A beautiful evening at HÖFN, one of our "intimist" events...
The 18th of July 2017, about 15 persons (several artists -sound artists, videasts, visual artists -,
the Art School in Aix en Provence and ARTEUM directors, art historian and philosopher, people involved in documentary filmmaking, former HÖFN residents.... ),
were sitting together around Margrét ElÃsabet Ólafsdóttir, HÖFN current resident until the 25th of July 2017… on our good old terrace...
Margrét ElÃsabet Ólafsdóttir has been working, during her 3 weeks residence at HÖFN,
on a biography which recounts and analyses the life and work of Steina Vasulka, pioneer in video art in the States at the beginning of the ‘70’s.
Steina moved away from her career as a violonist to devote herself to video as a research tool, and founded in New York « the Kitchen »,
a laboratory for all kinds of experiments and performances with video and music.
Strangely enough Steina Vasulka gained some relative notoriety in Iceland only in the ‘90’s, without any genuine recognition for her previous experience and work, even among the new generation of young video artists then.
From Steina’s not quite acknowledged but passionate life and work history, some questions arise :
what are actually the cultural, artistic, political, historical, economic conditions for creation? Vast topic !
Yet, Margrét, also called Magga, for more than an hour, has tried and approached these questions through Steina Vasulka’s life and the perspective of Icelandic art history.
The audience, few but very involved people, could before Magga's presentation, watch several examples of Steina Vasulka 's works...
... and afterwards, ask questions as well as react to Magga’s unformal and lively lecture..
Of course, as always at HÖFN, this moment was followed with sharing GOOD food and wine, late in the night.
Many thanks to HafdÃs Vilhjálmsdóttir , who offered HÖFN and our guests the most delicious Icelandic smoked salmon and salmon marinated in dill !
Many thanks to our Icelandic resident Margrét ElÃsabet Ólafsdóttir who generously shared her knowledge about contempory art in Iceland with us.
