Oceanfloor
QOPEI IN THE GARDENS
Qopei is in the gardens, his head is not here. His shell is in the mountains, cutting through the air. His voice is still singing in there, and with gel in his astral hair: A song collection of slow love, licking the roses & bleeding in the pool, weaving “this is our shaking hands” & “this is our love knife” into the garden in bloom in our secret life.
oceanfloor.group subsists from a group dedicated to initiate, maintain and care fore artistic inquires within; to assemble people, objects, images - - performance - - radio & sound-waves.
Lotte Rose Kjær Skau Holist_01, Holist_02 Gooseberry, Holist_03 Grapefruita
Series of minimal paintings revealing an ascending shapeshifting round body
Lotte Rose Kjær Skau relies on collaborations with materials and her surroundings to make work. She sees this way of working as “creating-with” or “being with the becoming of”. Skau relies on a sensitivity to her immediate environment in her practice. The works evolve around institutionalized behavior and freeing objects from their functionality. It manifests in sculpture, installation and drawings, always with a notion to non-hierarchical situations. Her images, objects and installations often appear in moments of growth or slow transformation, creating new relations between seemingly distinct things.
Sigurður Guðjóns Fuser
Sigurður Guðjónsson is best known for his striking time-based media works that often focus on man-made machinery and technical relics, investigating their enigmatic, hidden elements just beyond our field of vision. The artist experiments with camera lenses, perspective, light, and motion, amplifying and observing these forms and the transformations that take place as they interact with their environment.
The interplay of sound and vision features throughout Guðjónsson’s oeuvre. The artist uses intricate soundscapes as the foundation of his works, drawing out the acoustic properties of his visual investigations to create a stronger link to the subject matter.
Sigurður Guðjónsson represented Iceland at 59th International Venice Biennale 2022 with his installation Perpetual motion. Guðjónsson was awarded the Icelandic Art Prize for Visual Artist of the Year in 2018 for his dark and atmospheric exhibition Inlight, which featured video installations set throughout St. Joseph’s, a defunct hospital in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland.
Dagur Benedikt Reynisson Línur, Litir, Ljós
Dagur's works can be described as a spectacle of colors - shapes - light and play or participation with the viewer. The works are often in a traditional medium but unconventional to see. They move between being a print in a frame that plays on the eye or in a sculptural form. Spectacle or optical illusion are words that are sometimes used for his work and it comes into what the eye sees and does not see, that there is something moving that is not moving or a change in the work itself that cannot be fully explained.
Dagur works a lot with his perception of the environment and how he understands it. He draws inspiration from shapes, colors and light in his works, but jumps a lot between media where he has made prints, sculptures, photographs and installations.
Dagur enjoys making work that the viewer can participate in, thereby making the artwork more than just an art object.
Abigail Portner
Everyone's perfect in an empty room
Stuck in constant movement but stuck in one place. Constantly spending time on the road for work, traveling to beautiful places but spending a lot of time alone in hotel rooms and airplanes, this work is an exploration of the artist's internal and external view of herself while stuck in constant limbo. The footage was all shot of the artist and turned into repeating patterns of her limbs, face and objects from a room. Audio created for the installation by Dave Portner and is a collage of the artist's voice and her surroundings.
Abigail Portner is a production designer, illustrator and filmmaker living in Savannah GA. Best known for her collaborations and whimsical set designs for Animal Collective and John Cale. She creates large scale interactive installations, and videos for bands, festivals, and galleries.
Jessica Auer Myndavél – Seyðisfjarðarvegur
A minimalistic video tableau inspired by Vegagerðin’s traffic cameras, Myndavél- Seyðisfjarðarvegur invites visitors to pause, linger and contemplate on a view of road 93. In-between a still and moving image, the projection encourages viewers to imagine themselves in this landscape, travelling in and out of Seyðisfjörður over Fjarðarheiði heath.
Jessica Auer is a Canadian photographer and filmmaker, based in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. Her work is broadly concerned with the study of landscapes as cultural sites. Through a research-based practice, she examines our social, political and aesthetic attitudes towards place, including but not limited to – historical sites, tourist destinations, and small communities. Jessica teaches photography part-time at Concordia University in Montréal, and runs Ströndin Studio, a photographic art center in Seyðisfjörður. Her exhibition Lanðvörður was recently presented at the Reykjavík Museum of Photography and at Sláturhúsið in Egilsstaðir.
Sandra Olaws Á leiðinni/On my way
Hrafnkell Tumi Sound Piece in Three Movements
The body, light and sound, travel on a stretch of road. Navigating around conditions of different severities that dictate their movement. Approximately a kilometer away a firework rocket bursts. The bang echoes over the landscape and is heard twice because a portion of the sound is captured by a walkie-talkie radio. The radio transports the sound in the form of light and it can be heard, exhausted and diminished seconds before the actual sound arrives by air.
Hrafnkell Tumi Georgsson graduated from the fine art department of the
Icelandic University of the Arts in 2022. He works predominantly with video
and installation, mixing together mundane and mythological elements to reflect
on everyday phenomenological challenges.
Seyðisfjarðarskóli with Lilaï Licata Unity in Diversity
"Unity in Diversity" is inspired by "Snowflakes: A Chapter from the Book of Nature" by Israel Perkins Warren first published in 1863.
The artwork consists of a luminous sculpture with a sound recording. The sculpture is composed of a variety of snowflakes, each chosen from the book and retraced by a pupil on the plastic window of a CD paper sleeve up-cycling it into one of the many pieces of this collaborative artwork; the snowflakes were then assembled together in a structure where light comes from within to brighten up each snowflake. The sound recordings are from the students interpretation of "snow" in Icelandic.
Lilaï Licata teaches visual arts and cinema at Seyðisfjarðarskóli, the public primary and middle school of Seyðisfjörður. After graduating with her Master's degree in visual arts in Paris and in Venice, she traveled to several countries until she arrived in Seyðisfjörður about four years ago. She held various children's workshops and other artistic activities for List í ljósi, BRAS, and other cultural events in Austurland while teaching.
Each pupil, from 1st to 10th grade, who are in Lilaï's visual art classes since January, participated in the realization of the artwork.
Sin Fang & Máni M. Sigfússon
Serious Damage
Emerging in Iceland’s explosive music scene of the early 2000s, almost entirely by accident, this unassuming but uniquely talented soul got his start in the visual arts.
Through a homemade EP he made more or less on a whim, he has since then been catapulted into international fame, working on everything from his own solo project to film scores and commercials.
He has released six studio albums under his Sin Fang moniker, as well as countless collaborations. He is a founding member of Seabear, Gangly and Team Dreams and has composed extensively for other media in the past few years.
Sandra is born in 1992 and is raised in Seyðisfjörður where she currently lives. From an early age, she has expressed herself through videos, photography, creative writing and paintings. Her artwork at List Í Ljósi this year is based on a poem from her recently published book called ‘Ekkert Eitt’. She has used writing to process and work through difficult experiences and emotions, and today being a new mom she finds security in her earlier writings as she gets to know herself anew.
@sandrart111 @sandraolaws
Björt Sigfinnsdóttir
Enchanted symphony, celestial delight #01
An interactive visual and sound based poem to the fairy princesses that are the aurora borealis (aka. Northern lights). Audience can touch or even press the art piece.
Björt Sigfinnsdóttir (artist alias FURA) is a musician and multimedia artist born, raised and based in Seyðisfjörður. Björt has travelled the world with her music for over a decade now but has turned more to visual and performative art in the recent years. This is the second time Björt presents her work at List í ljósi.
@art_no.added.sugar
Lucia Gašparovičová 26 minutes
26 minutes is the length of exposure – exposure of photosensitive paper put in the camera obscura to light for two months twice a day laid on a bench situated towards the harbour and the apparent movement of the Sun in the Icelandic town called Skagastrond. “26 minutes” is a space-time recording and visual materialization of a wide range of lighting conditions in Iceland during its short light days (January – February).1300 minutes is the overall time a person spent at the same spot, standing near a bench and waiting to record the fourth-dimensional world that every day cares about the same equal and unequal things.
Lucia Gašparovičová is a Slovakian visual artist based in Bratislava, where she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, completing her doctoral studies in 2019. She is an artist in residence at Skaftfell Art Center in January and February. Working with objects, photographic images, author’s books, and site-specific installations, she focuses on the study and recording of environments and phenomena related to the perception of everyday life. In her work, she tries to programmatically draw attention to and visualize phenomena that are, so to speak, “invisible” and thus ignored. To be able to step aside from everyday life and look at it from a certain distance Lucia exposes herself to the natural conditions of Iceland during the winter months. During her stay in Seyðisfjörður, she focuses on the domination of natural phenomena and loneliness.
Lucia’s residency at Skaftfell is supported by a grant from Culture Moves Europe, implemented by the Goethe Institut, and the Slovak Art Council.
Hilmar Guðjóns
Three sexually objectifying instalments of a rock
1m x 1m
Rock, rope, steel & glass.
120mm medium format film photography
“Hilmar Guðjónsson is a multimedia artist and photographer who creates sincere compositions where the intimate and sublime clash for an unexpected outcome.”
-Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir
Þórdís Erla Zoëga Night Shift
When the day shift ends the night shift begins. There is tension in the air when the globe has turned and has shifted the light on the flipside in its daily routine.
Þórdís Erla Zoëga (1988) graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in 2012. She has exhibited her work in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Basel, the Czech Republic, and further worldwide. In Iceland, she has exhibited at the Reykjavík Arts Festival, LÁ Art Museum, Akureyri Art Museum, Gerðarsafn Kópavogur Art Museum, with the Iceland Dance Company, Reykjavík Art Museum and Icelandic National Gallery. She is currently Seltjarnarnes town’s honorary artist of the year. She is represented by BERG Contemporary. In her works she deals mainly with intimacy and connection in various forms of mediums.
Ioana Mona Popovici What could it be?
A meteorite captured before collision? A wish fulfilling jewel? A suspended cathedral? A floating confessional? A brain or perhaps a giant heart? A quiet witness? A fraction of your North Star? An entity that listens to and aligns itself to every dream, purpose, path, and journey, protecting it along the way?
Technical help: þorgeir Sigurðsson & Gunnar Gunnarsson
Ioana Mona Popovici – performance artist/choreographer. Her works have been presented in festivals and venues in Europe, USA, Mexico, S.Corea, Israel, Brazil, Nepal. For several of her performances she was selected as “Choreographer To Watch” in the critics’ survey of the German Tanz magazine, and she received Sazka Award for the performance “Portrait”, in Prague. As a performer she collaborated with several choreographers and theatre directors such as Charles Linehan, Karine Ponties, Simon Vincenzi, Luis Guerra, Viliam Docolomansky and others.
Juan Pablo Plazas Rólegur Rauðlaukur (Easy, Red Onion)
Juan Pablo Plazas is an artist based in Brussels, Belgium since 2012.His activities are a sort of fortuitous ethnography that unveils itself through the manners of an art practice. This means that he is constantly looking for the unexpected within the apparently obvious, the blatant certainty of the misunderstood and the wrong answers to the questions that no one ever asks. He is specially attracted to coincidences, which he takes as the thread that guides any kind of project he is doing, as the only proof that something ties this world together. To be able to make use of coincidences, he creates strategies to make himself available to them. He use the same strategies to build sculptures, performances, installations, videos, audio pieces, photographs, drawings or whatever other medium the circumstances of a project demand.
In 2011 he graduated from Anthropology and Art at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. In 2013 he graduated from the Master’s program at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels. His work has been shown at Bureau des Réalités in Brussels, Belgium (2016), SMAK, Gent, Belgium (2017), Chauffeur, Sydney, Australia (2018), Besme 105 in Brussels, Belgium (2018), Mieke van Schaijk Galerie in ’s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands (2018), and currently at La Centrale Brussels (2021 - 2022).
Mariana Murcia Sol Sól
Mariana was born in Bogotá, and since 2019 has been based and works in Basel. Her practice assumes a performative character while testing ways in which language emerges through material transformations and physical senses, incorporating relationships with our immediate environment to speculate on technologies we create to communicate. In 2021 she completed an MFA at the Institut Kunst, FHNW.
Sol Sól is a remarkable or unexpected presence of something that is close enough to perceive but far enough to grasp.
Tækniminjasafn Austurlands Spor / Footprints
Can we, who live in a world of electric lighting, imagine how the people felt who, over a century ago, experienced and saw electric lights illuminating the darkness, possibly for the first time?
In the early years of the 20th century, the Búðará River was harnessed to drive the machinery of the newly established Vjelasmiðja Jóhanns Hanssonar factory.
The electricity was also used to power the first electric streetlight in town.
The story goes that the townspeople would often walk long distances, from Aldan to Vjelsmiðja Jóhanns Hanssonar and back just to admire and marvel at the streetlight.
If the roads were impassable a small boat was used to get between the places.
Can we, who live in a world of electric lighting, imagine how the people felt who, over a century ago, experienced and saw electric lights illuminating the darkness, possibly for the first time?
Friða Isberg Á göflum / Gables
Fríða Ísberg is an Icelandic author based in Reykjavík. Her books are the poetry collections Stretch Marks and Leather Jacket Weather, the short story collection Itch and the novel The Mark. Her work has been nominated for The Nordic Council Literature Prize, won The Fjara Literature Prize, The Icelandic Booksellers Award, the P.O. Enquist Award, and she is the 2021 recipient for The Optimist Award, handed by the President of Iceland to one national artist. Fríða is a member of the writer's collective Svikaskáld and she occasionally writes reviews for The Times Literary Supplement. Her work has been or is to be translated into 17 languages.
Rasmus Stride The ghost of the Anthropocene
The ghost of the anthropocene" seeks to recreate a coherent, intimate and relatable expression of nature through the exploration of digital and analogue image processing methods.
Danish/Norwegian artist Rasmus Stride finds inspiration in the space between digital and reality. Looking into how 3D can work as a transformational tool to enhance a dreamlike state and evoke reminiscence thoughts of something recognizable but still slightly otherworldly.
Skaftfell Art Center
Composition in Five Movements: Videos by Barbara Naegelin, Dodda Maggý, Gústav Geir Bollason, Sigurður Guðjónsson, and Steina
An exhibition of five video works on the theme of movement in various forms — elastic, flickering, perpetual, spontaneous, and hypnotic — will animate and illuminate the Skaftfell Gallery in an exhibition titled Composition in Five Movements. The group exhibition will open on February 10, during the annual List í Ljósi festival of light in Seyðisfjörður. For one month, the Skaftfell Gallery will become a place of light, color, and contemplation with which to break out of the long winter darkness.
The exhibition is sponsored by: The Cantonal Culture Department Basel-Stadt, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Múlaþing, Menningar- og viðskiptaráðuneytið, and Uppbyggingarsjóður Austurlands.
Exhibition Opening: 10 Feb. at 17:00
Exhibition Open: 10 & 11 Feb. 18:00-22:00
Hrafnkell Sigurðsson
Freeze Frame
Hrafnkell Sigurðsson’s art is pure garbage. But perhaps we should explain. What Hrafnkell possesses is an inner radar and uncanny ability for finding discarded waste in the most unlikely scrapheaps and transforming them into something quite miraculous. Nothing escapes his eye and, regardless of how everyday or humdrum the objects may seem, Hrafnkell will find a way to reveal them to us in a brand new and unexpected light, conjuring up images of infinite and profound beauty.
Hrafnkell comes from a broad background in the visual arts and music. During his early student days, he was even a vocalist in the experimental Rock group Oxsmá, which played a dynamic role in the lively post-punk scene in Reykjavík in the 1980s
After studying at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht for a few years, Hrafnkell moved to London in 1993 to complete a Masters in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College before returning to Iceland in 2004. Since 1990, photography has been Hrafnkell Sigurðsson’s principal means of expression, although his work also comprises a variety of other media, including video, sculpture and installations.
Hrafnkell’s art likes to deal with the shock of contrasts, between nature and culture, harsh nature and refined culture, human nature and inhuman culture, the juxtaposition of chaos and harmony. His aesthetic vision deals with the ultimate questions of survival where devastation is often enveloped in irresistible beauty.
In 2007 Hrafnkell Sigurðsson received the prestigious Icelandic Visual Art Award.
Thomas Stankiewicz In Between: A Memory of a Friendship
In the words of Daisaku Ikeda, If a person has just one good friend, their happiness is doubled and their life is immeasurably enriched. This is genuine wealth”. In Between: A Memory of a Friendship is a piece of music composed using the material of old phone recordings of two friends playing music together. The tones have been captured through the cellular device, just as in day-to-day conversations. They weave in and out of each other and become abstracted, much like the gathering of countless words flowing between friends, through the air, at any given moment, over the radio waves. The result is a mirage of sound, a resonant memory of a friendship.
Thomas Stankiewicz is a composer and musician from Reykjavik. With an eclectic and versatile relationship to music, his writing selectively weaves between soundtracks, classical music, and evocative ambient sounds. Containing contemplations of the elements and sources of creation. Thomas graduated from IUA in Composition but considers his years of experimentation and communal musicianship to be his real study. He has worked with a multitude of artists, his latest collaboration being with The London Contemporary Orchestra in The Southbank Centre in 2022.
Linus Lohmann
Family tree
Linus Lohmann (b.1982, Hannover Germany) is a visual artist who works in drawing, print making and sculpture.
His works focus on connections between intention and substance where he utilizes various techniques to develop processes for image-making. Across his practice, he explores the perception of materials and the legacy of objects and space by orchestrating re-manifestations of material particles through drawing, sculpture and experimental printmaking techniques that accumulate to a blurred view of presence as an interplay of process and form.
Linus lives and works in Seyðisfjörður.
Gerome Gadient
bodypipes
Bodypipe is the sonic result and composition of recordings taken on, around and with an organ located in the town of Seyðisfjörður in Iceland.
Gerome Gadient is an artist, composer and DJ based in Basel. In installations, compositions and sculptures he engages with sampled and recorded material from digital and (non-)human surroundings to form surreal stories. the expansiveness of the ambient is a recurring element and navigating tool inside his practice. with an emphasis on vocal recordings such as spoken text and singing, he works out techniques to transform and de-construct his sonic palette into vital organic compositions.
RARIK Fjarðarsal
In 2023, RARIK is sponsoring the Festival of Light for the seventh time, having participated in the annual Festival from the start.
For the first time RARIK and List í ljósi will light up Fjarðarsal dam.
The lights will go on from Thursday 9th of February and be on for the duration of the festival for visitors to see.
Björn Alpha & Almar
Frey Audio Visual Improv
Almar and Björn are going to do an ambient audiovisual improvisation created on the spot, taking inspiration from each other's performance and expressions creating a sort of image-flow and sound feedback loop. The sound will be generated by the use of recordings of Iceland's nature and analog synthesizers. The visuals will be interactive with the sound, manipulated live by software and controllers.
Björn Alpha (Alexandridis) is a Music Composer/Producer from Iceland/Greece. His first steps in music were at the age of eleven, studying classical guitar at the National Conservatory of Greece. A few years later he started his experimentation with electronic music and finally went to study Music Production and Engineering where he graduated in 2010 with first class honors BA. At the same time, he founded with Marios Podaras the project Deep In Mind. In 2011 Björn moved to the UK for a master’s degree in Creative Music Practice, where he explored the possibilities of music composition, only by using found sound. Since then, he has been composing and producing music for his projects, Deep In Mind, Dub Puffin and Bjorn Alpha, while performing live, composing music for films, animation and commercials as well as collaborating with dancers and visual artists for various types of projects.
Almar Freyr AKA Tálsýn Visuals is a visual artist interested in relationships with humans, AI, and technology in art. For several years he has been performing and setting up installations for festivals and events in Iceland and abroad. Almar has developed his style along with music performance using live computer processing to generate visuals that react and flow to the sound of the environment.