MAPPING THE IMPERMANENCE/
ANNA LINDAL
By researching a confined unit of space, diversity at a larger scale is revealed. The process enables one to examine the grounds for decisions taken years, even centuries ago, and attempt to understand how the effects of those decisions will linger on tomorrow, even centuries later. The relationship with the past has more to do with metaphor than factual information.
In Mapping the impermanence, Anna Líndal deals with points of contact and the construction of identity. The project's focus fluctuates between, and flirts with, different approaches to condensed matter and microscopic particles. Five points of contact are presented, the Grímsvötn sub-glacial area in the Vatnajökull glacier, Eyjafjallajökull and the Karlsdráttur area in Kjölur, Iceland, Azerbaijan and Hawaii. The motivation to draw connections between these very dissimilar places in research spanning several years, is the desire to explore the glue that holds society together, and experience particles become a mass. The present is the past and the past becomes a future. From these places Líndal has extracted small cultural artifacts and tiny botanical fragments in order to produce a new context and recreate the relationship with memories associated with these places. The investigation looks at ideological- and material fragments and particles that play key roles in identity formation, at an individual- and societal level, and the transient state of such identities.
Líndal studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts and completed a postgraduate degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1990. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions internationally, among them the Istanbul Biennial's On Life, Beauty, Translation and Other Difficulties curated by Rosa Martinez (1997), Man+Space at the Kwangju Biennial in South Korea (2000) curated by René Block and the Reykjavik International Art Festival (2005, 2008).
From 2000-2009 Líndal was a professor in the department of fine art at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, in 2010 she received a two year artist stipend from the Icelandic ministry of culture.=