BORGARBÓKASAFNIÐ
Blindspot is a co-curational project between Daría Sól Andrews and the Reykjavik City Library. Discover a rich program of events during this month exhibition opening on March 13th 2021 in conjunction with the European Action Week Against Racism.
"The works in this exhibition explore a personal angle on racism and exclusion within a European and Scandinavian context. The artists in this exhibition offer a unique perspective on their lived experiences as well as a place of confrontation, a potential to shift our viewpoints. Microaggressions, cultural exclusion, gender inequality, and systemic racism are conversations that are uncomfortable, avoided, overlooked; we place these confronting realities in a personal blindspot. And yet, the simple fact is that systemic racism and gender biases are all too present in our institutions, in our everyday relations, and in our implicit, unconscious gestures. This exhibition and the European Action Week Against Racism is therefore an opportunity for us as a community to come together and acknowledge the spaces in which we need to represent and protect our minority groups. How can our institutions begin to combat their built in privileges and racisms and take actual steps towards accountability? Anti-racist policies and active acknowledgement of impicit biases within gender and race are the first necessary step. " Daría Sól Andrews
The exhibition Blindspot presents film, photography, and installation work by Salad Hilowle (SE), Nayab Ikram (FI), Hugo Llanes (IS), and Claire Paugam (IS) across various library locations in Reykjavík over a month long exhibition series.
Daría Sól Andrews - Curator
Daría Sól Andrews works as a freelance curator and art critic. She holds an MA in Curating, Art Management and Law from the University of Stockholm and a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. Most recent curatorial projects include group exhibition Norðrið at Listasafn Árnesinga (2020), group exhibition Silent Spring at Hafnarborg (2020), Vessel with Daniel Reuter at Harbinger gallery (2020), Icelandic Meat Soup at the Reykjavík Museum of Photography, alongside various curatorial projects in San Francisco, Reykjavik, and Stockholm. Daria aspires to create a place where life and art merge, to construct a space for experiencing intimacy and quietness, with art, yourself, and others. Her curatorial practice is inspired by ideas of deinstitutionalization and the removal of spectacle from art, rethinking how, where, and in what form, the exhibition concept can be manifested.
Salad Hilowle - Exhibiting artist
Salad Hilowle is an artist based in Sweden, Stockholm who graduated from the Royal Art of Academy of Sweden, Stockholm in 2020. In his work, Hilowle manages to pack a visceral range of childhood memories, connected with his Somali diaspora and Swedish art history. His themes revolve around identity, memories, place and visibility. Hilowle is behind the praised short films Erinra, Letters to Sweden and Waryaa. His fine-tuned and poetic films have been shown at festivals around the world and won prizes in Sweden. In 2015 he was one of two artists who got to share Engmansstipendiet, one of Sweden's largest art scholarship. In 2020, he was awarded the Bernadotte Scholarship by the Academy of Fine Arts for his work to make people of African descent visible in Swedish art history.
Nayab Ikram - Exhibiting artist
Nayab Ikram is a photographer, visual artist and artist-curator of Pakistani diaspora from the Åland Islands, based in Turku. Ikram works with concepts dealing with the feeling of in-betweenship, cultural identity, the collective memory and post-internet. She explores the concepts using symbols, rituals and abstract form of expressions through photography, performance and installations. Ikram graduated with a Bachelor of Culture and Arts degree in 2015, majoring in photography, from Novia University of Applied Sciences in Jakobstad, Finland. Together with multidisciplinary artist Ramina Habibollah, she also forms the curatorial duo in a way. Ikram has had numerous solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions. In 2017 she was the winner of the Portfolio Review for Young Nordic Photographers at Landskrona Foto Festival. In 2019 she was awarded with a culture award from the Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland.
Hugo Llanes - Exhibiting artist
Hugo Llanes graduated from the MA Fine Art Program at Listahaskoli Islands. Llanes’s practice investigates political-social fissures and the aesthetics that erupt from them. His works involve extended painting, site-specific performance and installation. By inquiring about social conditions like migration, exploitation, and decolonized processes of identity and their particularities, he articulates projects of a participatory nature and others of a more contemplative character. He believes that the personal is a microsystem that is exposed to a global sphere.
Claire Paugam - Exhibiting artist
Claire Paugam is a multidisciplinary French artist based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She is the recipient of the Icelandic Art Prize Motivational Award of the Year 2020 for her ambitious and powerful contribution to the Icelandic art scene in 2019. After graduating in 2016 from the Iceland University of the Arts’ MFA program, she exhibited in various art institutions in Iceland and abroad, such as the 5th International Biennale for Young Art, Deep Inside, curated by Nadim Samman. She also creates interactive stage designs for concerts and installations with new media artist Raphaël Alexandre.
We will also host a workshop for children (8-13) led by writer Yrsa Þöll Gylfadóttir: Who is the protagonist? where we will question the normalization of whiteness in children book illustrations in Iceland. This workshop will be happening in 4 different library locations: Grófin, Kringlan, Gerðuberg and Spöngin.
More information:
Martyna Karolina Daniel
Project Manager - Equity and Community Engagement
martyna.karolina.daniel@reykjavik.is
Daría Sól Andrews, curator
daria.andrews9@gmail.com