IN COD-liver WE TRUST inc I, II, and Ill, 2022 altered ready-made rain lamps

IN COD-liver WE TRUST INC. is an installation commissioned for the North Atlantic TriennialDOWN NORTH for the Portland Museum of Art Feb. 2022, Reykjavik Art Museum Oct. 2022,and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden May 2023. Ode to the Cod-liver oil and the social andpolitical impact it has had in the Northern hemisphere. The work consists of three intervenedvintage Rain Lamps, reindeer moss, rotating platforms, mineral oil and cod liver oil bottles,and pearls. The concept behind this joyous presentation is how fi shing and oil drilling areever-critical and controversial topics in the Northern Hemisphere with global warming and theArctic ice sheet ever decreasing.

The Vikings prized fi sh liver oil as “the gold of the ocean,” thanks to its healing properties.Cod liver oil remained a popular folk remedy in Northern Europe for centuries. And as early as1782, English physician

To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! is a large-scale group exhibition featuring a selection of works by Ragnar Kjartansson displayed along-side pieces by different artists, including new specially realised project specific works. Conceived in connection to the commission

Santa Barbara, To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow! explores the practice of artists who have previously been Kjartansson’s collaborators or inspirational dialogue companions. Curated by Kjartansson with his partner Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, the project is a very personal and intimate gathering of artworks, like a small group of guests around a dinner table. The exhibition installation is orchestrated to expand each work’s resonance through formal or content-based assonances and conversing juxtapositions. With Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, Páll Haukur Björnsson, Theaster Gates, Ragnar Kjartansson, Una Björg Magnúsdóttir, Jason Moran, Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson, Dick Page, Elizabeth Peyton, Magnús Sigurðason, Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir, Curver Thorodssen, Guðmundur Thorsteinsson- Muggur, Emily Wardill, Roni Horn, Olga Chernyshyova, Carolee Schneemann and Unnar Ön.

September, 2020 Reykjavík Art Museum holds a group exhibition outside the museum walls for the second time. Eight artists present new work in a diverse and original manner around the city and in the public spaces made available through modern technology. This includes performances, interventions and various happenings. Instead of material sculptures, memorials or other permanent environmental artworks, the exhibition Autumn Bulbs II focuses on artworks created in more or less intangible media; they spread around the city and flourish in unexpected circumstances.

After more than a decade of searching for melancholy in paradise, Magnús Sigurðarson throws in the towel with ADIOS MELANCHOLY - THE PARROTY OF LIFE.

With this, the 3rd exhibition at Emerson Dorsch, conceptual artist Magnús Sigurðarson presents 6 large clay paintings of parrots, a video performance, and an installation. The opening reception will be September 22nd, 6-9pm at Emerson Dorsch, which is located at 5900 NW 2nd Ave, Miami, FL.

Magnús arrived at his emblem honestly. He often proclaims that his home country Iceland is the northern-most Caribbean island. He is not joking here (though there often is a joke, so pay attention): Iceland, along with the Caribbean Islands St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas, were all once colonies of The Kingdom of Denmark. Not only did these islands have a distant sovereign in common, the Gulf Stream also connects them. The current draws warm water northward to the southern end of Iceland, making the southern end noticeably warmer.

The parrot makes its home in Miami (Magnús’s home now), Iceland (his homeland) and the Caribbean (let’s acknowledge that Miami feels like the northern Caribbean not the Southern United States). Magnús writes that:

“One does not always understand the complexity of one's environment nor society in which one exists. For example, the iconic parrot, symbol of Florida sun and fun, is an immigrant, all native species of parrot were wiped out in the 1900's and the species that we now find in and associate with Miami and South Florida were all imported one way or another. Immigrants are the new mascot of Miami, the parrot searching for a home, the Icelander seeking melancholy, all species and immigrants at one point have to redefine their identity based on their current reality. While they will never be native, they will through time be blended into the pallet of their new home as the lines of identity are blurred, smudged, and redefined. This exhibition will be the beginning of a post-melancholic identity through the power of myth and occasional mayhem.”

Magnús’s exhibition represents the latest project in which he distills and abstracts his feelings of displacement. Most previous works in this vein deflected seriousness or dreariness with humor. (Read a longer explanation about these works on his exhibition page at emersondorsch.com.) One emblazoned slogans of enthusiasm, “Fabulous!” “Terrific!” and “Super!” on blow flags. Another project, called Absenteeism at Dimensions Variable in 2011, was an installation of empty frames and stretcher bars. In 1001 Dreams of Occupation – What’s in it for me? at Emerson Dorsch in 2012, he pantomimed a protester at the train station in Opa Locka, a long faltered development with a Moorish theme in northwestern Miami. At first these projects read as a little kitschy. Themes of displacement resonate after interrogating the elements, their presentation and circumstance.

Sigurðarson’s most achingly poignant piece to date was a performance at the conclusion of Trading Places II at Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012. In Sleep My Baby Sleep/Soðou unga ástin min he sang a traditional Icelandic lullaby, accompanied by the choir of Our Lady of Perpetual Help of the Notre Dame Catholic Church, conducted by Boniface Laurent. With this performance Magnús represented Icelandic melancholy directly, with no humor to deflect its force.

The humor returned with Sigurðarson’s Corazón Vizcaya (2016), a short film commissioned for the Lost Spaces and Stories exhibition at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens. It took the form of the pilot of a telenovela (that could never be made) that told the fictional and never-ending story of Vizcaya and her family. Here the Icelander takes on melodrama as a mode that is sad, true, but not at all the same as that elusive emotion. The humor here is to see our Icelandic friend cast in a milieu and mode that is so utterly different than his identity and project and with such abandon. The artist’s endless effort to find melancholy parallels the endlessness of telenovela stories. Sigurðarson’s melancholy project is defined by its failure, like a mathematical limit.

With ADIOS MELANCHOLY, Sigurðarson once again accepts failure (for now). The pale marooned Icelander on South Beach is now at home in Miami’s Enchanted Forest. From his new seat of comfort, a content Sigurdarson reflects on his old angst. Its shadow could not survive in the sunlight. He has a little color in his cheeks now; he is fit; and he is in love. In a newly generous state of mind, he turns his attention to a flock of parrots, as they fly, squawking over the verdant canopy. He is inspired.

REQUIEM FOR A WHALE  

Performance-lecture at Kópavogur swimming pool

A continuation of Dances with Whales, performed at Cycle Music and Arts’ event Cryptopian States in Berlin (2018). The artist tells the tragic tale of the male orca Keiko (earlier Siggi and Kago; captured September, 1976). Keiko is most known for portraying Willy in the 1993 film Free Willy. In 1997, the artist traveled across America on pilgrimage to meet his fellow "Icelander" in Newport Oregon (on a quest to find the Holy Whale) in an attempt to find the missing bond between two mammals. Keiko travelled all over the world without swimming in the sea until he finally was released from captivity in 2002 outside the Icelandic Westman islands. The orca tragically died short thereafter in a Norwegian fjord in 2003.

PROCESS & PRETENSE

May 21 - June 12 2015

Reykjavik Art Museum, Hafnarhus

Magnús Sigurðarson has made the analysis of the obvious the subject of his art. On this occasion he focuses on a number of fixed points in reality which are found both in nature and in culture. Various creations and works of art have acquired significance in the human quest for the sublime. They bring together apparently contrasting qualities: on the one hand they are spectacular, overwhelming, and affect us by their sheer scale; on the other hand they are modest and symmetrical and appeal to us by their simplicity. Magnús sets out to break these assumptions down into their component atoms, in a quest to find some kind of nucleus – while at the same time asking himself, and us, questions about the internal and external reality of the individual, and his/her attitude to a Higher Power.

Magnus Sigurdarson's solo exhibition, 1001 Dreams of Occupation: What's in it for me?

The attempt to reach out to the Other over and over and over again despite preordained failure defines Sigurdarson's emphatically allegorical work.

For 1001 Dreams of Occupation: What's in it for me?, Miami-based Magnus Sigurdarson investigates ways to situate himself in the implications of The Arab Spring, since, he proposes, the strength of protests in the Middle East have made its participants less exotic, less Other. He does so with two videos of one-man protests; a rotating camel sculpture appropriated from a bakery sign; stills from his protest performances; and drawings of French colonial postcards of Arabia.

Sigurdarson exposes his own vulnerability in discrete acts, each of them acknowledging the pathos of his (and our) being. In doing so, he pierces through the illusion that any of us know what we are doing. He has lived seven years as an Icelander in Miami, FL, a multicultural city with a significant Latin contingent, and, notably, a population that are mostly immigrants from places around the country and the globe. Miami, then, is a city of displacement, of people whose hearts and imaginations are always tied, no matter the emotion behind this connection, to another place. With a self-deprecating sense of humor, Sigurdarson played out the dimensions of his heightened awareness of both being "Other" and encountering the Other in his characters as the marooned Icelander on South Beach, the English Beefeater man in the streets of London, or a Union soldier on an Indian battlefield.

Like a man constantly returning to the site of the most unresolved and tangled emotions, he continues to seek out ways to encounter, embody and/or connect to the Other. In his epochal essay "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodern ism," Craig Owens wrote this about the many nuances and structures of allegory in contemporary art, including obsessive neuroses, ceaseless accumulation of fragments and the desire to preserve the ephemeral.1 In all these ways Sigurdarson deploys allegory, to the extent that he piles up fragments of allegories. Furthermore, Sigurdarson deploys allegory to seek connection with the Other of the past, far away and/or of another culture. The attempt to reach out to the Other over and over and over again despite preordained failure defines Sigurdarson's emphatically allegorical work. In the works in this exhibition, Sigurdarson elides and conflates his own imaginings of multiple Arabias with images and experiences gleaned from the news coverage of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements of this past year. Using an etch-a-sketch like technique on the computer, Sigurdarson traced blown-out projections of early 19th century picture postcards of a French colonialist artist's vision of "Arabia." These fantastical pictures of nomads holding their camels were fabricated objects of desire for the Western tourist. Sigurdarsonfs layered interventions in the images reiterate the distance between the viewer and the subject. In their time the images were a demonstration of what we now call Oriental ism. Sigurdarsonfs appropriation of them exaggerates the distances bridged by the most typical use of allegory - bridging the present to the past and also the Western subject with the (Eastern and exotic) Other.

In a video called Occupy Sigurdarson wields various handwritten signs reading "Occupy my Dreams" and "What's In It for Me?" (among other slogans) as he stands alone in front of the Opa-locka train station, a 1920s revivalist work of Moorish architecture. Still an active building, the city hall is a vestige of Glen Curtiss's thematic development of Opa-locka, a city in greater Miami with the largest concentration of Moorish architecture in the United States.1 An economically motivated allegory, the fantasy behind the architecture was meant to be an attraction for investors and future residents. Embellishing the emotional depth of his performance, Sigurdarson chose Ravelfs Bolero as a soundtrack.

Through his different characters in the video, Sigurdarson acts out, he says, "many of the different spirits behind Occupy, yet the characters, they are all me. I go to different depths of myself to find them." With its disjunctive elements, Sigurdarson's lonely protest is akin to the lack of a central message in the Occupy protests. Each successive protest can be seen as an active re-reading of the others before it.

In these protests, social media played a vital role in the nearly instantaneous transmission of images and messages. The platform removed the distance that allegory is meant to bridge. The protesters everywhere were less Other because of this removal of geographical and temporal distance. In addition, when seen on the screen, in the privacy of looking at one's own phone or computer, we all have a little more courage. This was a hearts then minds and body offensive in which the currency of images and their captions, or the captions in them, had the most power to persuade. Now, Sigurdarson states, "What is happening in the Arabic world represents a paradigm shift. We can no longer talk about them as the "Other" now, because we want them to be our friends. "1

Sigurdarson carefully elides elements from the protests in recent history. A lone protester, he plays out a Jungian prototype - David against Goliath. At the same time, his singularly re-presents the immensity of each protester. Still, he states, "I am a passive-aggressive occupier." His dissection of the aspects of these phenomena is very indirect; there is no direct message. The allegories and comparisons never end.

Craig Owens' essay is also intensely allegorical; the text is dense with exegesis, commentary and quotations (all of these are appropriated fragments), properties that Owens likens to allegory by way of Walter Benjamin. In this way, Sigurdarson's fragmented allegories form a similar text.

Operation Beefeater: of man and his nature

It is obvious that our sensory experience is not limited to awareness of colors, sounds, odors, and other qualities, but includes many operations which cannot be the activities of the special senses. Daydreaming, remembering, and the perception of a thick, red, juicy, steak are obviously impossible to any one special sense. It is a basic fact of human behavior that we react not only to a single stimulus but to patterns of stimuli.

Our perception of the world as composed of objects (tree) rather than mere sensory qualities (green, large) demands further investigation.

Magnus Sigurdarson, 2010

How does one go about explaining what is before them?  Is it male, white, tall, bearded? Or simply guard, Beefeater? What sensory mechanisms lead us to objectify what we see as simply a Beefeater? Moreover, what are the implications of this labeling system that we have adopted as a society? This is the dilemma Magnus Sigurdarson, an Icelandic artist admittedly obsessed with the idea of identity and the cultural connotations attached to owning “an identity,” presents before us in his latest photographic series. 

Magnus teamed up with photographer, Paul Stoppi, for this body of work in which they set out to, “explore the space between disguise and anonymity.” They took a revered symbol of prestige and authority and injected him with a concentrated dose of absurdity. The Beefeater took to the streets of London, the very city he is meant to be solemnly serving, and became part of the hustle and bustle of quotidian life. We see him waiting for the tube, talking on his cell phone in an “I really must call you back” manner, making his daily commute pike-in-hand, and finally sitting down to a steak dinner, all the while dressed in authentic uniform. Magnus breathes life into a static symbol of authority, and reassigns his cultural role to that of a living, breathing, cell-phone chattering allegory.   

The driving force behind Magnus’ visual verbiage is to experience “the other.” Operation Beefeater challenges viewers’ notions of “the other” through the social tension, unexpectedness and awkwardness of the images. As he states in his piece Diagnosis of the Obvious – Project Mass Media of 2004, where he used 36 tons of local Norwegian newspapers to build a giant, collapsing wall that he then sprinkled with 120 thousand seeds of a foreign Alaskan Lupine that actually flourished; “If we take for granted that there is something called ME then there must be this other thing called YOU. Moreover, in order for YOU to understand ME and ME to understand YOU, I have to become YOU and YOU have to become ME. If this is not attainable we may have a catastrophic situation on our hands.”  Yet in order to experience the “YOU” or the “ME” we must leave behind preconceptions, and this is the real challenge. Regardless of where one hails from, everyone knows that a Royal British Guard should not pick his nose, because our socially formulated notion of this persona does not register a Beefeater as a person, but rather an object.  This tendency to objectify others through labels is what impedes us from ever bridging the “YOU versus ME” barrier. Magnus masks the melancholic nature of his photographs with quirks and smirks that highlight not only the absurdity of the images, but the absurdity of taking on such a task as trying to understand “the other.”

Magnus’ images are invitingly bright and playful, but the subject matter is much denser, inevitably making his viewers question how comfortable they are with themselves. This exchange between artist and viewer is fundamental to his work; it is in fact the unifying link of all his pieces. His goal is to entice both intra- and inter-personal communication. In his video installation, I’m so much better than you of 2005 Sigurdarson’s head takes center stage between two Chinese hand puppets in what appears to be a traditional Chinese puppet show. The artist repeatedly states “I’m so much better than you…I’m way better than you are,” and does so as the puppets attack him more and more aggressively. The video is about the catastrophic situation Magnus made reference to in Diagnosis of the Obvious – Project Mass Media. He invades a traditional Chinese custom in a failed attempt to understand another culture, conceals his failure by proclaiming his own cultural superiority, with the abundantly obvious result that the “other” retaliates.

Magnus has dedicated his career to exploring identities. Though his works are inherently melancholic and nostalgic, his goal is not intellectual enlightenment; but rather to provoke us to acknowledge those behaviors (whether they e superiority, repulsion, or bafflement) that the process of failing to understand “the other” uncovers, as well as the dangers of this failure. Along the way, in his pursuit to open our eyes, he also explores himself.

Carolina Márquez

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