The ArtBorder.
'Þýðing 2.0' (2023)
The third installation in the TextBook Art series. Exhibited Neskaupstaður, Iceland, the artists contribution to Fjarðabyggð's Innsævi art festival. Over ten thousand 'goggar' (paper fortune-tellers) are placed on a factory floor, forming roughly the shape of a circle as well as being place on the stairs going up. Like magic, the textbooks become a drawing, an installation, the factory (or what remains of it) transforms into something mysterious and odd. In becoming art, however, the paper re-defines and restricts accesses to different areas and functions of the factory. Since 'I don't know I just had to' (2023) the idea of text, research- and written material and it's relationship with art had become a concern for the artist (*and not just research i.e academic text but "paper work" Artists are constantly filing for one reason or another (applications etc)) - in 'Þýðing 2.0' the written-word-as-visual-art forms a literal border in display. Textbooks, text, art: subliminally blocking where visitors are able to go. Useless, in accessible text blossoming into Art in a dead factory.
Research-material-turned-art-material, their meaning already made distorted and incomprehensible (inaccessible) in the process of becoming art pull the audience, lovely welcoming shapes - a mysterious mass full of mysterious text - beckoning to be read also keep the people out. The paper things, fortune-tellers, whatever they may look like to the viewer: Art as restriction. Elusive and exclusive information and space. Literal language-borders and boundaries.
What it is exactly that is being gatekept in this factory? Who are its gatekeepers?
Who is art for? What is this factory for now that the industry has moved on?
Art like a waste product of the new "knowledge economy."
Just some thoughts one coming from a working-class background might ask.
