TAKING TIME

“Art doesn’t exist without the viewer.” With this core statement, Elín Hansdóttir approaches her art practice with a firm belief that art can alter a person´s perspective both internally and externally. She offers a focus within, while sharpening the one directed outwards. Adopted from various writings and viewpoints of 20th Century philosophers and artists, this statement is very actual and at all times political. Her works are settings for self-inspection.
In her previous works, Hansdóttir has concentrated on activating and enhancing personal experiences. She has created architectural interventions, such as a tunnel-like construction in which the viewer looses a sense of orientation. In other works, she has created settings where the viewer triggers change. A spotlight appears as the viewer enters a room and closes its door, sensors in the floor activate a person´s roaring screams, and a single hanging round light will grow brighter and brighter as the viewer comes closer to it. These works engage the viewer to participate in the work, experimenting with it, and at the same time exploring their own behavior, sense of playfulness, and expectations. One might decide to move in unusual ways in order to hear where the sound comes from or where the sensors are situated.

“You” was the title of Hansdóttir´s first solo show in 2004, in which she took her core statement to the test. One might consider the title alone as a work, since it involves a great deal of inclusions and exclusions. Indeed it sums up a standing point of focusing on the individual experience.

Hansdóttir´s work; “Taking Time”, at the Young Baltic Biennial is comprised of 85 found, documentary still images projected from a slide projector onto a bare wall. The images span from the early 20th Century until today. The slides roll one after the other showing people in different surroundings, with some showing strong expressions of anger and distress. People hold signs that are clearly meant for expressing a certain message, a message not visible to us in the work itself. It has been erased by the artist and reduced to blank, white colored signs (a white cube). If the signs are but a white cube, then Hansdóttir again creates a space for us to activate.
Many of the images show people in what seems to be a demonstration-march, while others show people wearing signs seemingly for advertisement reasons. Hansdóttir has shown this work before in a different medium: as posters attached onto electricity boxes and walls in Reykjavik. The work focuses on the subject of message and protest; a collective experience which communicates individual views and personal experience. Once the verbal message is gone, the signs have lost their significance and become white flags, referring to well known symbols of peace. The work leaves one questioning the true democratic influence in our contemporary society with the medium as the message. The focus is shifted, instead of reading the signs, one tries to read into other signals in each image in order to find out in which time and country this documentation is from and what the missing message might be. It is not Hansdóttir´s intention to recreate a narrative in these images, but to open up these empty spaces for each individual viewer to project their thoughts and hopes onto.

Hansdóttir´s piece; “Taking Time” corresponds to her piece “Book Space”(2006-), a work commissioned by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg. For the work, Hansdóttir installed 1.000 blank books in special sections of public libraries in Hamburg and Berlin. The books could be checked out by the libraries´ patrons and the white pages could be filled with whatever means of visual expression of choice. This work has since been installed in the Reykjavik City Library and will be installed in future venues. In this work, the visitor, the one who borrows the book, is offered an empty, public space for free personal expression. The blank pages offer the visitor a chance to rewrite history, to add to or subtract from the collective memory, and to let their voice be heard.

Birta Guðjónsdóttir
published in the catalogue Consequences and Proposals
Biennale of Young artists Tallin