1. Where did you draw your inspiration from for this work?

Actually the history of this work goes back to 2016, when I installed at Kunsthalle Giessen a floor that was built from colored vinyl foils and all kinds of different stuff. The installation called "the swamp" provided an extended experience on entering the wide open space of the Kunsthalle. Actually the work is also bound to still earlier bodies of work called “on a shaky ground” (la vague), that was/is dealing with the notion of being sure or unsure at the same time about the situation and meaning you are in, while entering the work by foot or sense and knowledge and all together. And also it is developed from a work realized in 2009 at Kunsthalle Giessen too, but in a different location at that time – the work called ‘barque, detournement (constructing situation)’ hosted a platform from car painted high gloss colored cardboards raised from the ground and to be entered and sit on by the people during the opening event. This time the installation itself is also opened to a broader community by advertising the image of the outlined figure from the second room in the October issue of the magazine ‘artforum international’.

Trying to deliver a different experience on common ground – transforming the exhibition space into a 3 dimensional colored landscape.

2. How would you describe this piece?

It is bound to our daily live using quite simple material and methods. Easy skills (nevertheless dependent on experience and knowledge) are needed to install; easy to use stuff, loaded with connotations is brought into space and the viewers mind, to give an experience and sensation of a special kind – you are asked to be open to it. I love the resistance and disturbance of the material – non art-material – to turn your view. –

The multilayered form of planes and objects reflect the space and a quite known world at the same time and is asking you to bring it into one.

You have to step on an artificial ground from layers of wrinkled vinyl and garbage to enter the adjacent spaces, passing by a set of camera and devices on tripods that reflect the history of the set up in case you enter the privacy of a phone and use the play button to open the recordings.

A terrain to cross before you get to the adjacent space(s). – Vinyl and splattered around object, underneath a surface of transparent foil, other materials floating on top – a sea, a landscape, a painting, an environment.

A kind of dystopian ambiance, the constant flow of the surface mixed with the audio sounds from the attendant space that is set up by a different artist not knowing her before but using it in the same way I use everyday material like on a mix tape.

Space invader, a stack of unfolded of cardboards on the wall, a color-full architecture or labeled crossover of advertising signs and color.

The mostly empty floor in the second space (besides the fat roll of leftover next to the corner wall), supervised by a metal outline, representing a figure (actually taken from a Yves Saint Laurent advertising) is fixed to the wall from floor to ceiling on the opposite side of the brightness of the windows. The shape draped with colorful worn out clothes - Nike of Samothrace or survivor of the flooding, perished or drowned …

2a. Can you tell me a bit more about the connection between the Yves Saint Laurent Advertising and the Nike of Samothrace sculpture?

I think this is a fascinating link.

After working on a couple of outdoor installations with simple materials - everyday rope-lights, fixed to bamboo scaffoldings, mounted to the outside of multi stories buildings – producing the image / outlines of advertised logos, in a critical reflection – simple and rough and raw, instead of high gloss imagery in magazines or on neon signs, promising a “better” world..

I started incorporating graffiti in the signage - logos and tags (presenting the everyday experience on “street level”) - I was looking for a quotable image actually I had in mind an photography by Jeff Wall: two boys playing guitar in a narrow space with graffiti all over the walls – but I couldn’t find and ended up with the advertising of Yves Saint Laurent found on a back cover of a magazine instead, that supposedly fits my ideas concerning this show even better….

this image has in common with the historical figure of the Nike of Samothrace a comparable posture as well as clothing (in some detail) and the comparison could be loaded with the supposed story of the sculpture, “… the work is notable for its convincing rendering of a pose where violent motion and sudden stillness meet, for its graceful balance and for the rendering of the figure's draped garments, ...” and also “… an iconic depiction of triumphant spirit and of the divine momentarily coming face to face with man.” (quote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_Victory_of_Samothrace)

The outline of the advertising – Yves Saint Laurent – is transformed into a metal wireframe holding found colored garments – the sculptural wire body ascending from the ground /soil/ waters could be simultaneously read as an image of drowning and surviving, loss and fading …

I use the imagery of the outdoor installations and transfer it to the exhibition space, in that the space itself has got a feeling of an outdoor situation

– it is: representing high-end advertising signals and logos on a low-tech level –

and imagery

3. The title is very interesting, where has it come from?

“I'm notreallyinterested in anythinggreaterthan life”.

I developed the title somehow during the days I was preparing for the show – probably I just took a shower and spoke to myself under the rinse of water.. – while preparing for a show I always think about titles, e.g. words to describe what I am heading to or what I am actually doing – or describe feelings or else – I write them down and test it .. sometimes simple words, phrases, sometimes more complex in a way. This time I wanted the words to be connected to size and life - as my work is always connected to this. The works are for times not being installed compacted and stored away or shipped; unfolded to their size while set up.

I love the ambivalence in the title – I often do readable, literal words – nevertheless to be understood in one direction or another – I like to “unclear” clarity of the first reading making the understanding ambivalent.

I am interested in greatness – that is big and great at the same time – bigger than life, and great in being super, extraordinary, XL, size large or else. There is no-thing bigger than life – so I’m interested in the biggest greatest to achieve – life is the measuring scale.

Measuring makes you able to cross - frontiers, borders (of own control, of control through others). Going beyond, best would be: beyond what I am able to think (about) and what to do.

– almost impossible, you can’t, but give it a try, maybe the utopian is possible though..

the title is loaded with ideas around every word every single mark every blank or not blank

but every single reader is reading his own title his own history..

I tried to translate my words and connotation to Icelandic language using translation machines back and forth to get as close as possible to my point – the addressed (the publisher) gave it back to me in a different translation it sounded to me that we were missing our links, so we ran back and forth up to where we ended in the printing – not quite sure if it’s the same any more, probably it doesn’t matter at all but is good as a starting point, coming together and talk.

4. Can you tell us more about your performance, what were your motivations for doing so?

Experience, widening the horizon, going beyond borders, beyond I did before, to not be at the safe side, to give the viewer a new point as well - adventure and risk on my side – win or loose…

To not get bored by doing it all the same way ever and ever … push yourself in front of the Abyss..

5. It took a lot of technical skill to mount the wall installations in your performance, how did you go about planning the movements you would make?

I used a script, comparable a musical notation in modern music. I went through it in detail by reading and imagining step by step inn before, it was like learning a textbook, trying to figure out the difficult parts and the edges to come around and manage them. All compacted works come with a script and set of drawings already, to be able to set them up on different location. So it seemed quite logic to me to set up an installation in front of an audience one day.

I started with entering the boxes very early from the beginning of these works – sometimes recorded them on tape in the studio without any audience – there is still always some part of improvisation possible, that makes it real and re-actable and connected to the situation and time.

Giving possibility to tell more than just the story of handcrafted set up.

6. What would you like the audience/readers to take away from your work?

Wonder about what it is and in the best to be kept and captivated at once.

I would love them to keep the experience in mind until a feeling to it is installed in your sensual brain.

7. Do you have an artist philosophy/area you are particularly interested in? Is this reflected in your work?

Ephemeral works that hit your sensual feeling and are sensitizing you to open up a predetermined thinking. Finding beauty in the ugly, doing complicated in the simple, or the other way round – breaking walls.. would be fine.

Environment and politics, color and space, the human body and thinking is my area.

Ephemerals that resist time and external influences, eventually only in minds.

7a.“Ephemeral works that hit your sensual feeling and are sensitizing you to open up a predetermined thinking”

I am not into easy, monodimensional reading, the work should not be one by one representational, it’s an attitude and a reflection on – maybe – “live”. I would love to give bodily experience to the viewer, that hits him physically and mentally.

7b. Would you say you follow the existentialist school of philosophy in your art?

I never felt being part of an “-ism”, but ‘existentialism’ I could feel well with, also being part of a school, yes. But as “even Sartre himself once said: ‘Existentialism? I don’t know what that is.’”(from https://www.iep.utm.edu/existent/) I would say I am a human, thinking critically about the world and back to the title of the show it could very much look like a (personal) philosophy, maybe a ‘philosophy of resistance’.

7c. The little sign that rests on top of the rolled up material in Gallery 05. What does it translate to? How did it come about?

Thank you for looking so close!

Are you asking about the upper – small piece of cardboard on the tripod, or the paper with the written text on top of the role..?

the paper on the tripod is a “device of surveillance” ( ;-) ) as the tripod hosted a camera during set up. It’s almost just the same, just to have a camera or to have a signature (an image of a camera, a cartoonish like, or just a piece of words -> and you will read it.

The bigger paper on the role, came with the transport crate. The museums staff was asked to install it at the center wall in gallery02 before the opening of the show and before the whole space was transformed by the later ‘perfomance set up installation’

And actually it was intended to ask people to bring the mentioned material (or not) to the performance date and I would react and work on it – perfom it.

The text itself was a back and forth translation via elctronic translation – rendering as well something new or strange and unexpected in some ways wrong and therefore being right, haha. – Heterotopian, dystopian.

8. Any further artists comments? It can be anything at all you would like the readers to know.

I thank all the people who dive into artwork and try to deal with it and get a better humanity.