Hvít sól / White Sun
2018, Skaftfell, Seyðisfjörður
Installation - 24 coloured flags, steal and soundscape
Made my IYFAC: Halla Birgisdóttir, Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir, Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir and Sigrún Hlín Sigurðardóttir
Soundscape: Daníel Helgason
Curator: Tinna Guðmundsdóttir
Made my IYFAC: Halla Birgisdóttir, Ragnheiður Harpa Leifsdóttir, Ragnheiður Maísól Sturludóttir and Sigrún Hlín Sigurðardóttir
Soundscape: Daníel Helgason
Curator: Tinna Guðmundsdóttir
Text by Tinna Guðmundsdóttir, curator:
"We who live in the northern hemisphere are used to the changing daylight in summer and winter. Here, the sun may not be a reliable source for telling the time, but it still takes us gently through the seasons of extreme light and darkness. If we would make our own solar clock, what would it look like and what would it measure?
Our existence is interwoven time. Up to a certain degree, the sense of time is built into the consciousness of human beings. From a very young age we are trained to understand chronology and are required to learn to tell time, but our everyday life is a mixture of subjective and objective sensing of time. The sun has a key role in this interplay. The position of the sun tells us how time passes. It is quite common to find natural reference points in towns and villages, such as certain mountain tops or stone formations, that are used as solar clocks.
The exhibition White Sun opens almost half a year after the performance White Sun - prequel, under very different light circumstances. In the wintertime the sun rises too low to be able to reach the town in its valley, making it difficult to tell the time of the day by referring to the sun. The IYFAC group therefore brought symbolically preserved “suns” from high summer with them, in order to build another solar clock for the winter. The whole gallery space is transformed into a big installation in which the oversized sunflags play the key role. The flags hang side by side down from the ceiling and form a kind of solar path for the viewers. A part of the installation is an audio piece, which interprets the solar cycle, composed by Daníel Helgason. While moving around the space the viewer is offered an experience of time that differs from the everyday. The real sun, the earth’s life giver, has stopped being the reference point and has been replaced by manmade suns, providing an alternative sensual way of measuring time in a place where the seasonal light conditions would otherwise make this impossible. "
All photos by Ragnheiður Maísól
