Anna Lìndal

Professor, Artist, Listaháskóli Íslands/ Iceland Academy of the Arts

Bjarki Bragason

Artist

Branch collection – Displacement as art expression

Branch collection is a collaborative exhibition by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, Bjarki Bragason and Anna Líndal that will take place in May-June 2008. It is a part of the Reykjavik Art Festival opening Mai 17th 2008, taking place in Safnasafnið the Icelandic Folk Art Museum in Svalbarðsströnd in north Iceland. The artists are in close co-operation with the unique Folk Art Museum and the environment around the Museum. The theme of the Festival is fine art as a force in society – art outside the boundaries of traditional museums and galleries, art as architecture, art as part of science culture, basically art outside its traditional boundaries.

The above description on how the environment and surroundings inspire and define the exhibition serves as an introduction to the topics being addressed:

• How can fine art been used to redefine how people sense and define their surroundings, places or work.
• How can we make sense of the research process, or situate it exactly in the art-making process itself, when working in often unexpected and surprising ways from an idea to an exhibition?
• Aesthetic decisions – what sort of research lies behind aesthetic decisions? For example, what is a worthwhile topic in fine art? How are minor details decided?
• Values and criteria used to define quality of the research and how does it relate to the actual pieces of artwork that form the final outcome.

A related question for quality of artistic research is: Is there a possibility that the quality of research interferes with the aesthetic quality of an art work, or that it in any way diminishes artistic quality? Does it matter if a particular piece is considered a “bad work of art”, as long as it constitutes good quality research methods and results?

In this case the answer is obvious, since the object of the research is an important component of the work of the artists, and throws new light on the topics being addressed. The core of the research is to find a valuable expression in Fine Art for something that already exists in our daily surroundings but we normally do not wonder about.

By highlighting the subject and displace it in new surroundings, the subject is given a new role in society, a power to stimulate the viewer to experience their surroundings in an open and creative way. We are actually talking about culture and nature. By doing this we build a platform for discussion, raise a political question, a philosophical and an aesthetic one.

In this project the notion of quality was relevant during the whole working process.