Gústav Geir Bollason and Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir
Out of Perfect Context
Úr fullkomnu samhengi
From April 24 to June 14, 2025
Opening on April 24 from 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm
A project developed in partnership with Factory (Iceland), Out of Perfect Context plays upon apparent incompatibilities and accentuated decontextualization to explore new forms of collaboration and exhibition-making. Starting from our relationship with nature and the role it plays in culture, the project proposes a meeting between urbanism and wide-open landscapes, image-making practices drawn from reality and others created entirely digitally, as well as an intersection, a confrontation even, between a fragile, endangered nature and an idealized, magnified nature. Two exhibitions will be presented, one at Dazibao, featuring works by Gústav Geir Bollason and Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir, and the other at Factory, featuring works by Julie Tremble and the duo Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Tanya St-Pierre.
At times looking in from the outside and at others out from the inside, Out of Perfect Context underlines how sites and built environments influence our perception, and the ways in which we are part of the living world – or not.
Gústav Geir Bollason, Ljósætur [Light-Devourers] — 20 min. 17 sec.
Ljósætur traverses sparse landscapes exploring the most withdrawn strata, those last recesses of fulminant decomposition and slow reconstruction. Entreated here are the dwellings and refuges bound to nature, made and unmade over seasons, erected for hosting or naturally providing shelter. Nature offers shelter to the living just as nature seeks shelter. With utterly sensual, atmospheric images, attentive to visual and sonic textures, connections are sewn between a greenhouse that offers seasonal protection, an aqueous environment where insects evolve, and the residuals of industrial ruins reclaimed by living things. As if to bring human scale back down to size, tight close-ups of tiny larvae growing in microscopic environments neighbor wide shots of a distant yet enormous abandoned building, swallowed by the landscape. Such sensorial temporalities, swollen by slow, almost impressionistic editing, are shouldered by a human protagonist who moves from one task to another, performing a series of small, enigmatic gestures in ceaseless dialogue with the living, and reminding us patiently that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Presented as two mutually activating images, Ljósætur also insinuates that concentrating on any sole aspect makes ignoring the others easy.
Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir, Touching Distance (2025)
Fixed firmly to the horizon, glaciers appear between barren, lifeless land and stretches of tranquil water, emerging from a haze of clouds. Shot in the Sprengisandur desert and around the area of Vonarskarð — an oasis in the middle of this desert — Jónsdóttir's minimalistic images give a larger-than-life account of non-human existence in minute detail. Moving slowly into the landscape — in all its grandeur — the artist questions our infinitesimal position in space and time, bringing our attention to millennia of history, where often-ignored stories seem to pile up in thin layers of ice and are revealed in every tiny detail of the natural world. Constantly navigating between the temptation to enter these places and the fear of being rejected from them, Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir's work questions our relationship to land, to the way in which, over time, we inhabit it and it inhabits us.
Almost half of Europe's remaining wilderness is found in Iceland and is under constant threat of exploitation, both from Icelandic power companies who wish to acquire the glacial rivers for building dams, and from foreign investors looking to acquire land.
Program — 70 min. 26 sec.
Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir and Lee Lorenzo Lynch, Konni (2022) — 10 min.
Konni is the last child inhabitant on remote island Grimsey, north of Iceland. The dying Arctic island, whose only school closed its doors in 2020 after serving the population for nearly a century, now boasts a population of only 16 people. Part character study, part portrait of the island, Konni attempts to reconcile the use of ethnographic film in order to document societies and persons in their most fleeting moments.
Gústav Geir Bollason and Clémentine Roy, Carcasse (2016) — 60 min. 26 sec.
Carcasse is set in an undated era, or maybe in a coexisting world devoid of the forms of energy sources and technology as we have grown attached to in contemporary society. On a deserted island a group of people are working with the relics of a lost world to build a new one. Between documentary and fiction, Carcasse invites us to inhabit this landscape and to invent it with them. To renew relationships with the landscape.
Gústav Geir Bollason (1966) is an Icelandic visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Hjalteyri. Using film, installation, drawing, and found objects, his work focuses on themes of memory, reality, and representation. In his explorations of the environment and bio-ecological structures, his work takes into account narratives that the landscape has to offer, as well as those lived by the residents of Iceland's northern coastline. Recent works include his first film, Carcasse, made in collaboration with Clémentine Roy, and Mannvirki (2023), selected for the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2023.
Thorbjörg Jónsdóttir (1979) is an Icelandic experimental filmmaker who lives and works between Los Angeles and Reykjavik. Her abstract formalist practice uses 16mm film, video installation and collage to examine ethnographic narratives of preternatural states in which oral mythologies and landscape collide. Her work has been presented in Europe, Asia and the United States at festivals and venues such as CPH:DOX, IMAGES Festival, JEONJU International Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. A tree is like a man (2019), her most recent film, premiered at CPH:DOX 2019, where it competed in the NEXT:WAVE section.
Outreach
Meet the artist
On April 26, 2025 from 2 pm to 4 pm
Other exhibition
Tanya St-Pierre & Philippe-Aubert Gauthier and Julie Tremble
From July 3 to August 28, 2025
📍 The Factory (Hjalteyri, Iceland)
Dazibao thanks the artists and Factory for their generous collaboration as well as its advisory committee for their support.
Dazibao receives financial support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the ministère de la Culture et des Communications and the Ville de Montréal.
Dazibao acknowledges that it is located on the unceded territory of the Kanien'kehá: ka Nation and that Tiohtiá:ke / Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations, and today, is home to a diverse population of Indigenous as well as other peoples. Guided by ethics of respect, listening, and awareness, Dazibao commits to a continued reflection regarding the deep-rooted and systemic challenges tied to accessibility and inclusivity in the arts and beyond, and endeavors to apply such reflections to all aspects of its activities and governance.