Icelandic artists Ásdís Sif Gunnarssdóttir is currently participating in the Romanian Icelandic collaboration project entitled Artists as Agents of Institutional Exchange. As a part of the project she will stream live via a online platform.
Gunnarssdóttir studied video and performance arts in New York and Los Angeles and has made a number of large-scale installations and performances, poetry and photographic works. Among her recent works are The Blue Mountain made for ephemeropter 2013. In it the artist transferred herself to Los Angeles and laid her self to sleep lost in a space with no beginning and no end and a solo show in the Reykjavik Art Museum, Harbor house in 2014, titled FutureCrash/Tribal TV. In the summer of 2014 she released the sound poetry peace Enter the Enlightenment, Become Real, with the artists own poems and texts, written and composed in recent years.
About the project
Artists as Agents of Institutional Exchange is a 2015 joint initiative of tranzit.ro/ Iasi and Skaftfell, Seydisfjordur, Iceland, that is materialised into a unique live streaming platform dedicated to the use of its artists in residence: Cristina DAVID and Asdis Sif GUNNARSDOTTIR. As practitioners, we often witness or create a result of artistic research that is mostly based on past, hidden, personal processes, on archaeological praxis, but we never allow ourselves the freedom to go live into the void of online audience and perform a video or carry out research together with our audience. Through this project, a term deemed to live forever in the past, the footage (a film that has been shot) will thus be experienced live, instantly, by the contemporary artist and the contemporary online witness. Platforms for live streaming are already the new institutional media in various instances, but this project is doing more than transmitting the result. Its function is to offer to our two artists in residence a new tool for live footage. It is about transforming this communication medium into a medium of artistic production, where the artist will have full control and responsibility for engaging a larger audience into a personal research process. With this we hope to further expand the notion of what an artist residency can be, by closely examining two institutional experiences from both the artists and the producers perspective. The new method for embarking on such a process is to empower the artist as an internal agent.
About Tranzit.ro
tranzit.ro was founded in 2012 at the initiative of ERSTE Foundation, becoming thus the fifth member oftranzit.org, a network of independent, non-profit organisations in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the Slovak Republic.tranzit.rohas the particularity of being itself a network, activating in three permanent spaces in the cities ofIasi, Cluj and Bucharest.Rather than illustrating curatorial concepts, tranzit.ro/ Iași searches long term involvement with art projects or artists that may initiate public interventions and influence the mental or social constructions that surround us. tranzit.ro/ Iași is a curated institution whose mechanics is softly determined by a local context within an international constellation.
Artists as Agents of Institutional Exchange is a collaboration project between tranzit.ro/ Iași in Romania and Skaftfell – Center for Visual Art. The project is supported by grant from Iceland, Lichtenstein and Norway through the EEA grants and the Romanian Cultural Ministry.
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