Berliner Salon: Don’t miss Roni Horn at the Deutsche Guggenheim

True North, a group exhibition featuring Art21 Season 3 artist Roni Horn, closes this Sunday at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. The exhibition includes work by seven contemporary artists, “whose photographic or video-based projects evoke the tradition of Northern Romantic landscape painting as well as its legacy in later nineteenth-century photography.” Despite allusions to formal antecedents, the general tone of the exhibition undermines any romantic idealism associated with the notion of the “North.” Rather, the viewer is confronted with modernity’s attempts, however futile, to “colonize or commune with” this unforgiving and utterly unapologetic climate.

Horn‚Äôs installation consists of a photographic series hung conspicuously above eye-level, creating a horizon that effectively distances each image from the viewer’s comfortable gaze. As with her previous work, this series focuses on elements of Icelandic life, specifically unspectacular routines like daytime soap operas and the tides, which emphasize the melancholy that dominates both the island and this latitude in general.

True North closes at precisely the correct time, heralding the much anticipated onset of spring (assuming it ever arrives), as well as the beginning of the 5th Berlin Biennial, which officially opened to the public last Saturday. The bb5 brings an energy to the city’s cultural calendar that easily aligns itself with metaphors of spring rejuvenation. Curated by Adam Szymczyk and Elena Filipovic and entitled When things cast no shadow, the Biennial’s traditional day program is divided among three venues: the Schinkel Pavillon, Skulpturenpark and Kunst Werke. In addition, 63 “noctural events” are systematically being announced in conjunction with the Biennial’s evening program, My nights are more beautiful than your days, finally giving Berliners a legitimate reason to cease with hibernation and brave the less-than-beautiful April weather. The 5th Berlin Biennial runs through June 15th.

Roni Horn at Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi in London

Season 3 artist Roni Horn has concurrent exhibitions on view in London and M√°laga, Spain.

In a solo show that opened on Tuesday and runs through April 12, Hauser & Wirth Colnaghi in London presents the culmination of the artist’s long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds, the birds are viewed from behind, their unique physiognomies and markings resulting in inscrutable shapes and patterns on the photographs‚Äô surfaces. Horn‚Äôs photographs, like the stuffed birds represented, are quizzical. These are terse, slippery images in which clear-sighted, accurate detail only serves to underline the limited knowledge offered up by appearances.

Despite the singular form of the title, the birds in this series are all presented in pairs; images that are hung side by side one another highlighting the differences and similarities between the two. The gesture of doubling ‚Äì as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy ‚Äì has been a recurrent motif for Horn since 1980, a tool that invites careful scrutiny from the viewer, altering the dynamic of the work. She has noted that “with two objects that are one object you have an integral use of the world. You have the necessary inclusion of circumstance.”

Alongside the bird photographs Horn is showing a new sculptural work entitled Blue by Blue, which consists of two almost identical objects made of solid cast blue glass. Horn has elucidated. “the experience of blue unlike most colours is always half you. So this is a pair that is both mirror and window. The window contains the view of blue. The mirror reflects the blue in you.”

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Until March 30, A Kind of You is up at CAC Málaga (read more here) and a major touring exhibition of Horn’s works will take place in 2009-2010, organized by Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Podcast: Roni Horn at Frieze 2007

From the Frieze archives: a podcast of artist Roni Horn (Season 3) describing the site-specificity and seriality in her work. In this 40-minute keynote lecture from the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London (”Cultural Cartography,” October 14), Horn talks about her time and works in Iceland and her most recent project, Library of Water, in particular. It is the culmination of a lifelong interest in the relationship of language to place.

Access this podcast here.

[via Frieze]

A decade of Roni Horn in Spain

This Friday, the CAC M√°laga (Centro de Arte Contempor√°neo de M√°laga) (Spain) opens Roni Horn, an exhibition of work that the Season 3 featured artist created over the last ten years. This is her first solo show in Spain.

Roni Horn will focus on the artists’ use of the photographic portrait as the leitmotif of the exhibition. Horn captures, through her meticulous and precise work, the smaller and imperceptible changes of reality, thereby emphasizing the importance of observation and awareness. She subverts the notion of ‚Äòidentical experience,‚Äô insisting that one‚Äôs sense of self is marked by a place in the here-and-there, and by time in the now-and-then. She describes her artworks as site-dependent, expanding upon the idea of site-specificity normally associated with Minimalism.

In addition to her photographs and installations, visitors will be able to view two of Horn’s latest editorial works: Index Cixous and Weather Reports You. Index Cixous, published in 2005, is inspired by and a tribute to the contemporary French philosopher Hélène Cixous, with whom Horn has collaborated. Weather Reports You (2007) is, in Horns words, “one beginning of a collective self-portrait.” Based on interviews with a small group of people from Iceland, where she has traveled often since 1975, and whose landscape and isolation have strongly influenced her practice, the book gathers personal testimonies talking about the weather.

Roni Horn will be on view at the CAC M√°laga from January until March 30, 2008.

The Sum of Its Parts

Next week, New York gallery Cheim & Read will open a group show of works by twelve artists, among them Art21-featured artists Jenny Holzer (Season 4), Roni Horn (Season 3), Louise Bourgeois, and Bruce Nauman (Season 1). This diverse group creates artworks configured from multiple parts, sequences, or series - hence the connection among all of them and the exhibition title: The Sum of Its Parts. This title references to Gestalt theory’s statement “the whole is greater or different than the sum of its parts.”

Gestalt psychology studies the viewer’s innate tendency to create patterns, and to perceive separate parts as pieces of a greater whole. It is in this subconscious grasp at cohesion that the possibilities of meaning lie. The artists in The Sum of Its Parts effectively exploit language, repetition, and sequence to produce multi-faceted yet unified compositions.

Roni Horn’s piece, “When Dickinson shut her eyes: no. 859″ (1993), employs language from an Emily Dickinson poem, separated in parts, to create a work in which overall meaning is expanded. The repetition of circular shapes in Louise Bourgeois’s “Hommage Duras” (1995) is almost musical, the different rounds like notes of a harmonious score. Bruce Nauman’s separate images of contorted mouths in “Studies for Holograms” (1970) are unified by their serial layout and their identical format. Jenny Holzer’s “Hand Yellow White” (2006) also relies on format to unite the various parts of her subject; the heavily censored, wartime pages of declassified U.S. government documents become that much more haunting in the cool formalism of their presentation.

The Sum of Its Parts opens Tuesday, January 8 and runs through February 2 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, New York.

Roni Horn – Vatnasafn/Library of Water

Season 3 featured artist Roni Horn, who has been intimately involved with the distinctive geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland for the past 25 years, has developed in collaboration with Artangel. Vatnasafn/Library of Water is a multi-faceted long-term installation and community centre situated in a former library building in the town of Stykkishólmur on the western coast of Iceland north of Reykjavík overlooking the ocean on one side and the harbor and town on the other.

In the main viewing room, Horn has replaced stacks of books with a constellation of glass columns containing glacial water from around Iceland – gathered from the glacial tongues of Vatnajökull and the glaciers of Hofsjökull, Langökull and Snaefellsjökull. A customized floor is inscribed with both Icelandic and English words describing the state of the weather - or the mood of the viewer. Through the watery columns, natural light is refracted and reflected onto the floor creating what Horn describes as a “kind of lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the lighthouse in which the view becomes the light.” Absorbing the visitor into a world of weather, water and light, the room also doubles as a space for reflection and a place for community activity from writers’ readings to women’s chess clubs, yoga classes and town meetings.

Also in Iceland, Roni Horn’s exhibition MY OZ is on display at the Reykjavík Art Museum until August 19, 2007.