From the six rooms of the Listasafn Arnesinga (LA) museum and community center in Hveragerði, people suddenly gathered in the central hall. The opening of the exhibition became so softly, or should I say, in such soft voices, that I mistook it for a quiet moment that everybody wanted to share. I wanted to join the formal part of the opening and stood there for a minute, mimicking the environment, applauding and smiling, while not understanding a word out of the beautiful and abscons Icelandic discourses, so I just slid slowly into the next room. In each of them, the same documentary was playing, projected on one or two walls, while other installations were detailing the life and livelihood of Sigurður Guðmundsson, living in Sviðugörðir.
I looked at the plexiglass boxes hang on the walls, glanced on the film a couple of times, and then I saw the subject of the art – this man in his 70ies, from a village, whose life was on all those maybe 20 or 30 walls.
He was looking at me, from a third room, from the dark, actually, since in that one, the film was being projected in the dark, with a sort of a curious, yet, suspicious gaze.
I was the only one, except for him, straying from the official opening of Ólafur Sveinn Gíslason’s exhibition.
I got closer, smiled at the man resembling terribly the character on the screens around us, said hi and asked him, in English, whether it was him in the films. He didn’t understand me, but nodded. In fact, he half-nodded at me. I then pointed my finger towards his moving silhouette on the wall and asked, is this you? He nodded again, with a sort of unease and then, we stood there, next to each other, for a couple of minutes or more, sharing a moment of silence.
It was so touching for me, it was just like the whole setting was there to create this very intimate moment between two people not understanding each other, but sharing their awkwardness in a room next to the crowd celebrating art.
And then I remembered the story behind the art I was told while going from Reykjavik to Hveragerði. Olafur, the artist, talked with Sigurður, his neighbor, many times, and, based on these conversations, wrote a script. He then filmed Sigurður’s life, using four other people that would play the man, and also Sigurður himself. A young boy, an actor, a woman and a man in his 30ies all interpreted parts of the life of a farmer, the last in his bloodline, living on a farm in Iceland.
While being driven by car, the story was only theoretically appealing to me. But there, seeing Sigurður on screen next to Þór Tulinius, a renowned actor, wearing the same traditional and very iconic wool pullovers and the same hats, and then watching the house and surrounding being deconstructed and re-build as installations in all these rooms...
While sharing that very interesting moment of silence with Sigurður, who was just as out of place as I was, and who was looking at people with curiosity, I wondered how is he looking at the whole show. Was he happy so many people are interested in him? Or, rather, in his being deconstructed and reconstructed via art? And maybe, just maybe, could he be thinking, what’s wrong with all these fancy city men and women talking giberrish while nodding extatically and looking at his smoking barrel turned into a cardboard work of art?
