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This exhibition is no longer on display.
NOTES FROM THE LIVING DEAD MUSEUM Artists Ylva Westerlund, Runo Lagomarsino and Olivia Plender recently hosted lectures at the Living Art Museum in regards to the works and influences at their current exhibition at the re-titled museum; The Living Dead Museum. In their lectures the artists addressed the early twentieth century British youth movement Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1951), led by artist and novelist John Hargrave, parallels between the bank crash and street-revolt against the ruling regime in Iceland and the Argentinian economic crisis and the resulting riots, with a focus on colonialism and rise of nationalistic nostalgia, and ideas of an artist-run museums, collection policies and collection items and if such institutions are in fact zombies. All of them must go! In December 2001 Argentina entered one if its deepest economical and political crisis. As a reaction people took the streets and demanded the governments resignation. One of the most common slogans was Que se vayan todos! (All of them must go!) It’s interesting to see that the same phrase has been reused in the aftermath of the current financial crisis. Maybe it’s time to reintroduce the Upside Down Map by the artist Torres Garcia (1943), not just as a symbolic gesture but as
Lecture: Pro Death The Living Art Museum has a collection of over 1000 works by both Icelandic and international artists. The project of collecting and the collector has a history connected to sometimes murky ideologies and Nation building. But what is it today, what does it represent? And how can one rethink aspects of the collecting and presentions of collections without doing reflexive readings? Ylva Westerlund will introduce art works and thoughts of for example German theorist Boris Groys, and adress different notions around the collection, the museum curator, bird watching, feminism and death. Screening, after the lecture: works for the exhibition:
TUEZ LE FLIC EN VOUS, 2008, 1 min., video loop/animation by Beata Fransson and Ylva Westerlund. In Ylva Westerlunds work entitled “Ashes to Ashes”, 2009, a comic strip in charcoal will cover the walls of the exhibition hall. The work deals with issues on how the concept of “death” is perceived in politics and philosophy.
Olivia Plender is an artist based in London. Her recent practice has focussed on research into an early twentieth century British youth movement called the Kibbo Kift Kindred (1920-1951) led by an artist and novelist named John Hargrave, in order to explore parallels between the events of the 1930s and the global financial crisis unfolding today. Originally part of the Boy Scouts, the Kibbo Kift split from Baden Powell’s conservative organisation in order to establish a socialist youth movement, in collaboration with veterans of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage and the Co-operative Movement. However the leadership style of ‘Head Man’ John Hargrave soon became autocratic as he became an increasingly charismatic figure and camping was elevated to a ritualised spiritual activity. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, the Kibbo Kift became the the Social Credit Party of Great Britain, known as the ‘green shirts’; a uniformed group who participated in the hunger marches in London in the 1930s advocating a now discredited monetary reform theory. Parallels can be drawn with the German Lebensreform movement, as Plender explores the dangers of a recurring dream of returning to a pre-industrial golden age in the face of economic and social crisis, a romantic and potentially nationalistic idealisation of the past, personified by figures such as Robin Hood. |
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