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Journey – Privat exhibition – Reykjanesbær Art Museum

Like so many of Finnur Arnar ́s video pieces Journey uses double images to underscore a conceptual whole. Fragments, shown in a loop, feature a walking man dragging along a fisherman`s gaff; another set of fragments are taken up with a man slowly revolving around himself, he ́s clearly the artist. Untouchable money floats in mid air. Fingers beat out a rhythm on a table; all around there are the ragged remains of Christmas past. The artist puts together a set of open-ended symbols. He pulls us, the viewers, into the centre of the piece; much like the revolving man we are placed between images, having to turn this way and that to look at them. What is he thinking, the man who revolves in the whirlwind of money or in the the detritus of a Christmas extravaganza, or the man who waits, drumming with his fingers on a table? Or the fisherman on his neverending journey, holding on to his gaff?

Journey poses questions of some urgency, centering on our humanity. They have to do with the meaning of our lives, our values and our pursuit of happiness. There are no answers to them except the ones we discover within ourselves and these answers may be subject to change. Through its conceptual scale and weighty presence, as well as through its insistent rhythm, Journey is a powerful work. Where is this journey taking us?

Ragna Sigurðardóttir

 

 

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Private exhibition – Center of Visual Arts – Akureyri

 

Finnur Arnar works with questions concerning life and death and also discusses ideas about how time is relative based on current criteria. The time of each human being is short compared to the time of the mountains, but it is also short compared to the solar system. The Bible, our most famous book of civilization, is about the creation of the world; here are 7 photos of different dried plants that have been put into it for storage. By drying flowers, we can try to prolong their life and enjoy them longer. One can take this thought further and imagine that the person picks up the plants with his hands from the mountain slopes and they then rot and become soil again and from it come new flowers that the human hand can pull up and so on. frv. Endless cycle.

 

 

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In Deep Water – The Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art

Fisherman’s Widow, Fisherman

Two side-by-side videos show the same perspective and are recorded simultaneously. The difference between them, however, is that one is taken straight up into the sky from land and the other out at sea, where the old man rocks the boat. The wind is an underlying element in the work where we see the clouds traveling in the sky and it carries the waves of the sea.

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Silence – Reykjavík Art museum

Seven photos of fish, taken with a Polaroid camera; the heads of the same seven fish in jars filled with formaldehyde; the invisible presence of their bodies locked in a freezer; the video images of the two hands that created the scene; the cross of a window frame leaning against the wall. In the middle of the installation there is a cloth lying on the floor were the fishes was slaughtered. The composition is open-ended.