'Bitten 2',Installation, Sláturhúsið. For 'Nr. 2 Umhverfing’ Group exhibition. Egilsstaðir, Iceland (Summer 2018.)
The show ‘Nr. 2 Umhverfing’ (Eng: ‘No 2 around’) was the second group exhibition organised by the Academy of the Senses for the Around project. An ongoing project aimed at bringing contemporary art to areas of Iceland with limited access to the arts. For their contribution, the artist set up an installation of human-made spiderwebs for the second time under the new title ‘Bitten 2’ referring both to the exhibition’s title, and the original installation made a year earlier (‘Bitten by a Radioactive Artist’, 2017)
Like ‘Bitten by a Radioactive Artists’ the idea behind ‘Bitten 2’ is the human-animal connection. Spiderwebs are not art - because spider, animals, cannot be artists - so what about human-spiders and human-spiderwebs? The often elevated human compulsion to create art - the thing that makes human beings unique among other animals - questioned. How different, really, is my creative process than that of animals like spiders?
The work was situated in an on-site dance studio in Sláturhúsið, hung strategically so that people could walk through the room and not get tangled in the string. Various found objects including a table, red floor mats, houseplants, a ceramic cup and mirror were incorporated into the work (used to anchor the string.)
