Text by Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir

Apertures

Beware! If you wander around during the opening, that certain something – that some days is mundane, other days not- will alter itself. It charges itself with yet another layer of question. Until what, artist? Until the bundle of questions blows up the certainty of those in charge of what the day should be like? And the night. Blows up the certainty of those that maintain the norm at the expense of everything else. But is it only an inner explosion, without a bang, dampened by the accumulation of a thousand rubber sheets?

Gate (interior paint)
When you enter, through the opening, the blood-red opening, the invisible wound, you will find yourself in a precarious situation and you will never get to the bottom of it. Since the entrance is not based around fantasies of virgins, but a challenge to self-responsibility. A project for a lifetime: To read apart and to break protective membranes and expanded, fused senses. Weave it once again, patch and glue. Wrap a cloth around the vulnerability, the subtleties in the perception, and the conclusion.

Vertigo (soundproofing carpet, velcro)
Carpeted two-dimensional sensory spaces. Sándor Ferenczy was a Hungarian psychoanalyst who Freud tried to write out of psychoanalysis history with the help of co-dependent colleagues, because Ferenczy based the therapy too firmly on love and empathy. In a chapter titled Psychosoma Ferenczy writes: “When the pain is “unbearable” … there still remains a potential of life with the help of spiritual force – in psychosomatic asphyxiation, the patient still seems to feel and function, telepathic organs of sorts start to come into being, due to mental power.”

Sonar (silk screen)
A child feels obliged to stay silent when something serious is committed against it. Ferenczy researched this silence meticulously. Decades later, Michel Foucault writes in his Histoire de la folie that he is not interested in writing yet another chapter about the language of psychiatry, instead, he wants to write the history of speechlessness, to write about words that are silenced by dis-ease.To open the ears to persistent mutterings within the scorched root of meaning, to write the archaeology of silence.

Tongue (rubber, wood)
A sheet of the same stuff that surrounds the jaw before the twisted iron drill breaks through. From the thick, yet flexible material that envelops the abdomen to protect the womb from radiation. The black tongue, it speaks in the language of confidentiality. What language is that again? Did the tongue intend to speak on our behalf, but went limp under pressure? Towards what was the confidentiality meant then?
How can a tongue-tie be broken? „Don‘t say anything, say something instead “, the children‘s book on bullying reads. But do not say anything foolish. Let me see your tongue! Go straight to the naughty chair, your tongue is black.

The fantasy of relating an indiscretion and the fear of saying something foolish: will the tongue flutter like a white flag or a red one above a new-found land of a sacred mystery. Or is your tongue twisted? It is worth remembering that super imperialists made the black tongue the emblem of abnormality and unreliability, and the supposedly lying tongues of natives were pierced, discarded, or cut from the mouth, buried under the surface of the earth.

Aim (plexiglass, wooden poles, make-up)
The rubber seeker finally finds the tree in the darkness, aiming its light and saber with a swerved blade. Working carefully: cuts a particular pattern in the tree: a few holes with the same exact space in between (like a French barrel-organ musician who punctures holes in porous paper with a scalpel. Because, if the tree is wrongly cut it has nothing to give, or way too much and it dries up, empties itself. When accurately perforated the rubber flows into a zinc container, a liquid called milk, and it stacks up into balls, rubber balls which later are flayed apart, turned into rubber-skin attached to a raft that tends to disintegrate in harsh rivers. The milk-membrane ruptures and the native tongue streams from the ball. Into the water. You dip your tongue through the surface: it is a mythical passage. The primary structure of genealogy.

Apertures (pvc canvas, projection)
Anemia. Vertigo. Surrender without devotion. But forward we go. Opening after opening. You are an aperture, lighting up the ambiguous relationship between the artist and Loki, to be able to perceive it in its delicate origins – if that is possible at all. Artist, the aperture is turned towards you and you open your mouth humbly. Move the rubber-tongue in rhythm with the second indicator that touches the skin, tickles. The nose is itchy, it is black, from a material that surrounds the nostrils of sensitive animals which know precisely what is what and stand by the entrance gate, a disease control gate in airports. A drug or virus detecting dog sniffing until it finds your innermost obsessions and desires. Through the cracks in the make-up of icons and gaps in masks the light seeps. And blasts the defensive walls, in lust, love, and unrestrained laughter.

Oddný Eir Ævarsdóttir