Knitting House
With Knitting House, installed at the Reykjavík Art Museum, Elin Strand Ruin and The New Beauty Council work with the Icelandic Academy of Art to develop a project originally produced in a suburb of Stockholm, by also involving Icelandic knitting communities. This project springs from a fascination with the rationality that characterises large-scale social housing areas in post-war Europe, particularly the Nordic countries, but it also derives from an interest in the lives lived behind mass-produced concrete walls. Knitting House centres on the act of knitting, in which every stitch has been carefully touched by a thought, turning private space inside out; bringing ‘oikos’ into the public sphere.
Reykjavík Art Museum — Hafnarhús
Passerine
In a second project, Passerine—an ephemeral work, unusually funded by the Public Buildings Art Fund in Iceland—The New Beauty Council, Thérèse Kristiansson + Mariana Alves and Katarina Bonnevier produce a collective social mapping of Reykjavík’s public, private and common spaces by drawing a straight line through the city and following it from A to B—through living rooms, kitchens, offices and car parks. Their point of departure is the borderless path of migrating swallows, converting their flight line over the city into a promenade on the ground, resulting in a walkable cross-section for humans, making visible the underneath, the in-between and the on-the-side. As part of the project, The Passerine issues an open invitation to help co-create the action and performance (mapping, building and promenading) that explores the conditions pertaining to private and public spaces in the city.
Venue: from Harpa, Concert Hall & Conference Center to Reykjavík City Hall
