Tacit Gaze – Þögul Athygli  2021 – Arna Valsdóttir & Raisa Foster – Gallery, Laikku Culture House, Tampere, Finland

  https://www.laikku.fi/tapahtuma/2021-10-02/Raisa-Foster–Arna-Valsdttir-Hiljainen-katse

ARTIST STATEMENT
Tacit Gaze is an installation of our collaborative video works in the Gallery at the Culture House Laikku.The mosaic-like work of art aims to create for the audience a sensory feel of the silent conversations we had with different environments and creatures. We met in 2014 while working as the artistic directors of dance and visual arts in the Nordic Culture Event of the Year, “The Nordic Light”.      We got excited about our collaboration and wanted to develop further new methods for our embodied and site-specific artistic work. As a result, we met again in Iceland in the autumn of 2017 and the summer of 2018.
We went on an excursion around the country relying mainly on non-verbal communication and our perceptions. In our previous works we have both dealt with themes such as movement, voice, stillness, and silence in natural and urban environments. We also share an interest in using the sense of touch to explore diverse subjects such as other living creatures, the forces of nature, buildings, and soil. We have paid attention to each other’s focus and used cameras to capture these moments of perception. The random encounters with moss, a hill, a cow, a horse, a bathtub, and an abandoned fish factory are presented at the exhibition as fragments of our journey.
We invite the audience to take a break from everyday life by offering a sensory journey to alternative landscapes and novel encounters. We believe that art can offer new perspectives on the aspects of life that we often take for granted and no longer pay attention to.

Raisa’s artistic research in this project has been supported by Kone Foundation in 2017, Arts Promotion Centre Finland in 2018 and the KESTO project in September 2021.                                                                                    The exhibition in Laikku 2021 was funded by The Icelandic Visual Arts Fund, Icelandic Art Center, Akureyri Cultural Fund and Letterstedtska Foundation.