HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

performance in collaboration with Reykjavik dock workers as part of Keep Frozen part four at ASI art museum

On the occasion of the opening of Keep Frozen part four at ASI art museum on the Museum night 2016 in Reykjavik (05.02.2016) a group of dock workers from Reykjavik carried a trawler net from the Reykjavik midtown harbour and up to the art museum on the hill. There the workers placed the pile in the middle of Asmundarsal gallery on the 2nd floor of the museum to join the rest of the installation. 

The trawler net had been found stored in a heap after being recovered from a one-year sojourn at the bottom of the sea. It had belonged to the factory freezer trawler Vigri, the star of the documentary film Keep Frozen, who had lost the net to the sea in the winter of 2014. Coincidentally, almost exactly a year later to the day, another ship found the net and rescued it. Its colours and texture have been deeply affected by the year it spent underwater in the salty sea. The gesture of showing and transporting the net references a gesture at the first exhibition in the Keep Frozen series, Keep Frozen part one, when Gudnadóttir exhibited tiny, delicate fragments of net threads and detritus that she had found on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. 

In Asmundarsal, the heap of net took on the role of a “found sculpture” recovered from the bottom of the sea.