HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

Keep Frozen Projects was a series of symposium and exhibitions in Leipzig and Reykjavík in January and February 2016 supported by the Nordic Culture Fund, Nordic Culture Point and Icelandic Visual Arts Fund.

Kunstrkraftwerk, Leipzig: 22.01. - 24.01.16.

SEA BODY INFRASTRUCTURE IMAGE - AN ARTISTIC RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM

in collaboration with DISTRICT, Berlin, as part of The Many-Headed Hydra

Curated by Suza Husse and Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

Moderated by Jonatan Habib Engqvist

Gathering practitioners from artistic, curatorial and theoretical fields, a group of artworks and audience members, the three-day program of various figurations, included performances, conversations, a site visit, roundtables, video screenings and physical exercise, linking current practices and discourses of arts-based research with thematic and topographic contexts of the Keep Frozen research project.

In a meeting with the Leipzig based editorial group of the magazine outside the box, the symposium took a departure point in intersectional feminist perspectives on the politics of labor and forms of knowledge production in relation to social hierarchies and biopolitics.

Drawing from critical theory and examples of artistic practice, Jonatan Habib-Engqvists contribution addressed ‘work’ as a potential form of fabricated agency and regarded its physical symptoms to demystify the concept of ‘immaterial labor’.

With EIE-The Class (Dafna Maimon) queer approaches to the body and its performance in the production of images, identities, definitions of self and other were invited to gain understanding of contemporary body intimacies with technological, economic and corporeal infrastructures.

A territory of passage undergoing social and ecological transformations, the North Atlantic Ocean was discussed as a shifting geopolitical entity with members of the transdisciplinary research project Occupational Hazard. Its material and mythological meaning as infrastructure and resource resonates in the streams of technology and capital, the diasporic histories, the desires and discourses that cross its waters.

Embodiments of the queer, eco-sexual, inter-species, spiritual and scientific that inhabit a different shoreline in Between the Waves (Tejal Shah) stimulated imaginaries of fluid forms of existence between archaic and futuristic realms.

Based on these topical fields and their crossings, the roundtables with Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, Emma Haugh, Anne Hofmann, Suza Husse, Sören Kjörup, Dafna Maimon and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson provided a framework to reflect arts-based research in terms of methodologies and narratives, economies and environments, power structures and affects.

The group of artworks participating in these translational set-ups were invited to be interlocutors in their own right: They introduced scenes of transition in the scope of the symposium, such as the moments of the fish unfreezing from its immobilized and packaged state in the transactions and journeys of Labor Move. Together with these examples of artistic research, the participants in the Hydra Reading Troupe Workshop #01 SPEAKING AS FISHES (Emma Haugh & Suza Husse) which concluded the symposium, animated the fish as a presence of (neo)colonial currency traversing oceans, bodies and forms of knowledge as well as a fluid site for reimagining interdependencies and interspecies relationships.

January 22/

16:30-18:00 Figuration I: Feminist Perspectives on Work and Knowledge A meeting with outside the box – Magazin für feministische Gesellschaftskritik @ MONALiesA Feministische Bibiothek.
18:00 Figuration II: Keep Frozen Part Three, chapter two
Opening of a mixed-media 3 channel video installation by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

January 23/

10:00-11:00 Figuration III: Introductions to SEA BODY INFRASTRUCTURE IMAGE with Candace Goodrich (Artistic Director Kunstkraftwerk), Dr. Laura Hirvi (Director, Finnland Institut), Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, Aldis Snorradóttir (curator of the Keep Frozen Symposium Reykjavik), Suza Husse and Human Comma Being (sculpture, Dafna Maimon, 2015)
11.00 – 12.00 Figuration IV: Extended I Exercise – The Class
Performance by Dafna Maimon (2015), presented by Michael Norton
12.30 – 13.15 Figuration V: Performing Work
A quasi-conversation on labor, performance, dematerialization and incorporation with Jonatan Habib Engqvist and contributions by Nina Möntmann
14:30 – 15:15 Figuration VI: Occupational Hazard - on notions of ‘ecology’, ‘active citizenship’ and ‘the future’ in relation to shifting geopolitical conditions and emerging new waters of the Arctic
15.30 – 19.30 Figuration VII: Sea Body Infrastructure Image: Artistic Research towards a grammar of streams and countercurrents
Two Roundtables stimulated by Between The Waves (Video, Tejal Shah, 2012), Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, Emma Haugh, Anne Hofmann, Sören Kjörup and Dafna Maimon; moderated by Suza Husse and Nine Eglantine Yamamoto-Masson.

January 24/

11.00-16.00 Figuration VIII: Hydra Reading Troupe Workshop #01 SPEAKING AS FISHES: A collaged reading of The Many-Headed Hydra through the body sorcery of Quota Queen
Workshop by Emma Haugh and Suza Husse

Iceland Univeristy of the arts, laugarnes, Reykjavik: 11.02. - 12.02.16.

RECLAIMED LANDSCAPE - A SYMPOSIUM ON ART PRACTICE AS RESEARCH AND CREATIVE RESEARCH METHODS

Directed by Aldís Snorradóttir
Moderated by Berglind Jóna Hlynsdóttir

Reclaimed Landscapes originates in the ongoing artistic research project Keep Frozen by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir.

The aim of the symposium was to create a forum for multi-disciplinary dialogues about art practice as research, artist as researcher and creative research methods. The symposium brought researchers from artistic, curatorial and theoretical fields together to engage, interact and share methods and ideas as they present new works, research projects and performances.

The Keep Frozen research project has reflected how the aesthetics of the harbor have changed and how it has become the victim of gentrification, which thrives on a romanticized conception of the docks. The Reclaimed Landscapes symposium examines this subject within a broader context and additionally reflects on how borders are shifting and how, in turn, various landscapes are changing. With respect to the increase in tourism around the globe, locals sometimes experience visitors taking over the environment and landscapes of their surroundings - the environment they feel is their own. The host country of the symposium, Iceland, is a prime example of how the landscape is becoming more regulated and defined by specific attractions. This raises questions of humans' positions on its environment and changing landscapes. It could be argued that man is in an existential crisis of some sort – feeling the need to reclaim forgotten landscapes and traditions. In relation to changing environments, labor and authority, with an emphasis on the male role, will also be reflected on and the ever blurring borders defining it.

Through workshops, lectures, performances and an open dialogue with the audience these issues were examined from the perspective of art practice as research.

February 5th /

Opening of two solo exhibitions based on art practice as research methods: Keep Frozen Part Four a mixed-media installation and collaborative performance by Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir and Feral Attractions: The Museum of Ghost Ruminants a mixed-media installation by artist duo Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson at Listasafn ASÍ, the Art Museum of Icelandic Confederation of Labour.

February 11 /

13:00 - 16:30 Hydra Reading Troupe Workshop #01 SPEAKING AS FISHES - A collaged reading of "The Many Headed Hydra" through the body sorcery of "Quota Queen" Workshop by Suza Husse and Emma Haugh at Hverfisgalleri

February 12 /

10:00 - 10:30 Words of welcome by Aldís Snorradóttir, the director of the symposium and Suza Husse, the curator of SEA BODY INFRASCTRUCTURE IMAGE, introduced the sister symposium that occurred in Leipzig. Moderator, Berglind Jóna Hlynsdóttir, introduced speakers. 
10:30 – 11:30 A Curatorial Point of View - Stefanie Hessler
A lecture on artistic research from a curatorial point of view, within the purview of its manifestation (and oblivion) in exhibition making. Attempt was made to trace the development from art history to a history of (nearly) everything.
11:30 – 12:30 Transformative Masculinity - Narve Hovdenakk
Presentation about the artist research and work with a focus on an existential transformative masculinity. 
13:30 – 14:30 Reclaiming Reykjavik: memory, landscape and a thawing of archaeology - Gísli Pálsson and Oscar Aldred
Archaeologist exploration on the ‘thawing’ of the material culture associated with Reykjavík’s old harbor that has been brought to light in a series of excavations over the past decade - focusing on these excavations as a reclamation of sorts, as well as on this landscape’s uneasy role in Reykjavík’s city plans.
14:30 – 15:30 KEEP FROZEN PROJECTS - Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir
Overview of the project.
16:00-18:00 Driving the Blues Away- Olof Olsson
A performative lecture. In a comical way he deals with various subjects ranging from sociology, economy, aesthetics, biography, computing and much much more.