For 25 years, the collaborative artist team, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, has been practicing and producing in the field of contemporary art on an international stage with projects and exhibitions in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the USA. They have built a reputation, resonant in contemporary art as well as in animal studies, human geography, museology, the environmental sciences and more. It has been their strategic intent to explore an anti-anthropocentric agenda, and to champion the idea that contemporary art is a significant tool to this end, made possible by the application of unique blends of method, material and cross-disciplinary appropriation.
Typically, each of their projects will focus on a particular site and a particular human/non-human nexus (a particular animal or organism) in order to deconstruct the complexities of such intersections and make visible the concepts of shared interspecific worlding and thereby the multiply conflicted human interests and behaviours pertaining to that site. To this end, they attempt to focus, wherever possible, on specific beings, individual animals, circumstances and events, both to avoid superficial generalisations and reductivism and in the understanding that such specificity will ultimately carry more traction in the imagination of audiences,
In considering and practicing art as a tool of disruption and mediation in the context of crisis, (e.g. mass extinction and the Anthropocene) they ask how situations involving complex, cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural relationships can effectively be deconstructed and their stories productively reconfigured and told. Consistent with their approach, through many projects, the artists have invested and directed their energies towards alliances and conversations across multiple fields in exhibitions, associated seminars and international conferences. For them, every exhibition made, is a provocation of sorts and is used to create opportunities for extending discourse, often between people who would otherwise rarely, if ever, engage.
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s artwork is multidisciplinary in nature, most usually taking the form of installation, involving anything from sculptural interventions, found objects and materials, video, audio, drawing, photography and texts. Notwithstanding their participation in International Biennales and major gallery shows, their adherence to the significance and advantage of site-specificity have often led them strategically to exhibit in many unlikely and otherwise non-art-specific venues. They have exhibited and otherwise continue to be involved with many other internationally significant artists and theorists across the world.
With multiple project monographs to their name, the production of their work is unashamedly driven and facilitated by intensive research and interdisciplinary associations with specialists both amateur and professional in multiple fields. As artists, they consider art to be both the most promising platform and the most pertinent instrument by which the fusion and mutual complication or disturbance of traditionally discrete knowledge-fields will succeed in effecting significant and increasingly urgent cultural and behavioural change.
And change should be the only show in town…
snaebjornsdottir/wilson website
Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir (PhD) is Professor at the Iceland University of the Arts
Mark Wilson (PhD) is Professor emeritus in Fine Art at the University of Cumbria, Institute of the Arts, UK