In June, artist Ragnar Kjartansson will represent Iceland at the 2009 Venice Biennale. But first, he’ll be creating the work at The Banff Centre. On site in Banff for the next few weeks, Kjartansson is the first artist to benefit from the Centre’s new Benediktson Fellowship for Icelandic Artists, an endowment that will build strong creative ties between Iceland and Canada.
Established in 2008 by Calgarians Stephan and Adriana Benediktson, the Fellowship honours Stephan Benediktson’s grandfather, Stephan G. Stephansson, an early Alberta homesteader and celebrated Icelandic poet whose family home is an Alberta Historic Site near Markerville. The family’s endowment was supported by the Government of Iceland, and will be used to support one Icelandic artist working in visual or literary arts to attend a Banff Centre creative residency every year.
The first recipient of the Fellowship, Kjartansson’s artistic practice is characterized by experiments in visual art, music, and theatre. Working primarily as a performance artist, his pieces play on contradictory feelings of sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humour. Kjartansson graduated from the Icelandic Academy of Arts in 2001 and since then has presented his performances and related videos, installations, and paintings in exhibitions worldwide.
He garnered international attention with his contribution to the 2005 Reykjavík Arts Festival, staged in an abandoned meeting house in the countryside of southern Iceland. He spent 12 hours a day over two weeks, strumming a guitar, singing to himself, and gradually adding elements to the installation. For Manifesta 7 he presented Schumann Machine (2008) a restaging of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a psychedelic and absurd loop.
As part of his Venice Biennale project, Kjartansson is working in Banff with Icelandic composer and jazz musician David por Jonsson.
For more on Ragnar Kjartansson:
http://this.is/rassi/
