The Icelandic Love Corporation, Think Less - Feel More, 2011, Photo: Lilith Performance Studio
Icelandic Love Corporation - Gjörningaklúbburinn
Think Less – Feel More

The Icelandic Love Corporation (since 1996, Iceland) is a group of three artists, Eirún Sigurðardóttir, Jóní Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir, (Dora Isleifsdottir left the group in 2001), who graduated from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in 1996. Primarily working with performance, they also branch in various other fields of artistic activity: a crotched costume for singer Björk, installations, and objects. Each of their works surrounds a strange mystery of daily life, of womanhood, that seems to defy all interpretation, yet with an underlying humour. If art and life are lacking of enough sense, it can at least be fun to partake in them.

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For this performance, Icelandic Love Corporation created an interior installation, a living web largely made from nylon pantyhose. The audience had to change into black clothes and helmets before being led into the performance space. Here they watched a somewhat shamanistic ritual performed by women clad in white nylon, a meandering figure in black dragging stones, and a Joseph Beuys character, complete with Eurasian Staff and grey hat. Another female figure in white climbs a pedestal and poses as if she was a Greek sculpture. Throughout the performance a woman throws Popcorn into a wheelbarrow, and interrupting cries are heard from someone who may be tortured. The performance is described by the artists as “a giant 3-D painting in which a set of recognizable characters is in an uncontrollable system”. The use of fabrics, especially nylon pantyhose is a common thread in ILC’s work, referring to the female sphere, to craft, DIY aesthetics, but also to the elasticity, adjustability and transparency required in our times of global liberal capitalism.

In collaboration with and produced by Lilith Performance Studio in Malmo, Sweden in Dec 2011
Courtesy Icelandic Love Corporation

Document media
video

Issue date
2011

Tags
participation, craft, ritual