Debatable Lands: Dialogues from Shared Worlds (20-year retrospective exhibition) September 11 2021 – January 9 2022
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- (a)fly 2006 Survey (wall text), shooters (photographs on aluminium) and shot maps (on board and with shotgun pellets) (a)fly is founded on a survey that mapped domestic pets within Reykjavik city centre. Four ptarmigan hunters were invited to turn their shotguns on maps at a distance of 50 metres, thereby randomly selecting multiple, specific residential properties within Reykjavík 101. The owners of these properties were contacted and from this, pet owners and animal-dwellings in the area were identified and then photographed. By examining the habitat or dwellings chosen by the pets themselves, or in some cases constructed by their owners, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson offer new and contradictory perspectives on established classification systems and controversially shared environmental relationships – reframing the human-animal exchange.
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- ‘coming into garden from woods behind house’ is one nervous extract from the Fox Reports, precisely as noted by the receiving pest control officer. The work is .from Uncertainty in the City 2008–2010. Initiated as research on the animals who choose to reside in or move across the borders and thresholds of human homes and gardens, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson focus here on those whose activity, for the most part, is beyond human control, and about whose presence we are often ambivalent. They explored the questions: What is a pest? What is the relationship between fear or discomfort and a lack of control in this context? What are the inconsistencies in our responses to nature within our locality and the reasons behind such contradictions? And what is it about ourselves that begins to be revealed by the recognition of outsiders in our midst? Their findings reveal speculations on the different anxieties, limits of tolerance, unplanned disturbances and the desire for control we seek over wildlife, encountered in urban environments; how ideas concerning human-animal contact, encounters and cohabitation, shift according to their proximity to our homes.
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- nanoq: flat out and bluesome 2001-2006 Series of 32 photographs from Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s survey of taxidermied polar bears in the British Isles Collections of Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland and Nevada Museum of Art, USA Between 2001 and 2006, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson surveyed and photographed taxidermied polar bears in the UK, as found in storage, on display or undergoing restoration. As part of this project, the artists assembled an archive of images of the bears, incorporating the specific provenance of each specimen; their history and, where possible, the date, places and individuals associated with their death or capture. The photographs are a strange and sometimes unsettling documentation of the polar bears in situ, within museum displays, storage environments and both grand and modest, domestic settings. On one hand tragic and melancholic, they also reveal a layer of humour in the often-unnatural positions, conditions and contexts of the bears, as curiosities, captive still within their cultural environments.
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- Íslenskir Fuglar (Icelandic Birds) 2008 Collage: Poster, tape, printed matter The birds depicted in the collage are all the bird species imported to Iceland during the year 2005–2006. In this work, originally commissioned for the exhibition Bye Bye Iceland in Akureyri Art Museum, the artists looked at human ambivalence towards ideas of change, within Icelandic culture. On one hand, humans are conservative and suspicious of the disruption that change inevitably involves. On the other, they are drawn both to novelty and to the practical benefits that new introductions to our lives can bring. The tension suggested here is between what is considered to be manageable and controllable and what is deemed to be too disruptive and problematic; a judgment that is charged with potential miscalculations and incalculable cultural or ecological consequences. The taxidermic bird species in this two-part work are all those featured on a well-loved, Icelandic ornithological poster.
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- Elevation #4: flood/wave/flood 2019 Steel, wood, Pepper’s ghost/3D video, grasses, ceramic tiles The ceramic tiles each carry the common name of one species of flora, fauna, fish, crustacean, mollusc, insect or bird which together make up the ecosystem of the Rhode Island saltmarsh environment – the breeding ground for the soon-to-be-extinct saltmarsh sparrow. By examining the plight of saltmarsh sparrows, who live and breed exclusively in the narrow and increasingly depleted marshlands along the eastern seaboard of the US, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson emphasise the wider issue of human/environmental relations, interdependency and pending extinction. This particular species, it is thought, will be extinct by 2050, because their homeland saltmarshes are among the most vulnerable in the US, due to their low elevation and the rate of rising sea-level in the Northeast. The birds’ nesting cycle lasts around 23 to 24 days – just a few days less than the 28-day tidal cycle influenced by the moon’s gravity. With rising tides more frequent, the 28-day window is lost and eggs will either float away or the chicks drown. Further to that, from inshore, landfilling for development threatens the birds’ survival – and that of the flora and habitat in the area. The ceramic tiles in this work together carry the names of this and all other recorded species of flora and fauna which make up the Rhode Island saltmarsh sparrow breeding environment.
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- Elevation #4: flood/wave/flood | 2019 – from The Only Show in Town Steel, wood, Pepper’s ghost/3D video, grasses, ceramic tiles By examining the plight of saltmarsh sparrows, who live and breed exclusively in the narrow and increasingly depleted marshlands along the eastern seaboard of the US, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson emphasise the wider issue of human/environmental relations, interdependency and pending extinction. This particular species, it is thought, will be extinct by 2050, because their homeland saltmarshes are among the most vulnerable in the US, due to their low elevation and the rate of rising sea-level in the Northeast. The birds’ nesting cycle lasts around 23 to 24 days – just a few days less than the 28-day tidal cycle influenced by the moon’s gravity. With rising tides more frequent, the 28-day window is lost and eggs will either float away or the chicks drown. Further to that, from inshore, landfilling for development threatens the birds’ survival – and that of the flora and habitat in the area. The ceramic tiles in this work together carry the names of this and all other recorded species of flora and fauna which make up the Rhode Island saltmarsh sparrow breeding environment.
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- ‘The Fall – 2009–2010’ | 2016 Sheep leg bones, engraved silver bands, magnifying glass, reports, vitrine Silver bands inserted into and extending two leg-bones, inscribed respectively with the words Tálkni 2009 and Tálkni 2010, the dates when the sheep were herded off the mountain and slaughtered. In October 2009, a small flock of feral sheep that had lived independently of humans for some decades on Mt. Tálkni, an inaccessible part of the Westfjords, was rounded up by a team of men and dogs from the neighbouring communities. Observations by local farmers suggested that these sheep possessed some physiological adaptations, including a supposed increase in leg length. Nineteen sheep were caught but five perished as they fell from the towering cliffs. All those captured were taken to slaughter immediately and information concerning their physical changes lost in the process. The incident, and subsequently this work, serve to highlight tensions that surface when our will to categorise and contain meets the will of domestic animals who transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness.
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- nanoq: flat out and bluesome 2001-2006 Series of photographs from Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s survey of taxidermied polar bears in the British Isles Collections of Reykjavík Art Museum, Iceland and Nevada Museum of Art, USA Between 2001 and 2006, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson surveyed and photographed taxidermied polar bears in the UK, as found in storage, on display or undergoing restoration. As part of this project, the artists assembled an archive of images of the bears, incorporating the specific provenance of each specimen; their history and, where possible, the date, places and individuals associated with their death or capture. The photographs are a strange and sometimes unsettling documentation of the polar bears in situ, within museum displays, storage environments and both grand and modest, domestic settings. On one hand tragic and melancholic, they also reveal a layer of humour in the often-unnatural positions, conditions and contexts of the bears, as curiosities, captive still within their cultural environments.
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- Gallery view: The Only Show in Town, Feral Attraction…
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- Gallery view: You Must Carry Me Now, Íslenskir Fuglar, I’m Not There…
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- You Must Carry Me Now 2014 14 archival photographs on rag paper, mounted on Kapa, custom-made shelves and benches with accompanying bookwork inset You Must Carry Me Now is a suite of fourteen photographs the artists made of the preserved cadavers of Californian condors, a threatened species they worked with in Grand Canyon, Arizona. The entire species was saved from extinction in 1987 and is maintained on a human life-support system that closely monitors and treats the birds all year round for the otherwise fatal effects of lead-poisoning. As scavengers, the birds feed from discarded gut piles of hunted game. The viscera are contaminated by the fragmentation of the hunters’ lead bullets, causing crop stasis and eventual starvation in the condors. So the two cultures of conservation and hunting meet and compete in sustained tension, both within the crop and over the fate of this species.
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- Pet Environs – (a)fly – flug(a) 2006 33 photographs of domestic interiors, depicting the sites chosen by or assigned to pet animals – assorted gilt frames (a)fly is founded on a survey that mapped domestic pets within Reykjavik city centre. Four ptarmigan hunters were invited to turn their shotguns on maps at a distance of 50 metres, thereby randomly selecting multiple, specific residential properties within Reykjavík 101. The owners of these properties were contacted and from this, pet owners and animal-dwellings in the area were identified and then photographed. By examining the habitat or dwellings chosen by the pets themselves, or in some cases constructed by their owners, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson offer new and contradictory perspectives on established classification systems and controversially shared environmental relationships – reframing the human-animal exchange.
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- Elevation #1: escape/release/escape 1-4 from The Only Show in Town | 2019 photographs/diasec By examining the plight of saltmarsh sparrows, who live and breed exclusively in the narrow and increasingly depleted marshlands along the eastern seaboard of the US, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson emphasise the wider issue of human/environmental relations, interdependency and pending extinction. This particular species, it is thought, will be extinct by 2050, because their homeland saltmarshes are among the most vulnerable in the US, due to their low elevation and the rate of rising sea-level in the Northeast. The birds’ nesting cycle lasts around 23 to 24 days – just a few days less than the 28-day tidal cycle influenced by the moon’s gravity. With rising tides more frequent, the 28-day window is lost and eggs will either float away or the chicks drown. Further to that, from inshore, landfilling for development threatens the birds’ survival – and that of the flora and habitat in the area. The ceramic tiles in this work together carry the names of this and all other recorded species of flora and fauna which make up the Rhode Island saltmarsh sparrow breeding environment.
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- A Safe Passage | 2009 Photographs with text A Safe Passage is in part a response to a (2007) work by Martha Rosler, Kassel Gardens (from the Perspective of a Mole). Rather than pursuing ideas of human memory and haunting, it imagines the transit of a mole from the UK (where it is regarded as a pest, fit only to be trapped and killed), to Germany, where it is a protected species. Along the way, the artists consider those disparate means by which moles are persecuted, along with speculations regarding their experience and ontology through the lenses of geology, architecture, transit systems and burial rites.
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- White Noise 2001 Video (53:00) A text-based account of the artists’ five-day journey on foot through unfamiliar, uninhabited and possibly dangerous territory in Greenland, overlaying an image of a Greenlandic sled dog standing guard outside a makeshift wooden pen. Upon returning from the disorienting hike, each artist wrote these descriptive narratives, diarising their specific responses to the events along the way – to getting lost in the landscape, their thoughts, anxieties, expressions of wonder and even dreams, sequenced in the order they occurred. Though the beginning and end of both accounts are synchronised, the relative significance of the events to each artist and the short phrasing of the extracts disrupt the narrative sequence and emphasise the memory-based, dream-like differences of their individual experiences. Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s long enduring interest in human/animal relationships was sparked around this time, following their observations of sled dog colonies in the Arctic, more specifically, the fluctuating spectrum upon which the pack dogs exist in the north – from occasional companions and (rarely), pets, to working animals, barely removed
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- Searching for Stipa # 1 2017 Photograph assembled from 29 individual Electron Microscope scans of seeds 100:1. Printed on archival paper, 150 x 1400 cm
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- (a)fly / flug(a) Survey, Shooters, Maps, Pet Environs 2006 (a)fly is founded on a survey that mapped domestic pets within Reykjavik city centre. Four ptarmigan hunters were invited to turn their shotguns on maps at a distance of 50 metres, thereby randomly selecting multiple, specific residential properties within Reykjavík 101. The owners of these properties were contacted and from this, pet owners and animal-dwellings in the area were identified and then photographed. By examining the habitat or dwellings chosen by the pets themselves, or in some cases constructed by their owners, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson offer new and contradictory perspectives on established classification systems and controversially shared environmental relationships – reframing the human-animal exchange.
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- You Must Carry Me Now (detail) | 2014 Custom-made bench with inlays/books
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- Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet | 2011 Performance video (19:00) Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet is a three-channel video work commissioned for the Gothenburg Biennial Pandemonium in 2011 by the curator Sarat Maharaj. The performance-based HD video work documents a meeting between a human and seabirds around a custom-built table at which bread and fish is prepared and shared. The performance took place on the roof of Roda Sten, the main Biennial building, on the waterfront where food at al fresco café and restaurant tables is targeted and seized, on a regular basis, by fearless gulls. Despite the original site-specific setting, Vanishing Point is a critique on the interpretation and legacy of Christian doctrine which together with Cartesian objectivity has detrimentally placed anthropocentrism and human interests at the heart of western conceptions of the world. The artists’ ambition was ultimately to place this work in an ecclesiastical context. In another way, the work references a well-known biblical miracle narrative, in which generosity and sharing are key, but here, rather than situating it entirely in human terms, it extends the generosity across and between species.
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- (a)fly / flug(a) 2006 (a)fly is founded on a survey that mapped domestic pets within Reykjavik city centre. Four ptarmigan hunters were invited to turn their shotguns on maps at a distance of 50 metres, thereby randomly selecting multiple, specific residential properties within Reykjavík 101. The owners of these properties were contacted and from this, pet owners and animal-dwellings in the area were identified and then photographed. By examining the habitat or dwellings chosen by the pets themselves, or in some cases constructed by their owners, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson offer new and contradictory perspectives on established classification systems and controversially shared environmental relationships – reframing the human-animal exchange.
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- Feral Attraction – Erasure Projection, maps, books, vitrine In this work, a looped video image is projected onto a map of the Tálkni peninsula. It shows a sheep being sheared. On completion of the process, the sheep struggles from the shearer’s grasp and disappears from the edge of the map. In October 2009, a small flock of feral sheep that had lived independently of humans for some decades on Mt. Tálkni, an inaccessible part of the Westfjords, was rounded up by a team of men and dogs from the neighbouring communities. Observations by local farmers suggested that these sheep possessed some physiological adaptations, including a supposed increase in leg length. Nineteen sheep were caught but five perished as they fell from the towering cliffs. All those captured were taken to slaughter immediately and information concerning their physical changes lost in the process. The incident, and subsequently this work, serve to highlight tensions that surface when our will to categorise and contain meets the will of domestic animals who transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness.
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- Uncertainty in the City – Audio work 2010 100 interviews concerning human-animal encounters. Collected during 2009–2010, the artists took their modified caravan out in the field and into communities in Cumbria, inviting individuals to share stories and opinions of their personal animal encounters. Radio Animal shares these human/animal narratives from in and around human spaces. As Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson have written: “We may mow the lawn and weed the borders but things beyond our control continually arrive and depart, through hedges and fences, across and below the surface of the soil and grass – and by air inhabit or visit the trees and flowers. Some are welcome, some are not, and some are a source of vexation and perplexity. In an unthinking way we would often rather be without that which perplexes or bothers us.”
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- Tálkni Grassworks from Feral Attraction 2016 These photographs, taken by Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson from an imagined sheep‘ perspective, were made on the slopes of Mt. Tálkni. In October 2009, a small flock of feral sheep that had lived independently of humans for some decades on Mt. Tálkni, an inaccessible part of the Westfjords, was rounded up by a team of men and dogs from the neighbouring communities. Observations by local farmers suggested that these sheep possessed some physiological adaptations, including a supposed increase in leg length. Nineteen sheep were caught but five perished as they fell from the towering cliffs. All those captured were taken to slaughter immediately and information concerning their physical changes lost in the process. The incident, and subsequently this work, serve to highlight tensions that surface when our will to categorise and contain meets the will of domestic animals who transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness.
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- This artist book frames cairns, photographed during the last day of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s 10-day expedition through the uninhabited area of Hornstrandir in the Westfjords, Iceland. The concertina folding allows one cairn to follow another across the vast and misty land – a reminder of these makeshift human markers that, in the absence of paths, guided their passage across the terrain. Following the last photographic image and the words, Reykjafjörður, Þaralátursfjörður, Svartaskarð, July 29 1998, the text reads: The last day of a walking expedition in the Westfjords, Iceland. Weather conditions consistently misty. Visibility 10 metres except in the fjords. The largest scale map of the area in existence is 1:100 000. In such conditions, reliance on a compass is imperative although we inevitably would need to rely on something else from time to time.
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- Matrix | 2016 Glass, projection, sound These works grew from the artists’ fascination with polar bear maternity dens, both in their individuality and their ergonomic form. For six years, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson researched different iterations of their denning in the arctic, finding that the outdated, romantic narrative of pristine isolation and barrenness in the northern circumpolar region is misleading. Instead, polar bears share much of this territory in a complex relationship with multiple human populations, industry, tourism and scientific research; meaning that the bears’ dens are often found in close proximity to human sites. The works are scale models of specific, measured polar bear dens in the Alaskan North Slope Borough. Each den maquette sits on a glass screen, carrying projected video surveillance footage of the coastal area, captured using the Oil and Gas industry’s Forward Looking Infra-Red technology to identify, by thermal imaging, the presence of polar bear dens. If detected, ice roads serving the companies must be built or re-routed to a minimum one-mile radius of the den.
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- The Only Show in Town – Elevation #1 escape/release/escape | 2017–2019 Photographic works (on diasec) By examining the plight of saltmarsh sparrows, who live and breed exclusively in the narrow and increasingly depleted marshlands along the eastern seaboard of the US, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson emphasise the wider issue of human/environmental relations, interdependency and pending extinction. This particular species, it is thought, will be extinct by 2050, because their homeland saltmarshes are among the most vulnerable in the US, due to their low elevation and the rate of rising sea-level in the Northeast. The birds’ nesting cycle lasts around 23 to 24 days – just a few days less than the 28-day tidal cycle influenced by the moon’s gravity. With rising tides more frequent, the 28-day window is lost and eggs will either float away or the chicks drown. Further to that, from inshore, landfilling for development threatens the birds’ survival – and that of the flora and habitat in the area. The ceramic tiles in this work together carry the names of this and all other recorded species of flora and fauna which make up the Rhode Island saltmarsh sparrow breeding environment.
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- Feral Attraction (three preserved heads) 2016 In October 2009, a small flock of feral sheep that had lived independently of humans for some decades on Mt. Tálkni, an inaccessible part of the Westfjords, was rounded up by a team of men and dogs from the neighbouring communities. Observations by local farmers suggested that these sheep possessed some physiological adaptations, including a supposed increase in leg length. Nineteen sheep were caught but five perished as they fell from the towering cliffs. All those captured were taken to slaughter immediately and information concerning their physical changes lost in the process. The incident, and subsequently this work, serve to highlight tensions that surface when our will to categorise and contain meets the will of domestic animals who transgress the invisible and unspoken boundaries that separate landscapes of domestication and wildness.
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- Flatskins 2004 Video (39:47) In Flat Skins, a conversation is conducted in the Australian section of the University of Oxford Natural History Museum collection. Flat skins (the preserved, head and hide with fur) of a variety of small Australian marsupials are taken one-by-one from their storage drawers and passed backwards and forwards between two female pairs of hands. The black and white movie is slowed and silent – the viewers are invited only to conjecture what ventriloquy from these unfortunate animals is being performed.
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- Gallery view: nanoq: Matrix, White Noise, I’m Not There, A Dog-Like Story…
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- Nightvision 2010 Video (23:38) Nightvision was filmed during both day- and night-time in a garden in South Glasgow. During the day, the camera pans the typical urban garden setting, through 360°, taking in the shed, the red swing, the old roller and compost heap. During the night-filming, the camera is fixed on some bushes, a bird table and a hedge. Towards the end of the piece, two pairs of bright, white eyes appear, one after the other and the shadowy forms of animals move from the frame to the centre of the image, beneath the bird table. The foxes stop for a while, their pointed ears visible, side by side. In this place, one preens the other before they both move on into the darkness.
photographic documentation by Vigfús Birgisson
Vanishing Point: where species meet
Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet is a three-channel video work commissioned for the Gothenburg Biennial 2011,Pandemonium by the curator, Sarat Maharaj. The brief was for a site-specific, relational work: Vanishing Point focused on the roof of the main Biennial building, Roda Sten, situated on the River Gota waterfront. Research included acquiring knowledge of and developing sensitivity towards the site, including the various species of gulls, their diet and behaviour and was conducted through discussions and interviews with local fishermen, birdwatchers and pavement café owners in the area. Seagulls are often regarded by people locally, as a nuisance.
The performance-based HD video work documents a meeting between a human and the gulls around a custom-built table at which food (bread and fish) is prepared and shared. The table, designed by the artists, also played a crucial role in generating and testing our ideas concerning notions of sharing and hospitality across species.
The performance took place on the roof of Roda Sten, the main Biennial building in Gothenburg, on the River Gota waterfront, along which al fresco café and restaurant tables are targeted on a regular basis by fearless gulls.
Vanishing Point can be seen as a critique on the legacy of how Christian values have been interpreted and together with Cartesian objectivity, have placed anthropocentrism and human interests at the heart of our conceptions of the world, to the detriment of a potentially more ecological consciousness. Such viewpoints have contributed to a dislocation between human beings and the wider environment rendering it largely as a series of resources and sites for exploitation. The project asks how performance, involving the free will and participation of non-human others, may be used to test ideas of parity. Vanishing Point sets out, site-specifically to reconfigure ideas of notoriety and interspecific social order. How can art and aesthetic presentation contribute to the reappraisal and rehabilitation of a known pariah? In the context of long-established scientific rationale and religious dogma, the work attempts through the processes and actions of art, constructively to effect new audience-awareness of interspecific interdependence?
For the biennial,Vanishing Point was exhibited alongside works by Francis Alys and Ernesto Neto.
Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art
Vanishing Point: where species meet (2019) at Edinburgh Art Festival
Vanishing Point: Where Species Meet (2011/19) St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Haymarket, Edinburgh.
Despite the original site-specific setting on the Gotheburg waterfront, our ambition has always been to show this work in an ecclesiastical context. In some small but significant way, the work can be construed to reference a well-known biblical miracle narrative in which generosity and sharing are key. But strategically, rather than situating it entirely in human terms, it carries the idea across and between species.
The Only Show in Town
Elevation #6: the ebbing
Elevation #4: flood/wave/flood (detail) ceramic tiles on pallets
Elevation #4: flood/wave/flood (detail) ceramic tiles on pallets
The Only Show in Town
an introduction by Jo-Ann Conklin, Director of the Bell Gallery
It’s 4:30 am on a late-June morning when I arrive to pick up BryndísSnæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson from their bed and breakfast in Providence. We are on our way south, to Jacob’s Point, a marsh in Warren, RI, where Deirdre Robinson and Steve Reinert are researching saltmarsh sparrows. As we arrive, it is already warm – the sun is rising on the marsh, glistening in dew on the grasses; it is peaceful and beautiful, and awe inspiring. The crew is already set up, going about their business of looking for saltmarsh sparrow nests: small indentations in knee-high grasses that are invisible to the untrained eye. Their task is to band the birds and to record their nesting habits, their successes and unfortunate and increasing failures in the face of incrementally rising sea levels.
Elevation #1: escape/release 3
Experiences such as this are commonplace for Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson, whose research-based art practice has led them to collaborate with specialists in far-flung natural settings around the globe.[1]Over their twenty-year collaboration, they have created artworks addressing California condors and humpback chub in Arizona’s Grand Canyon, polar bears living in Alaska and taxidermied in the UK, seals in Iceland, gulls in Sweden – and even our pets. In each of these series, they examine the “cultural lives” of animals — the relationship between non-human and human animals and how human culture intersects with, and often interrupts, the balance of nature. Their works intersect with issues in animal studies, as well as broader studies of colonialism, ecology and climate change.
Which brings us to the saltmarsh sparrow. What story do Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson have to tell us about the saltmarsh sparrow, and what story do the sparrows have to tell about us? Living exclusively in narrow and depleted marshlands along the eastern coast of the US, saltmarsh sparrows are threatened by landfilling for development on one side and sea-level rise on the other. Rhode Island’s saltmarshes are among the most vulnerable in the United States because of their low elevation and because the rate of sea-level rise in the Northeast is higher than in other places.[2]
Saltmarsh sparrows are among a number of species that breed in this delicate and endangered landscape. Nesting on the ground, saltmarsh sparrows—Ammospiza caudacuta—have evolved a highly particularized breeding habit that allows them to mate, lay, hatch, and fledge chicks within twenty-eight-day cycles – the time between high tides when the marshes flood. The female lays her first egg five days after mating, then lays one each day for two or three days (the chicks may be the offspring of several males, who have no responsibility for rearing chicks). Incubation takes about twelve days, and it takes seven to eight days for the chick to be strong enough to climb out of the nest (they cannot fly or swim). If not perfectly performed—if the female has mated late or built her nest too close to the water’s edge—when the water rises eggs float out of the nest and are lost, or chicks that are too young to climb up the marsh grasses die of exposure or are drowned. Sea-level rise from climate change has shifted this delicate balance. Saltmarsh sparrow populations have decreased by 75% since 1998, and at some point in the next fifty years the sparrows will cease to exist.[3]Although there are aspirations for floating saltmarshes and other extraordinary measures, the impending loss of the species is accepted fact among the orthnithological community. It was this assertion, made by ornithologist Charles Clarkson during an early interview for the artists’ project at Brown, that stunned Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson and catalyzed their exploration into the plight of the saltmarsh sparrow.
Avian researchers—like Robinson and Reinert, and Chris Elphick, principal investigator of SHARP, the Saltmarsh Habitation and Avian and Research Program—are racing the clock and the tides to learn as much as possible about saltmarsh sparrows prior to their extinction, and to build support in hope of saving other saltmarsh species. In spring of 2017, biologists Robinson and Reinert initiated their citizen science project, the Saltmarsh Sparrow Research Initiative (SALSri). The impetus was a serendipitous sighting of a banded saltmarsh sparrow at Jacob’s Point, made by Robinson the previous summer. Finding a banded bird is unusual. Curious to know more, Robinson elicited the help of Reinert, a Master Bander. They captured and identified the bird. Referencing the band codes, they learned that she had been banded in Florida on October 31st, 2015. This tiny bird, weighing only 0.7 oz., had migrated 1,243 miles from Florida to Rhode Island — setting the record for the longest documented migration for her species.
Elevation #1: escape/release 4
Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson’s research-based artworks are multidisciplinary in nature, most often taking the form of installations, involving diverse media including sculpture, found objects and materials, video, audio, drawing, photography and texts. In The Only Show in Town,as in their other projects, they “represent the process of research itself.”[4]Through a series of six works in the exhibition, the artists invite us to join them in the saltmarsh, to share their experience, which Mark describes as “the significant search for some understanding not yet known.”[5]
As they entered the saltmarsh on that June morning, the artist team was instructed in the first rule of the marsh: the need to walk slowly and deliberately in order to study the ground beneath their feet, “to distinguish between promising-looking twists of dried grass and the constructions that would hold or had once held the eggs and hatchlings of saltmarsh sparrows.”[6]Robinson pointed out nests and gave instructions on how to find them — Mark was a natural, identifying a nest almost immediately. In the exhibition, this search is translated into an arrangement (a field or marsh) of photographs. Viewing the photos, which are shot down on tangles of grasses, we join in the search for nests, looking beyond the surface texture to find the tell-tale indentation of the nests.
Elevation #1: escape/release 2
While Mark sought out nests, Reinert instructed Bryndís in the identification and properties of cordgrass, salt hay grass, and glasswort—plants common to the marsh. The work entitled Salicornia depressais their 172” high photograph of one such plant, commonly known as glasswort or pickleweed. A fleshy, salt-tolerant plant, glasswort is usually the first plant to grow in high-salt environments, making it invaluable in the establishment of new marshes. Additionally, it provides a habitat for invertebrates, is a food source for many animals, and is edible to humans.
Working with student technicians and a photomacrographic system at the RISD Nature Lab, Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson scanned a sample of the grass in sections, each section stack-scanned 65 times, and later reassembled these, in Photoshop, to produce this highly detailed image. The extreme magnification of the image invites us to look closely, to examine the plant in a way not possible with the human eye, and to enable a scale-shift more correspondent with the view of a creature the size of a sparrow.
Salicornia depressareflects the artists’ concerns with plant blindness. Identified by biologists James H. Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler in the late 1990s, plant blindness refers to the human tendency to ignore plant species and to disregard their importance.
We defined plant blindness as: the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s own environment—leading to: (a) the inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere, and in human affairs; (b) the inability to appreciate the aesthetic and unique biological features of the lifeforms belonging to the Plant Kingdom; and(c) the misguided, anthropocentric ranking of plants as inferiorimals, leading to the erroneous conclusion that they are unworthy of human consideration.[7]
Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson contend that, “In view of increasing species extinction, the world can no longer afford our citizens to see ´nothing´ when they look at plants, the basis of most life on earth.”[8]In a symbolic act of respect the artists returned the specimen of glasswort to Jacob’s Point and replanted it.
Elevation #1: escape/release 1
In a work, snaking its way across the Gallery floor, the interdependency and complexity of the saltmarsh habitat is indicated in several hundred ceramic tiles impressed with the names of animals, birds, insects, and plants that live in or frequent the marsh and contribute to its ecosystem. Some of these species, like the saltmarsh sparrow, seaside sparrow, and clapper rail are “obligates” that spend their entire life cycle in the marsh. Others breed in the marshes and elsewhere, and may survive the loss of saltmarshes. Still others come to feed in the rich environment of the marsh. The artists make visible the richness of species that thrive in the saltmarsh, out of view of urban dwellers. They quantify the variety of plants, insects, birds, and animals that will be lost or displaced when rising waters overtake and flood the marsh.
***
At Jacob’s Creek, the artists watched as Robinson and Reinert carefully captured the birds in mist nets and quickly took measurements of their health, banded their legs for future tracking, before releasing them. There is something magical about the moment of release, when the bird is freed and lifts off from the hand of the researcher. It stems from the encounter of two species in unusually close proximity, and from the release of anxiety in both bird and human as the encounter ends. Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilsonhave captured this moment in a series of photographs that they describe as an “homage to the carers of the birds.”[9]While the photographs are that—a recognition of the humans who truly see and care for other species—they also carry darker implications. For here, the artists present us with an unrecognizable landscape. Colors have shifted to eerie, otherworldly hues: grasses are a mixture of navy and magenta, the sky an odd grey-pink. Making this shift, the artists definitively remove their images from the realm of documentary or environmental photography. Images that would otherwise read as sweet and wistful, take on an ominous and dystopic air. This manipulation in color forecasts our future world, in which the birds that disappear off the edge or out of the frame of the photos are no longer simply escaping our grasp; they are instead exiting our world.
Viewers to the exhibition will have noted the lack of representative images of our ostensible subject: the saltmarsh sparrow. Reinforcing the theme of “searching” and referencing the extinction of the bird, the artists offer only one such view and position it as the culmination of our viewing experience. A bird blind, traditionally used for viewing and study, sits at the rear of the gallery; through the window in the blind we observe athree-dimensional likeness of a saltmarsh sparrow. Perched on a branch, the life-size bird ruffles her feathers as she observes her surroundings (the marsh or us). The artists draw attention to the reversal of roles, of the bird observing us or alternately of our attempting to look out through the eyes of the bird. The illusion is created via the theatrical technique called “Pepper’s ghost,” which employs a mirror to “throw” an image into view. The image is fleeting. Reduced to a ten secondoop that the artists liken to a “relic” – a future object of remembrance.[10]
***
The extinction of the saltmarsh sparrow is foretold. We have experienced this before with Martha the passenger pigeon who died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914, with Lonesome George the last known Pinta Island tortoise of the Galapagos Islands who passed on June 24, 2012, and with multitudes of less famous examples of species collapse. In this period of extraordinary and human-generated changes to our environment, how should we respond to the loss of this small, somewhat hidden, and un-iconic bird, whose existence may seem insignificant to those humans who are neither biologist, environmentalist, nor even, avid birder? For Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson, the answer is clear:
“When the extinction of a species occurs, it is neither enough nor appropriate to close ranks and ‘carry on regardless.’ We should learn to grieve and through that process come to an understanding of how it is we are changed — and how it is we should go on.[11]
“As artists, we consider art to be both the most promising platform and the most likely instrument by which . . . traditionally discrete knowledge-fields will [combine to] succeed in effecting significant and increasingly urgent cultural and behavioral change.
And change is the only show in town.”[12]
Jo-Ann Conklin
Published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name
April 6 to July 7, 2019
©David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University
Titles: The Only Show in Town
Elevation #1:escape/release/escape 1–5
Elevation #2:moon/wake/moon/wake/moon/wake
Elevation #3:Salicornia depressa
Elevation #4: flood/wave/flood
Elevation #5: hide/blind/hide
Elevation #6: the ebbing
[1]Research for The Only Show in Townwas conducted over a two-year period (2017–2019).
[2]“According to SLAMM [Sea-level Affecting Marshes Model] project maps, Rhode Island is poised to lose 13 percent of its marshes with one foot of sea-level rise; 52 percent of marshes with three feet of sea-level rise; and a staggering 87 percent of its marshes with five feet of sea-level rise.” http://www.crmc.state.ri.us/news/2017_1016_wc_rssm.html.Estimated projection from NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] forecast sea-level rise of nine to eleven feet by 2100, foretelling the demise of RI saltmarshes.
[3]The results of Reinert and Robinson’s study are not encouraging. Of the twenty-seven nests that were monitored in 2018, only nine nests were successful in fledging at least one chick. More than half of the nests were lost to flooding. 2017-2018 Summary: Breeding Ecology of Saltmarsh Sparrows (Ammodramus caudacutus) in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hvEXL2TqKIsV6gUnY_jNmvviV0ITA2Ox/viewaccessed 2/15/19.
[4]Email correspondence with artists, 9/27/18.
[7]James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, “Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness,” in Plant Science Bulletin, Spring 2001. https://www.botany.org/bsa/psb/2001/psb47-1.pdfaccessed 2/15/19.
[8]Artists’ website, Beyond Plant Blindness.https://Snæbjörnsdóttirwilson.com/category/projects/beyond-plant-blindness/accessed 2/1/19.this quotation from the team behind the Swedish-based project Beyond Plant Blindness(2015-17) of which Snæbjörnsdóttir Wilson were the artist contributors.
[9]Conversation with the artists, 1/25/19.
[10]Email from the artists, 2/24/19.
[11]BryndísSnæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, “Other Stories ..On Power and Letting Go,” in You Must Carry Me Now: The Cultural Lives of Endangered Species, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, 284 Publishing Inc., Arizona State University Art Museum, 241.
Visitations: solo exhibition, Listasafni Akureyri, Sept 25 2022 – Jan 16 2023
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- Ursus Maritimus Íslandia1880-2021
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- Visitations I, II ,III
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- Matrix
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- Matrix (and Polar Bear News)
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- Þverárfjall ♂ June 3 2008
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- Gallery view
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- Kaldbaksvík 1892
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- The Edge of the World
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- The Edge of the World (detail)
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- The Edge of the World (detail)
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- When Once Comes Once Again
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- When Once Comes Once Again
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- 50 miles north of Hornvík (a bear was ‘hanged’)
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- Gallery View
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- Shooting the Messenger
photographic documentation by Daniel Starrason
Visitations: Polar Bears Out of Place
In 2019, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson received major funding from Rannís, the Icelandic Research Fund, for a 3-Year project 2019-2022. The project will conclude with two major solo exhibitions in Akureyri Museum of Art (September – January 2021) and Anchorage Museum (October 2022 – September 2023)
Please enter here: http://visitations.lhi.is
In January 2019, Mark Wilson PhD, artist and Professor at the University of Cumbria, UK and Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir PhD, artist, Professor and MA programme director at the Department of Fine Art, Iceland University of the Arts, received a 42 million ISK (268,000GBP) grant from Rannís, the Icelandic Research Fund for a three-year research project Visitations: Polar Bears out of Place.
In the context of global warming and sea-level rise, ‘Visitations’ takes specific historic and contemporary polar bear arrivals to the coasts of Iceland as a point from which to consider more widely, issues of population displacement, hospitality and increasingly excited global migration patterns. Approaching the subject from a contemporary art perspective, in a cross-disciplinary collaboration with folklorists, anthropologists and an international art curator, the project probes intimate and geo-political contact zones, between humans and others and thereby, related networked effects of climate change, population displacement and environmental disruption The research will gather and combine images, texts, audio, biological and other material relating to specific recorded polar bear arrivals. Methodologies will involve a close study of the relationship between source material and its cultural and environmental contexts as well as to the transmission, interpretation and presentation of subtexts embedded within all visual and textual matter. The project has a number of satellite partner institutions, both locally and abroad, allowing for further comparative study within a wider cultural context, and will conclude in two major museum exhibitions, an international conference and a publication encapsulating the project as a whole.
Collaborators are from the University of Iceland´s programme in Folkloristics, Kristinn Schram and in Art History, Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, as well as its Research Centre in Strandir, the Akureyri Art Museum and the Anchorage Museum in Alaska.
Of the 198 applications submitted to the IRF for this year, 16%, or 31 projects received support. The project is hosted by the Iceland University of the Arts. This is the first time a research project within the field of arts practice has received support from the Icelandic Research Fund.
Shooting the Messenger
Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson’s 2018 series of works Shooting the Messenger (2018) takes as its leitmotif, the idea of the unwelcome visitor, arriving at the shores of an island. The visitor’s appearance in this place, though opportune, is not entirely voluntary and certainly not comfortable. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Marcus Coates’ Finfolk, Lars von Trier’s Dogville, the protagonist’s appearance, may be seen as the consequence of changed circumstance and possibly a harbinger of other more extreme events to come. Like them, with global warming, looming belatedly but ever more prominently in the media gestalt and so, in public consciousness, the arrival of polar bears in Iceland signifies a pivotal moment, in its potential to trigger either (temporally) new (or historically repetitive) behaviours in the host, with equally far reaching consequences.
In the summer of 2008, two polar bears made respective appearances on the Skaga peninsula, (Skagaströnd) in the north of Iceland, on the 3rd and on the 16th of June. Their arrival, though not at all extraordinary in itself, caused a particularly public reaction and controversy.
In response, for Anchorage Museum, last year, the artists made a two-part work entitled Shooting the Messenger in which a cross section of one of each bear’s teeth indicating annual, cementum-layer growth, was set against a roster of climate change events, summits and warnings correspondent with those same years of each bear’s life.
(the diptych is in collection of Anchorage Museum, Alaska)
Beyond Plant Blindness
Snæbjörnsdóttir Wilson have recently installed a new work, a 14 metre tapestry, Searching for Stipa. The tapestry shows the complex structures of a grass seed Stipa pennata. During research for the project Beyond Plant Blindness, under the supervision of the artists Bryndís and Mark, a scanning electron microscope at Chalmers University of Technology was used to image the seed awn in twenty-nine highly detailed sections. The artists then meticulously assembled the scans as one image, using Photoshop software. From this single file, the tapestry was woven in wool, in Norway, by Kristina Aas.
It was installed in Hus B, Pedagogen, University of Gothenburg on August 15 2018
Searching for Stipa #2 (Rain Shelter) Panels 1, 2 & 3
Contemporary humans have become an urban species. Living in megalopolitan cities reduces intimate contact with the natural world thus placing greater emphasis on ´presented nature´ settings, such as zoos, botanic gardens and natural history museums
Searching for Stipa #2 (Rain Shelter) Panels 1 & 2
However, previous research has demonstrated that ´plant blindness´ inhibits human perceptions of plants. In view of increasing species extinction the world can no longer afford our citizens to see ´nothing´ when they look at plants, the basis of most life on earth. The team of researchers in this project Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Dawn Sanders, Eva Nyberg, and Bente Eriksen Molau believe that conducting research in order to understand how we can move beyond plant blindness is imperative for a sustainable world
Searching for Stipa #2 (Rain Shelter) Panel 3
“The everyday life of a plant can appear to be static and silent to human perception. And yet, modern science tells us that plants live in complex, and often social, worlds. Removing plants from the human view makes it easier for us to exploit them but reduces our ability to see into their worlds; how might taking a different view improve our understanding and sensitivity to the lives of plants?” [1]
The artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have examined instances of particular seeds and plants brought to Gothenburg Botanical Garden from diverse regions of the world
Aconitum hemsleyanum (Red Vine)
The fourteen photographs in the Gallery (plus that of Stipa at the Stolpboden site) are electron microscopic scans, made of seeds selected by Henrik Zetterlund, who also records his experience of their collection. How do such stories, of the environments and conditions from which these plants were taken, their perceived needs, new habitats and subsequent behaviour, unravel the simplistic dynamic of public display-for-recreation?
The seedlings growing under the growlight are from the very same seed batch as those in the photographs. Some are the very same seeds. Due to timing and the vulnerablility of the seeds not all of them might be in the gallery at the same time. Although we hope that further on into the summer all of them might be here, we cannot be sure. The well being of the seedlings/plants is our main concern and will determine whether or not they need different environmental conditions from those we can provide in the Gallery
Searching for Stipa #1 (Stolpboden)
Searching for Stipa #1 (Stolpboden)
These artworks are part of the cross-disciplinary research project Beyond Plant Blindness: seeing the importance of plants for a sustainable world. The project was funded by The Swedish Research Council
Searching for Stipa – detail, approximately 1 m (image 1200 cms x 112 cms)
The artists would like to thank the many staff at Botaniska who have helped to support their project. Special thanks to Marika Irvine and Henrik Zetterlund
Gladioulus flanaganii
Beyond Plant Blindness Artworks: Seeds Flora Rilke Gallery , Searching for Stipa 1 Stolpboden and Searching for Stipa 2 Rain Shelter (Rock Garden)