Group Exhibition of the Year 2024
The Visual Arts Council’s Award for Group Exhibition of the Year goes to Tracing Fragments, in Gerðarsafn in Kópavogur. The exhibition, installed in the museum’s two main galleries, featured new and recent works of 6 artists, two of whom are Icelanders of foreign descent. The artists’ works addressed the bond between self-image and nationality, parentage and personality traits, as well as how personal history relates to history in the grander sense.
The Visual Arts Council’s Award for Group Exhibition of the Year goes to Tracing Fragments, in Gerðarsafn in Kópavogur. The exhibition, installed in the museum’s two main galleries, featured new and recent works of 6 artists, two of whom are Icelanders of foreign descent. The artists’ works addressed the bond between self-image and nationality, parentage and personality traits, as well as how personal history relates to history in the grander sense.
Exhibitors: Kathy Clark, Sasha Huber, Hugo Llanes, Frida Orupabo, Inuuteq Storch, and Abdullah Qureshi
Curator: Daría Sól Andrews
Tracing Fragments, 2023. Gerðarsafn. Photo: Vigfús Birgisson
Tracing Fragments, 2023. Gerðarsafn. Photo: Vigfús Birgisson
Tracing Fragments, 2023. Gerðarsafn. Photo: Vigfús Birgisson
Tracing Fragments, 2023. Gerðarsafn. Photo: Vigfús Birgisson
The exhibition and its accompanying programme, along with a publication, touched, in insistent ways, upon diverse aspects of the complicated history of colonialism, racial violence, the reclaiming of terms such as authority and victim, oppression, and retrieval of historical heritage. The exhibition also covered the diverse roles of craftsmanship and artistic practice in such reclamation, both through artistic work as a way of addressing the past and as a practice and form of communication that honours the creativity and cultural heritage of ancestors. Part of the exhibition also consisted of a series of talks where academics discussed racism in the Nordic countries, the visibility and invisibility of marginalised groups, and culture in a time of compression and censorship.
The jury finds that the exhibition directly addresses a more extensive discourse on colonisation within the arts and the social sciences. It has instigated further discussion within the arts in Iceland about diversity, marginalisation, critical views of historical heritage, and puts a spotlight on the invaluable contributions artists of diverse backgrounds bring to the table.
