Nermine El Ansari | JÖKULSÁRLÓN 2014
Reykjavik City Library exhibits Nermine El Ansari’s video piece “JÖKULSÁRLÓN 2014” in Grófin.
A melting glacier is navigated through personal memories - the geographical and chronological distance becomes irrelevant.
The exhibition is a part of the Library´s project Inclusive Public Spaces and is on display during opening hours in Grófin until 03.07.2020.
The opening is on Friday, 26th of June 2020 in Grófin at 5 pm. All welcome.
About the art piece
by Hubert Gromny
The video “JÖKULSÁRLÓN 2014” by Nermine El Ansari evokes powers of landscape and memory to transform each other and to question categories of time and space.
The gaze cast on melting glacier brings reminiscences which seems to signify geographical and chronological distance, but the body, regardless of its location, carries the memory. Act of remembering makes it immediately present.
The echo of remote events comes with the repetitive chant of the ocean, the figure of connectivity. A continuous matter of water encompasses distant lands, and carries waves from Mediterranean Sea to North Atlantic, back and beyond. The personal dimension of time and space is a mode of navigation, which cancel the separation between global regions informed by their respective histories. A sound of the sea might have been the same a thousand years ago or a thousand miles away.
About the artist
Nermine El Ansari lives and works as a visual artist in Reykjavik. In 1998 she received her painting diploma from the School of Fine Arts in Versailles. In 2002, she graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA) of Paris in multimedia. In 2002, she studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) in Havana. Her work has been presented in various exhibitions in Egypt, France, Lebanon, Germany, Taiwan, Cuba and other countries. Nermine’s works range from painting, drawing, animation, printmaking, installation and digital live drawing performance. Her earlier pieces were primarily concerned with the body in human and beast form, often presenting a distorted view of her subjects and exploring a series of dualities and inversions. Over the last ten years, she has focused on cities, borders, territories and mapping, both real and imagined, exploring the binaries provoked by the urban landscape.
Learn more about the project Inclusive Public Spaces here.
For more information contact: Hubert Gromny