Visitations: Debatable Lands and Troubled Waters 

The artists Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson (Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson) have been working in the international art scene for over twenty years. During this time, they have developed a pioneering approach to art practice, grounded in feminism and post-humanism. Typically research-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary their practice explores human/non-human relations within the context of history, culture and the environment intersecting multiple fields by linking contemporary art to disparate disciplines and areas of public of interest.

The Visitations project is exemplary of how Bryndís and Mark carry out their vision of art as a catalyst for social and environmental change. The project draws particular focus on historic and contemporary accounts of polar bear arrivals in Iceland from 1881 to the present, as found in national and private archives, as well as in personal and collective memory. Awarded funding for 3 years by the Icelandic Research Fund it explores the complex and manifold contact zones between humans and polar bears by foregrounding the animal as ‘foreign’. Considering its multiple guises: as an individual being, a cohabitant, a visitor, an environmental register, a remnant and an artefact, Visitations contributes to the current (and urgent) discourse on the objectification of both human and animal ‘Others’. In this way the project adds an important layer to our knowledge and understanding of human/non-human relations in a time of environmental catastrophe. 

The lecture will draw specifically also on previous projects nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2000-2006) and Matrix (2010-present)

Websites

http://visitations.lhi.is/

www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com