Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson: Your Country Doesn't Exist
Dates: November 24, 2011 - February 12, 2012
Place: East Cloister
Exhibition Session: Margin and City

Multidisciplinary artists, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson (Spain/Iceland) work together since 1997. Based in Rotterdam and Berlin, they use different types of techniques, including sculpture, photography, sound, video, installation and text.

They sound out the extent of the socially and legally permissible, and challenge rules and conventions by initially adhering to them. Despite these strong ties to society, their works are generally not participative in the sense that they cause the audience to become involved in an action; rather, they always stem from collaborations with other people and contain implicit calls to active participation in collective processes. Although they touch upon a wide variety of themes, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson never lose sight of their own particular artistic mission. They address issues that concern us as citizens and subjects, culturally, politically and socially, such as identity, labour, the economy, (illegalized) immigration, the ways in which our cities are constructed and destroyed, political lobbying and the Icelandic constitution.

They explore the spaces of what is socially and legally permissible and defy norms and conventions by overstepping their boundaries. In Constitution of the Republic of Iceland, included in this exhibition, they focus on the constitution that currently governs civic life in Iceland and its reform. In contrast, that part of identity as citizens that Castro and Ólafsson preserve in this work is negated in the campaign which lends its title to the exhibition, Your Country Doesn't Exist, provoking the observer and alluding to the numerous existing paradoxes that spring from the concept of the nation as a construct. They first displayed this slogan in a public place in 2003, coinciding with the invasion of Iraq, and since then they have been conducting their campaign of denial with all kinds of formats and variations in different contexts, languages and countries. Three of the 33 video portraits that comprise the installation Everybody Is Doing What They Can, created during the collapse of Iceland's economy, and the slide series Demolitions and Excavations round out the exhibition.

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

[Press Dossier. PDF File: 100kb]

[High Resolution Images]