LIMITED ENGAGEMENT (NOV ONLY): “Sandtime Psalm of Fading Flowers”

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LIMITED ENGAGEMENT (OCT ONLY)

Description
Animations and videos of wilting plants among debris. Hybrid sculptures reminiscent of vehicles and measuring devices, as well as shelters or craters within damaged landscapes.

There is sand everywhere, visible or invisible: in the concrete walls, in the optical equipment, in the phone, in the landfill. The movements of the animated flowers flicker and accelerate. In between the images, there is nothing but emptiness, a mental absence.

In video footage, withering plants appear in a rotating installation that spins at different speeds. The arrangement circles mechanically through light and shadow, faster and faster until it becomes vague, leaving fleeting expressions of a fading time and space and fusing reality with desolation. The sculptures in the installation speak to a standstill of the status quo. Runtime: 38 minutes, 27 seconds

Director Biography - Gústav Geir Bollason

Gústav Geir Bollason is an artist and filmmaker living in the north of Iceland, in the small coastal village of Hjalteyri. He manages the local art space Verksmiðjan, which—although remote—has gained attention and accolades especially for its film programs, video installations, and experimental music workshops.

Bollason’s own artistic practice is primarily a response to landscape and the life it harbours. Creating drawings, found-object sculptures, animations, videos, and films, he often combines these media in installations that give rise to fictional extensions of reality. In his filmmaking of landscape narratives—situated somewhere between art films, documentary accounts, and subjective fictions—Bollason works alongside other local residents in his interventions in situ and allows the settings to comprise an expansion of his atelier. Shooting mainly around the northern Icelandic coast where he lives, he also films in the island’s barren highlands and at sea, often focusing on liminal zones, wastelands, and ruins. These sites afford rich exploration of subjects including environmental change, energy and material use, and entropy as well as the stories and myths embedded in landscapes. In disorder and decay, Bollason highlights the opportunities offered by change and the passage of time.

Bollason studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts (now Iceland University of the Arts) in Reykjavík and the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest. He graduated from L’École Nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy in 1995, and lived in Paris until 1999 before returning to north Iceland.

Director Statement: Shauna Laurel Jones, art historian and environmental writer

The Moth Effect

“When Gústav Geir Bollason began work on Sandtime Psalm of Fading Flowers, he was reading Paul Virilio’s Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991), in which the philosopher describes what he calls picnolepsy: a condition marked by momentary cognitive absences, temporary disconnects. As the picnoleptic flickers in and out of consciousness, they compensate for these “epileptic” discontinuities by glossing over them. Perception is thus a polished version of actual sensory experience—just as our eye stitches together discrete cinematic frames for the illusion of seamless movement. With the acceleration of information and hyperstimulation of modern life, these gaps and glitches become ever more frequent. And “the more information flashes by,” says Virilio, “the more aware we are of its incomplete fragmentary nature”; the greater our knowledge—mainly gleaned from screens—the further we venture into a sensorial desert and an “attentive impatience for a world that does not stop coming.” (That Virilio wrote this before Instagram is truly remarkable.)

“When you zone out for a second, what do you miss? In one second, a bat chirps 200 times; Amazon makes 18.5 sales; 4.3 babies and 4,800 stars are born. If you space out for a second on a commercial flight, you are 250 metres nearer your destination, the same distance it takes three minutes to walk. What you miss can therefore be relative to your speed, your frame of reference. And should we speak not of personal, but of collective picnolepsy? Virilio stresses what “the meteorologist explains: ‘the local level is always an uncertain objective, it’s on the scale of the globe that we should envision the meteorological data, our weather’s always somewhere else’s.’” How many acres of rainforest have disappeared in our cumulative lapses of attention?

“How many songbirds lost?

“Virilio has been criticised for his imprecise metaphors, and perhaps theorising about perception based on an idealised understanding of epilepsy is problematic. But in the quote above, it’s someone else’s metaphor he borrows: that of Edward Norton Lorenz, whose “butterfly effect” transcended its scientific origins to become a concept familiar to all. The oversize power of the single, distant butterfly might not be taken literally by meteorologists, but as an analogy for significant effects of seemingly insignificant causes, it works; it is appealing, too, in our efforts to organise the chaos of circumstance.

“What is the eventual, distant impact of an exhibition in north Iceland? Gústav Geir’s fading flowers, desiccated landscapes, swirling sands and twirling microcosms—musings on environmental crises since the Great Acceleration—may someday have untold consequence. For as Virilio, paraphrasing Rilke, says, “What happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can…never really know its true appearance.” And yet, to expect a butterfly effect puts undo pressure on the individual artist to save the world. Perhaps we could instead view this work in terms of the moth effect: the tendency of the eye to follow movement and light—and the body to follow the eye—just as a moth is pulled to a flame. Where we direct attention, so too do we direct intention. Gústav Geir is one of many artists around the globe drawing our eye to the state of ecological systems on which we depend, shaking us from our picnoleptic languor, bidding us bear witness and take action. As a single moth flutters delicately down, down, down the screen and off the frame into nothingness, my eyes burn from the flickering brightness but still they follow, magnetised, vigilant.”

Credits & Specifications
Gústav Geir Bollason, (Director, Animation)
verksmidjanhjalteyri, (Producer)
Ninon Liotet, (Editing)
Hafdís Bjarnadóttir, (Music)
Brynjar Daðason, (Music)
Guðmundur Ari Arnalds, (Music)

Completion Date: May 24, 2022
Production Budget: 1,500 USD
Country of Origin: Iceland
Country of Filming: Iceland
Shooting Format: Digital
Aspect Ratio: 16:9