Select Exhibitions
Hidden Paths
Curetated by Íslenska teiknisetrið
Arisa Purkpong, Brák Jónsdóttir, Deepa R. Iyengar, Logi Leó Gunnarsson, Boaz Yosef Friedman
Hafnar.Space
Reykjavík 2025
There are those things that live just below the surface. They can bubble up, be revealed through scratching the spot, or can be found over there - the next mountain range. They can also stay hidden, receding further, pulled down slowly by earthworms, or layered in our mental geology, covered by sand, as last year becomes the year before that. In Hidden Paths, Íslenska Teiknisetrið presents five artists at Hafnar.Space - Arisa Purkpong, Brák Jónsdóttir, Deepa R. Iyengar, Logi Leó Gunnarsson, and Boaz Yosef Friedman - whose works hold a unique relationship to hidden paths and drawing, pulling it out of its usual place of comfort on the page. Notions of longing can be seen in Brák's outdoor sculpture and performance, Ear (2022), where she interacted with the earth, marking a giant ear in a field of grass by temporarily bruising the ground in an intimate act of intrusion and trust. Whereas Deepa’s installation, On Our Good Days (2022), also deals with relationship, she conjures the past through faded photos of intertwined materials. This documentation is contrasted with having only one of the two photo subjects in situ, bearing witness to the loneliness within absence. The framing of time is also apparent in Arisa's video: It's not the first time, but still, it might have value (2020). Made from revisited photographs and an accompanying musical composition, the work embodies a sense of searching - parsing out the meaning of a journey in what feels like a constant state of awareness. Logi's reliefs, Untitled (2018-), tie in this sense of exploration and discovery as well. The removed material serves as both a record - the process of making the work itself - as well as a paradoxically new image of what was there all along. This negotiation between surface and substance continues in Boaz's relief, Untitled (2025). By means of a sculpturally additive process, information is lost - pushed further down through layers of sand, in a process of creating through concealment.
Text by Íslenska teiknisetrið