HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

12 commissioned paintings, each 120x40 cm, ship-paint on aluminium; heap of net as a 'found sculpture' from the bottom of the sea; an inscription on the wall quoting Allan Sekula´s Fish Story; sculpture 'Golden Ship', ca. 50x50x100 (irregular size), wireframe, gips, plaster, paper-mâché and 23.75 karat 'Rosenoble' gold leafs; HD16:9 video loop 'Material Puffin' on a 24 inch flatscreen monitor; workers performance during the Vernissage later replaced by a documentation video showed on a 12 screen flatscreen monitor during the exhibition period.  

Keep Frozen part four responds to the history of Ásmundarsalur as an exhibition space for painting and to the ASÍ Art Museum as an art collection owned by workers. Marking the centenary of the Icelandic Confederation of Labour in 2016, the exhibition is developed in collaboration with workers from Reykjavík Harbour, which celebrated its own centenary the previous year. It brings together and extends several strands from earlier works in the Keep Frozen series.

Ghostnet as Sculpture from the bottom of the sea

At the premises of the fishing company Ögurvík in Reykjavík Harbour the artist found a fishing net weighing several tonnes that had been recovered after a year on the seabed. The net belonged to the freezer trawler Vigri, which lost it during the winter of 2014 while Guðnadóttir was filming the documentary Keep Frozen, centred on the unloading of the same vessel. Almost exactly a year later, another ship recovered the net by chance. Its colour and surface had been transformed by its time in the sea.

In the first Keep Frozen exhibition, at De-Construkt Projects in New York, Guðnadóttir presented fragments of fishing rope found on the Atlantic coast of Africa, where debris from fishing and maritime industries washes ashore from across the world. By bringing an entire recovered net into the museum as part of the Keep Frozen part four installation, she expanded this earlier gesture from fragment to monumental object.

At the exhibition opening, during the popular Reykjavik Culture Night in late summer, as a performance dockworkers transported the net from Reykjavík Harbour through the city and into the museum. There the workers placed the pile in the middle of Asmundarsal gallery on the 2nd floor of the museum to join the rest of the installation. 

Through this collective action, an industrial object recovered from the seabed became displaced from its working environment and reconstituted as a found sculpture recovered from the bottom of the sea.

The Shipyard Paintings

The exhibition also developed Guðnadóttir’s ongoing investigation of the relationship between artist and worker. At the Reykjavík Arts Festival in 2014, she presented photographic sequences in which she placed her own body in relation to the gestures of labour, while dockworkers performed a poetry action at the opening.

For Keep Frozen part 4, Guðnadóttir commissioned a series of paintings of the Reykjavík shipyard, focusing on the colours and surfaces of industrial ship paint. By coincidence, a painter and an immigrant was then employed as a worker at the shipyard and produced the paintings during his working hours. The circumstances collapse the distinction between painter and labourer that the project itself sets out to examine.

Gold of Iceland

The installation also returns to Material Puffin (2014), a video in which Guðnadóttir, wearing a puffin mask, spits gold into Reykjavík Harbour. A new sculpture refers directly to that work. Its starting point is the harbour’s continuous battle with rust: the chemical encounter between seawater and the metal surfaces of ships and infrastructure. The work also echoes Allan Sekula’s observation that if ships were made of gold, they would not need to be painted—a seemingly simple proposition that would radically alter both the appearance of ports and their place in the visual imagination.