SÍM

Tiina Rauni and Birgir Rafn Friðriksson - BRF present Raja / Takmörk Project at Brúnum Gallery in Eyjafjörður. The exhibition opens 12 June and runs undir 22 July 2023.

Birgir Rafn Friðriksson-BRF and Tiina Rauni have known each other since 1999, since Birgir Rafn got an Erasmus stipendium to study for half a year at Lahti Polytechnic School of Visual arts in Lahti in Finland. From day one it was quite clear that their approach to art is quite different. Nonetheless they became good friends. They found that the two nations, the Finns and the Icelanders, are not as far apart as people might think. The mentality, sense for dark humour and sarcasm, the dark depressing undertones of the people's psyche, the harsh seasonal changes, their enthusiasm for drinking and celebrating life when those opportunities arise are more or less in harmony. The likeness is such that usually when people from several nations come together, the Finns and the Icelanders seem to be drawn to each other.

Through the years each of them have developed in their own way as artists. Then, some few years back, they realised that their individual artistic productions have a common axis point, namely in our conceptual positioning. They are both making work that they position somewhere on borders, on the inbetween, so to say. The images thus become somewhat a mixture of reality and fantasy or imagination, the animate and the inanimate, facts and lies, belief and certainty, something and nothing, and so on. The visual appreciation is therefore in a way supposed to lure the spectator in via the visually known, but as he lingers looking at the work he realises that there is something else, a way or an interpretation or means that so to speak contradicts his first impression, thus taking the onlooker on the adventure the work itself reveals.

The project or the show is getting works from Tiina and Birgir Rafn together in a show at BrunirHorse Gallery in Eyjafjörður in Iceland. That gallery is also borderline something else too, where we run a horse rental and a small restaurant. So the space and location fits the show perfectly. The aim is of course to put forth these “inbetween” works of these two different artists and strengthen the relationship between the countries, between these friendly cultures.