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A thought

These days I have been doing work reduced to what one could say a simple presentation. That doesn’t mean that I will not make wild works in the future. I steadfastly believe that wild and minimal need each other to survive.

The two installations that I show upstairs are made with objects, video and sound. They are playing with illusion and what might be called human perception. What we see is partly a memory of what we have seen before and is interpreted in a subjective way. We see the world and colour it with our ideas in the same moment. This theory about the art of seeing is applicable to the way we interpret the world emotionally, philosophically and politically as well. We have “good” and “bad” connotations related to certain images, sounds, ideologies, countries etc. According to Quantum Physics what we see and think and what happens in the world is connected. We project ideas onto the world as we take in what we see.

Habit comes from a system built on memory. The whole human culture is based on that. We react to each other and to the environment with the tools we already have. The world must have many sides to it that we haven’t discovered yet. Painters who painted landscape in the past changed the way we see our environment. Writers write books, and philosophers and sociologists for example keep sculpting the way we look and think about the world. The world seems to be an never ending source and according to Albert Einstein it is endlessly crazy and what we experience is a limited image of it. Since the law of gravity was first laid down in theory by Sir Isaac Newton by 1687 and the human history goes thousands of years back it seems likely that more such groundbreaking discoveries are yet to be made.

The art of looking is vast. It is not only about staring onto things but about what you are thinking when you are looking.

Nowadays science is built on interpreting what scientists see, being that through a microscope or in mathematics. The ability to be alert is probably helpful to find solutions. I think that is also applicable to resolving situations in every day life such as quarrels, financial debts, loneliness, depression, religion etc.
I wish you a good day.

Egill Sæbjörnsson

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BIO

Egill Sæbjörnsson was born 1973 in Iceland. He graduated from The College of Arts and Craft in Iceland 1997. Since 1999 he has lived and worked in Berlin. Installations and performances by Egill Sæbjörnsson have been shown on different occasions in Kölnischer Kunstverein Cologne, by Ellen deBruijn Project and DeApple in Amsterdam, Isabella Bortolozzi, Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, Anna Catharina Gebbers in Berlin and Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin, SMoCA Arizona and Cueto Project New York, West London Projects in London, Museum of Modern Art Sydney, Kunsthalle Wien, Singapore History Museum, National Gallery Iceland, Reykjavik Art Museum and The Living Art Museum. Egill Sæbjörnsson has worked with music as well and released a few albums and played and collaborated on music with diverse artists such as Klaus Weber, Daria Martin and Björk.

Untitled, 2007

Two Bottles, 2007

concert by Hjörleifur Jónsson

Untitled, 2007