Five Nordic Women Artists. Exhibition 20 September – 30 November 2008
Viewing Friday 19 Sept 18-20.00
Five contemporary women artists present new work commissioned by NICE08 Festival
As part of NICE08 (Nordic International Cultural Events) women artists from Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden will show work on the fourth floor at Novas CUC, Greenland Street:
Artists: Katrin Fridriks, Laila Strandberg, Maren Juell Kristensen, Asa Johannesson, Laufey Johansen
Katrin Fridriks – Iceland, combines painting and installation with her ‘Risk Boxes’ scaled down landscapes, a ‘legoland’ of houses, trees, showing different stages of evolution of societies, ecological systems, war, religion and genetic code as described by Stendahl.
Laila Strandberg – Denmark, Laila will be showing 12 new paintings; ‘I like my work to have a continuous theme, its origin stemming from a viewpoint or challenge relating to our time’ Maren Juell Kristensen – Norway,
Maren presents an installation combining video work with a seies of watercolours; ‘My work is concerned with the expectation of meaning and the wish for fulfilment and purpose. I work with video, both as a device for storytelling and as a physical presence of light’ Laufey Johansen – Iceland,
Laufey has created a new series of paintings using predominantly black paint, the ‘sum of all colours, to reproduce the unseen energy of the unknown and capture the vast spirit of being that runs through us all’ I paint an impression of a world beyond our senses’ Asa Johannesson – Sweden, presents a series of photographs ‘Portraits of Her’ ‘My photography is a comment on femininity, drawing on the historical role of the photograph as a method of classification’ In the nineteenth century photography became a means of defining human faces as classified ‘types’.
Human bodies were defined and regulated: the criminal body, the ethnic body, the Jewish body, and the body of the mentally ill. This fascination with the representation of the marginalised body encourages a defining of bodily norms, and nowhere is the process of inscription more apparent than in the representation of the female body’