cal effects. In a derive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their rela¬tions, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
...

Our central idea is that of the construction of situations, that is to say, the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passionate quality.

Guy Debord

FLAKK or that extraordinary sensation of being abroad even when at home wants to introduce a young international art scene to Iceland's cultural community. The concept refers to the situationist's notion of the `derive'. The Icelandic word flakk means to drift and can be understood as a metaphor for the increasingly floating state of being we all experience, but is moreover conceived as the actual physical movement of the viewer through the gallery space. Fol¬lowing the meandering path through the multi-cornered galleries at Nordens Hus the viewer will be send on a journey that is no straight walk but rather a labyrinthine journey.

According to which way the visitor chooses he/she will explore his/her own very personal access to the artworks. Art looking becomes a physical experience in time and space and the viewers themselves become nomadic drifters drawn by unexpected attractions and encounters. The movement of our bodies through the room constitutes a here and now of the artworks. It demands the production of the viewer's own spatial concept in relation to the work. But this is different from the materiality of the modernist notion of a unified Gesamtkunstwerk. Most of the works are heterogeneous, due to the assem¬bled elements that they use as raw materials. As we look at all these things together we are forced to create a perceptual relationship between them. The model of art as a conveyor of fixed symbolic ideas or messages is substituted with one involving an indeterminate, unsettled process. One result of this strategy is that the transcendental iibersubject of the artist is replaced with the subject-in-process of the viewer who finishes the work in a multidirectional perception process.

The appropriation of the drifting theme by a generation of young artists, however, is not a naive copying of the original situationist's dérive: a strategy of resisting capitalist structures with the intend to revolutionize everyday life. The society of the spectacle - the circulation of signs and the attendant osmosis between cultural and economic spheres - has long become the self-evident premise of these young artists' work. Drifting no longer serves to introduce a radically oppositional and revolutionary counter-praxis but rather wants to sensitize the audience for our current state of a globalized world of mass media, in which an endless flood of images is caught up in a maelstrom of simulation. In order to not get swallowed by this vertiginous vortex we have to adopt a nomadic attitude, which sees value in inconstancy - that extraordinary sensation of being abroad even when at home.

FLAKK ... is not about representing a generic and singular movement but a diverse and a complex one. The common trait in the diverse artistic articulations of Thoroddur Bjarnason (is), Frans Jacobi (dk), Mattias Härenstam (se), Aleksandra Mir (se), Sarah Morris (usa), Ole Jörgen Ness (n), Seppo Renvall (fin), Annika Ström (se), Egill Saebjörnsson (is), Susa Templin (d) that span from painting, sculpture, and photography to video, installation, and performance is their shared interest in displacement, travel, and the everyday.

The exhibition will have a strong Nordic profile, but due to the very meaning of the Icelandic word FLAKK - travel and encounter - there will be participating other international artists. FLAKK ... thus stands for crossing and networking remote sites in order to link and articulate positions that had no voice before. These artists engage in cross-national projects, political, and cultural practices that can be aligned with local cultural practices in Iceland as well as elsewhere.

The show that is scheduled to take place at Nordens Hus' exhibition space in Reykjavik from May 27th through August 13th 2000, is curated by Per Gunnar Tverbakk and Andrea Kroksnes. Tverbakk is an artist and freelance curator. In 1999 he worked as exhibition coordinator for NIFCA - Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art. Tverbakk curated `Neste Stopp' at the Artfestival in Lofoten, Norway in the summer of 1999. Kroksnes is an art historian, critic, and curator; she is now based in Hamburg and New York completing her doctorate in Art History and Criticism at the University of Stony Brook. Kroksnes curated `Nordic Nomads' at White Columns, New York, in the Winter of 1998/99. The collaboration between the curators was fueled by an interest in linking aesthetic practices from diverse cultural contexts with one another.

Text by Andrea Kroksnes

Published in NIFCA Info 1/2000