The Villa Reykjavík art festival kicked off on Friday with the opening of exhibitions in various locations around the capital’s harbor area. One of the participating artists is Elín Hansdóttir, whose solo exhibition “Trace” opened at the i8 Gallery.
“Just as a line is a tracing of a point, a plane the tracing of a line and a space the tracing of a plane, a phenomenon in space is the tracing of time. Time appears to be in motion, because we are hardly able to experience the past, present and future as a continuum,” a press release says of Hansdóttir’s exhibition.
Hansdóttir’s work was inspired by the American choreographer Loïe Fuller (1862-1928), who became world-renowned for introducing a revolutionary dance.
In the so called “Serpentine dance,” she produced an image on stage which was non-representational. Instead of showing the dancer “dance,” she conjured up the tracing of the kinetic energy which the body instigates, just as a draughtsman, when he puts a point in motion to create a line.
In “Trace,” Hansdóttir not only alludes to Fuller’s ideas, but equally to the Lumière brothers movie clip of her “Serpentine dance,” in her own research on how energy disperses movement in time and space.
Click here to read more about the festival and here to visit its website.
