metropolis m

I first encountered Libia & Ólafur Ólafsson ‘s work while researching Icelanding art scene during my short stay in Reykjavik in 2007. Soon after I included their work in manifesta 7 in Northern Italian regions of Trentino Alto Adige (2008). Libia & Olafur produced a new work, a video Caregivers (which features in the TENT show), a portrait of Eastern European female seasonal workers who due to the economic reasons immigrate to Italy. Additionally, Libia & Olafur Uterus Flags were exhibited in Rovereto’s public space.

I was impressed by the sharpness of their approach towards sociopolitical and cultural matters of a particular urgency (such as for example, injustice and inequality) and their sensitivity towards (mainly national) minorities and their rights. I was also attracted by the way their critical device renders visible what is normally left unnoticed or ignored within a dominant social order and hierarchy.

Libia & Ólafur’s practice depicts individuals and communities entangled in a political and social turmoil of our contemporary, post-fordist reality. Their portraits and interventions (sometimes called field-works or site-related studies) reflect complexities of a world in a constant change and transition and search for alternatives to situations where political structures fail, social and economic systems collapse and radical cultural differences disturb.

I think it is. One of their on-going concerns is the sense of (not only national) belonging (and non-belonging). The place – as a physical phenomenon as well as a symbolic one – has always been considered in their works with a a particular care and research-oriented interest.

Not at all. During our discussions regarding their practice and the forthcoming survey show at TENT two notions turned out to appear as summing up and guiding principles, valid for their entire oeuvre – asymmetry and emancipation. Libia & Ólafur’s work strongly advocates an emancipatory commitment but it is asymmetry which acts as a vehicle for such crucial aspects of Libia & Ólafur’s conceptual take and thematic range, as indeterminacy, estrangement and alienation.

Asymmetry is a dispositif which generates and influences an imbalanced political, social and economic landscape as described in Libia & Ólafur’s often interventionist practice. By diagnosing and analysing the asymmetry, the artists aim at deciphering the logic of power division which upsets an equilibrium of justice and disturbs a constitution of equality.

Asymmetry has been appropriated as a conceptual tool and it appears in Libia & Ólafur’s work on a metalevel as a compositional and dramaturgical device. At the same time, the artists are interested in investigating asymmetrical power relationships that lie at the foundation of a world of precariousness and political confusion, influencing the manner in which social and political life is structured and policed and how legislative and juridical systems are established. Libia & Ólafur’s focus on asymmetry runs through their entire research-based work which articulates a difference, heterogeneity and ambiguities of today’s world of deregulated finance, social conflict and depolarized, intellectual debate.

Good art has always been a struggle between symmetry and asymmetry, chaos and order, harmony and imbalance. Libia & Ólafur’s work has a confrontational and interventionist nature: it corresponds with the wold of now, the world in crisis, the world of failed democracies and collapsed economies, the late-capitalist, precarious world of the inflation of values and ethical abuse. Asymmetry articulates urgencies of such complex world in decline. It acts as a therapy too.

Art’s role – at least in Libia & Ôlafur’s perception – is not to save the world but to critically map the areas of conflict straight from within in order to influence the world’s course and condition. Asymmetry makes one aware of how conservative and authoritarian power relations are and how deeply in crisis human rights are.