GUEST ROOMS x COSMOS CARL
GUEST ROOMS invites you to download two time-based artworks Millennium Fall, 2017-2019 & Generation Contradiction, 2019 by HRAFNHILDUR HELGADÓTTIR. From the comfort of your own device. GUEST ROOMS hosts the work for the occasion of an online show opening on 8 Nov 2019 at COSMOS CARL.
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Generation Contradiction, 2019
Hey!
Do you know what’s happening?
Do you get by in today’s society?
Do you understand what it means to be a good person?
To take responsibility for your actions?
Do you know what things should truly concern you and what things you should just shrug off?
I mean: do you get it?
Do you know how to act?
What to fucking wear?
What to feel and think and do?
Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir sure doesn’t. She is as confused about today’s world as any other sane person. Our post-truth, almost post-capitalistic, definitely post-great society can be an overwhelming, troubling, scary, unsafe place. Whatever we think we know to be true, is also untrue. We walk a pale blue desert filled with question marks instead of palm trees.
All that uncertainty has one huge advantage: it allows us to play. When you’re lost in a desert, it doesn’t really matter which way we go anyway.
No one really knows what is up and what is down anymore, where the centre of the universe lies, where to vacation and what to bring with us. Can we even ask those questions, knowing travel is so detrimental to everything around us, now that engaging in airfare has become the new smoking, the new murder, the new don’t-ever-do-that?
Smoking is the new meth popping.
Sleep deprivation is the new black.
Social media are the new eyes.
Horror movies aren’t even necessary anymore.
Generation Contradiction doesn’t care so much about answers. It instead represents the confusion, bewilderment and shape shifting reality we find ourselves in everyday, that whole where-the-hell-are-we and where-are-we-heading. For now, Helgadóttir says yes to all or our questions. Yes, of very course.
Generation Contradiction, 2019, video 00:08:50
Music by Gunnar Gunnsteinsson
Text by Maurtis de Bruijn
Millennium Fall, 2017-2019
The turn of the millennium came with expectations for a new century filled with glamour, economic growth, technology and endless possibilities. At the same time, technology became the enemy. The fear of the “Millennium bug” was shaped by the realization that network computers actually were controlling large systems of our world. With it came the anxiety that all computer systems of the world would collapse.
Millennium Fall starts with a chess table ready to be played. The chess pieces are year 2000 memorabilia champagne flutes, One team has empty glasses; the other team’s flutes are filled. Two females compete. The performers re-enact the iconic 1997 chess game between Kasparov and Deep Blue - a match that pitted the best human chess player in the world against an IBM computer. At the end of that day, Kasparov had lost to artificial intelligence. Artist Hrafnhildur Helgadottir uses this historical event to reflect upon a critical juncture for humanity when both belief in and fear of new technology were at their peak.
Millennium Fall, 2017-2019, video 00:07:26
Deep Blue–Kasparov, New York City, May 11, 1997 Game 6
Filmed in Kling&Bang, Reykjavík IS, 2018 by Saemundur Thor Helgason Performers: Sara Margrét Ragnarsdóttir & Erla Rut Mathiesen.
Music by Booker Stardrum
HRAFNHILDUR HELGADÓTTIR's earned her BA in fine arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Adacemie and an MFA from Sandberg Institute, both in Amsterdam. In her practice, Helgadóttir investigates different ideas around geopolitics, economy, and post-capitalism. Her images, performances, videos and sculptures find their parameters in games, rules, and other systems of interaction. This sometimes has included the development of display structures as framing devices that host the works of others, hold up physical bodies, or carry other information. Her exhibitions include @G (rongwrong, Amsterdam NL, 2014), Improvisation for Painting, 2014 (Sudurgata 7
Árbæjarsafn, Reykjavík IS, 2014), Improvisation for Painting, 2017 (Marres, Maastricht NL, 2017), and Millennium Fall (ABC klubhuis, Antwerpen BE and Kling and Bang, Reykjavík IS, both in 2018). In addition to her solo work, Helgadóttir is the co-founder of HARD-CORE, an artist collective that focuses on exhibition methodology and algorithmic exhibition making. HRAFNHILDUR HELGADÓTTIR lives and works in Amsterdam.
© 2019, GUEST ROOMS x COSMOS CARL
