Artists Elín Hansdóttir and Úlfur Hansson on the Beauty of Rubber Bands
Ad Infinitum, opening at Gerdarsafn on January 14th 2022 is a thought-provoking collaboration between visual artist Elín Hansdóttir and composer/sound artist Úlfur Hansson. Together, the Icelandic duo (and siblings) explore subtle phenomenological aspects of spatial orientation. Hansdóttir and Hansson invite the viewer to dwell in a liminal space that evades concrete meaning but foregrounds the embodied awareness of being present in an environment.
Hansdóttir’s immersive installations leverage sculpture, photography, and exhibition spaces to explore uncertainty, disorientation, sensorial limitation, and visual illusion. Hansdóttir’s aesthetic centers not on prompting discomfort, but rather on triggering modes of perception that draw out the palpable, yet somehow ineffable, experience of presentness in space.
Elín Hansdóttir, Suspension of Disbelief (2015)
“It draws attention to yourself as a viewer. It speaks to you on a visceral level, touches on a different mode of experience. ”
Hansson’s multi-channel looping composition (comprising this installation’s sonic arm) similarly functions less as a soundscape and more like an active force that orients the viewer’s awareness to the act of traversing the exhibition space.
“The sound is like a traveling entity looking for the guest. I wanted to create something that feels autonomous, like a minotaur guarding the center, following you, and moving around you in the darkness”
The installation’s visual components, featuring over five hundred images of rubber bands that Hansdóttir encountered and spontaneously photographed while taking walks over several years, are mounted on concave walls that visually allude to the gallery’s large circular window. The photographed objects and the walls they are mounted on echo elements of circularity in the exhibition space that houses them. In blending formal elements of the objects being viewed and the space that they are being viewed in, Hansdóttir and Hansson make a deft but subtle move that inverts historically dominant formalist aesthetic theories (rooted in European enlightenment thought), which privilege the concrete representational or formal significance of artworks over other aspects of the encounter with art:
In Ad Infinitum, the viewer isn’t drawn into the art space to uncover specific meaning in discrete artworks. Rather, the artworks invite the viewer to contemplate their feeling of self-awareness in the gallery space.
Ad Infinitum thus directs the viewer’s attention towards experiential and embodied aspects of the gallery encounter that formalist aesthetic conventions tend to edit out.
“I think it’s really beautiful to think of the sound trying to find you, but when you enter into the middle of the space, you’re actually looking for something and you’re not sure what it is.”
In drawing out phenomenological encounters like the viewer’s self-awareness as they travel through (and dwell in) a space, Hansdóttir and Hansson suggest that seemingly peripheral perceptual experiences are not really peripheral at all but, rather, central to the viewer’s experience.
“For me, the piece channels something hidden and unconscious: this dark space that’s like cloudiness or something that obscures what’s inside the center. My feeling is that this type of awareness is stronger than something that affects you cognitively or rationally.”
In a similar vein, Hansdóttir reveals that her artistic process rests less on finding or creating objects to convey specific meanings, and more on the process of perceiving itself, foregrounding the significance of looking for something that is as yet unknown.
“I’ve been collecting these images on my walks for the last five years. It was an immediate reaction to what I encountered on the street. I don’t know exactly what it was that I was looking for, and I can’t say why I kept on doing it, but the urge was instant, without being rationalized beforehand.””
In this sense, Hansdóttir and Hansson’s aesthetic draws parallels with the history of phenomenological thought, in which the visceral experience of sensing oneself in space itself facilitates the capacity for concrete meaning to arise.
Beyond visually and sonically capturing an experiential opening up of space within which meaning can arise, Ad Infinitum offers another reflection on the curation of meaning, suggesting that the most complex ideas have a profound simplicity at their core.
“I think a lot about the quantity of the photographs connecting to some kind of alphabet. This, I think, is really beautiful. The circle is one form that, through navigation in space, gets distorted: there are countless articulations that this one single form can fall into.”
Picking up the thread of Hansdóttir’s thought, Hansson speculates:
“There is a theory that the Hebrew alphabet was derived from different shadow projections of how you position your hand in front of a fire. The form is the same, but each time uniquely distorted. Even the simplest things are profound. ”
Hansdóttir and Hansson thus suggest that there is a certain beauty in deceptively simple things, and even more so in the often overlooked experience of ‘simply’ looking, for viewer and artist alike.
“Art practice is like that: it’s the urge to look for that four leaf clover. And once you find it, then what? Then you just keep on looking.”
Elín Hansdóttir is an interdisciplinary visual artist working at the intersections of installation, sculpture and photography. Her work explores the experiential perception and subliminal content of spatial emptiness. She has created and installed work in a number of international venues including KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, ZKM Karlsruhe, Frieze Projects, The Marrakech Biennale, the National Gallery of Iceland and the Reykjavík Art Museum.
Úlfur Hansson is an Icelandic Brooklyn based solo musician, film composer, sound artist, and instrument designer. Recent commissions have included works for the Tectonics festival curated by Ilan Volkov, The Icelandic Symphonic Orchestra, L’Orchestre De Radio France, and the Kronos Quartet. A piece written for an early prototype of the magnetic harp earned him the award of Composer of the Year at the International Rostrum of Composers.