If I had been…
October 16, 2015 – January 17, 2016
If I had been… is a new exhibition with the works of the American artist Nina Zurier which will open on Friday 16th of October at 17:00 (5 pm) in Reykjavík Maritime Museum.
The artist Nina Zurier wonders how her life would have been had she grown up in Iceland instead of the Midwestern United States. To try to answer that question Nina has chosen some photographs shot in Iceland in the 50’s and 60’s, and from them she has made her own photography projects that tell her fictional story. Nina has spent a lot of time in Iceland exploring the archive of the Reykjavík Museum of Photography and she has also been studying Icelandic. The result of her efforts is to be seen in this exhibition and in a book with the same title recently published by Crymogea.
Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir, cultural theorist, has this to say about Nina Zurier‘s exhibition If I had been…
“Photographs have reality to thank for their existence. Photographs show us the inevitable reality as it was at a given moment—but to give this moment meaning we must find that place in the narrative. When we use the imagination to give life to the past, then the past becomes real. It will become part of our self. In this way we create memories, precious things that we can share with others or entertain ourselves with sometimes. The photographs are not only records of external conditions, the texture and shape of objects, the style of the coats, the look of the cars. They are also a source of information about a smile, a glance, a touch, all these intangible emotions and states of mind. Nina Zurier is a stranger in this land and gets us to look at things from a new perspective. Details draw us in. A previously familiar reality gets a new meaning. From the real memories Nina has created artificial memories to re-ignite the real memories within the viewer. The exhibition creates a narrative about a life that was not lived, but nonetheless had real events, tangible things, and real emotions. A dream about what was not. A unique experiment with imagination and reality.”
For further information please contact:
NINA ZURIER [email protected]
+ 354 857 9908 eða +510 708 7969
