Opening reception April 6, 16-18h.
April 7 – June 1, 2019
An exhibition of the wonderful, strange, and varied collections drawn from the residents of Seyðisfjörður and surrounding areas.
Skaftfell Center for Visual Art, in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland announces its spring exhibition Collectors. We are all collectors, sometimes by intention and often by happenstance. These accumulations reflect our personalities, curiosities and passions. This exhibition arose from an invitation to the town and the surrounding areas inhabitants to show those things that they collect.
Skaftfell wished to make this exhibition as open and inclusive as possible, with the intention that wherever practical, every collection offered would be displayed in the gallery. The range of collections reflects the diversity of the town’s population, from an assortment of typewriters to cinema programs and serviettes to wasp nests. By showing those objects which have personal meaning or sentiment, the project will in effect become a portrait of the community. Each collection will be accompanied with information on the collector and a text in which the owner can explain the collection and why it is special to them.
We hope that this project is a practical demonstration of how the community of Seyðisfjörður is not merely the audience for the exhibitions at Skaftfell but are creative collaborators in everything that happens at the art center. Further, we wish that the exhibition will be a means to reflect on both the nature of collections and collecting, as well as the function of the modern gallery and its relationship to its immediate community. The project should spur such questions as: what makes a collector? Does a collection have to be intentional? What are the sorts of categories in which a collection can exist?