WATER COOLER CONVERSATIONS: Alumni Sounds
CCA Hubbell Street Galleries, 161 Hubbell Street, San Francisco
November 17, 6:30-8:30pm
Lecture by Bryndis Hafthorsdottir (MA 2016) on Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartnsson
Sound performance by Adam Henderson (MFA 2014)
BRYNDIS HAFTHORDSDOTTIR: ICELANDIC ART, BECAUSE THERE IS SUCH A THING
Many critics and curators operate on the premise that regional artistic styles and techniques will soon be rendered obsolete by an emergent international monoculture. Their interpretations of contemporary art presuppose that it has severed its ties to national traditions, and that it only draws on transnational movements for inspiration. This thesis argues against this limiting one-sided dialectic, in favor of an understanding of contemporary art postnational, or as an outcome of the complex intersection between national tradition and globalization. An interdisciplinary investigation into the work of two innovative Icelandic artists, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir and Ragnar Kjartansson, reveals that their artistic strategies repurpose medieval Icelandic oral traditions for international audiences. While their work is often read within exclusively international frameworks and determined to be detached or alienating, this new interpretation suggests that it plays on the affective ties of nation and heritage to cultivate complex forms of inclusion and belonging.
Bryndis Hafthorsdottir has spent most of her life moving back and forth between Boston, Massachusettes, and Reykjavik, Iceland. She received her BA in European Cultural Studies and German from Brandeis University in 2012 and MA in Visual Critical Studies from California College of the Arts in 2016. At Brandeis, she specialized in 20th century German and Soviet visual art and literature, and researched the ways in which art could communicate, document, resist, and work through the effects of totalitarian oppression and war. Her more recent research explores artistic reinterpretations of classic literary characters such as Faust, Don Juan, and Adam and Eve, and their futile pursuits of satiation or perfection.
After graduation, she spent one year in Vancouver, BC, interning at ARTSPEAK Artist Run Centre and at the Community Arts Council of Vancouver. Upon moving back to Iceland, she helped establish Hverfisgalleri, a contemporary art gallery that represents some of Iceland’s best-known painters, sculptors, and textile artists. She lives and works in San Francisco.
ADAM HENDERSON
Adam Henderson is a contemporary artist living and working in San Francisco. He experiments with art as a state of mind and explores how it exists beyond its own physical state, creating experiences for those who seek it. In his performative work, the blade of a kitchen knife becomes an instrument, blending and mashing analog video channels into looping visual circuits
