Sjónlistaverðlaunin 2012

Jeannette Castioni was born in 1968 and raised in Verona, Italy. She has lived in Iceland since 2004. She studied conservation in Florence and then started to study visual art, first painting at the Academy of Bologna and later at the Iceland Academy of Arts, where she graduated with a BA degree in 2006. Since then she has been active in the art scene in Iceland, her works being presented in exhibition spaces widely in Iceland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia and USA.

I first saw works by Jeannette at the graduation show of the Iceland Academy of the Arts at the Reykjavík Art Museum in 2006, where she had placed some yellow colored bread dough on the floor, rising and twisting throughout the entire building, around the columns and the works of her fellow students. It was as if she was objectifying the relationship between students, or in this case some sort of umbilical cord attached to the art academy, which would soon be cut. In two places one could see TV screens playing a video in which a theory proposed that one of the main ingredients of bread is the human body that makes it.

She placed packaging of the materials used for the installation, and large blending containers, in one place and in anther area she placed various food containers with rising, uncolored dough, which she had asked various people to bring from their kitchen to the museum. When I returned to the exhibition at the end of the exhibition period, the yellow colored dough had become hard, had broken and been stepped on. The dough-fragments were scattered about the museum space, creating a trashy atmosphere, a kind of disguised vandalism. It was as if this material, transforming throughout the whole exhibition period, could suddenly explode! Jeannette had also brought a Trojan horse into the museum.

I remember thinking to myself that I had never paid as much attention to the museum building, which had already been open to the public for six years, as I had through this work. The inspection, along the lowest point of the space, rendered a reflection of the inner structure of the museum and called for questions such as: What is rising in the museum? Does it provide much growth? What kind of knowledge production takes place there and which role does this artist take on among her fellow students as well as in society? I was fascinated by the work and became curious about this artist.

In the autumn of that year the exhibition Apostle´s Clubhouse was opened at the Reykjavik Art Museum. The exhibition project was the first project of a new season of the then newly appointed museum director; Hafþór Yngvason, his attempt to harness the energy and spirit of the grassroots scene and disseminate it to the public. The museum staff and the curators of the exhibition saw the project as a turning point in critically addressing the museum’s policy, and the project stretched the limits of the museum by actively re-thinking its operations, interface and objectives. An offspring of this project was a series initiated by the museum, the D-space, for which selected emerging artists were invited to put up a solo exhibition. Jeannette was one of the artists who exhibited their works in the D-space series, in 2009.

Jeannette´s graduation work brings together most of the threads her works are woven of such as transformation, chemical reaction and the becoming. This is the zone where the conservator meets the artist, but interestingly enough, the artist Jeannette is largely occupied with the intangible and the conservator Jeannette is occupied with, well, conservation of objects for the future and transformation as a part of that process. Her works evolve around the human condition and humanity from a philosophical perspective. She considers the semantics, and how communication and communicational systems, thoughts and imagination, are reflected in everyday life. Her works also evolve to a large extent around physical sensations and historical examination.

Her projects are at the same time based on sociology, cultural studies and art history and as an artist she positions herself between those sectors. She approaches each project with the urge for seeking further knowledge and in her search she is open to unforeseen possibilities in developing. She seeks collaboration and knowledge from various people and explores the ontological meaning of knowledge itself. Her works are open and full of oxygen. They are an open invitation for participation in the pursuit of knowledge as well as a game, many of them full of play and humor.