Description

In Big Mouth, the first publication of their collaborative work, the artists Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson bring together research material and documentation relating to three exhibitions held between September 2003 and April 2004 and research residencies in Greenland ( July – September 2001) and Australia (July – September 2002). Big Mouth gathers together documentation of Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s 2002 residency and Arts Council-funded project in Melbourne and Tasmania, which led to the eponymous exhibition in Tramway, Glasgow in 2004. Lavishly illustrated with fieldwork and exhibition photographs and including an introduction by the artists and transcriptions of all eight interviewees, there are essays by Juan Cruz, Nikos Papastergiadis and Francis McKee.The first installation, ‘Vogguvisur/Lullabies’ in Reykjavik Art Museum examined fears and uncertainties belying the balm of lullabies and the artifice and gloss of the popular song. The second installation, ‘there are some things you have to know’ (300m3 Gothenburg) used the Jim Reeves song Old Tige as a soundtrack to a short road movie. The third installation, ‘Big Mouth’, at Tramway, used the thylacine/Tasmanian tiger, to examine human behavioural responses and how acts of identification by means of comparison with what is familiar can often be expediential, fateful and produce irredeemable results.