ELÍN HANSDÓTTIR

With her team, Hansdóttir built a 500-foot tunnel-like construction inside Edinborg House, an edifice from the 1890’s in Ísafjörður, a village in the north of Iceland. A passageway of disillusionment zigzagging through a completely white interior awash in monochrome lighting guided the visitors in changing directions: to the right, left, right, up, down, left, right, and, nally, back out.

This visual spatial experience was expanded by a sonic pattern that was based on sound-recordings from within the tunnel and emmited via surround sound systems. Sensory deprivation and the disorientation induced by the meandering trajectory made the installation a screen onto which the visitors projected their own thoughts.

It would be hard to forget the otherwordly work LONG PLACE that Elín Hansdóttir made for the Reykjavík Arts Festival in 2005. An entirely unexpected space of pristine exactitude and disorienting spatial and temporal experience housed in an otherwise unassuming building in the far northwest town of Ísafjörður in Iceland. Leaving behind the dramatic natural landscape of the area, entering Hansdóttir’s work resulted in another form of sensory overload but now in the form of absence. A one metre wide perfectly white corridor took you through a turning, rising and dropping geometrically pronounced journey only to be deposited on the other side of the building back into the surrounding outdoor space of colours, noise, smell and human life.

Jessica Morgan
Director, Dia Art Foundation