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Professional Amateur
10.11.2018-07.12.2018


Arnar Ásgeirsson
Bergur Ebbi
Dagrún Aðalsteinsdóttir
Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir
Saemundur Thor Helgason
Félag Borgara




About the artists:

Arnar Ásgeirsson

Bergur Ebbi

Dagrún Aðalsteinsdóttir b. 1989 in Iceland, works in various mediums from performances and videos to collage drawings. Her work is an attempt to use personal or fictional scenarious and narratives to be in dialogue with how personal value versus collective value can overlap within the context of a cultural production. The work explores the anti-spectacular and awkward positions of personhood- in order to study what happens in the psychosis when our ideas of ideological and economical value fail. Dagrún graduated in the year 2016 with M.A degree in Fine Art from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, a partner institute with Goldsmiths University in London. Dagrún works in collaboration with artists in Europe, Africa and Asia, organizing and curating projects in collaboration with contemporary art institutions as well as artist run spaces. Dagrún has exhibited her work in Xiamen and Shanghai China, Basel Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Manila Philippines as well as taking part in various group and solo exhibitions in Iceland. In 2015 she was selected to be part of the Icelandic biennale Sequences VII curated by Alfredo Cramerotti, creative director of Mostyn. In start of 2016 she was chosen to be part of the project Night Transmissions curated by Margot Norton, associate curator at The New Museum, where video works by 38 international artists were broadcasted on the Icelandic National Broadcast Service, Television Channel RÚV.

Hrafnhildur Helgadóttir

Saemundur Thor Helgason is an Icelandic artist based between Reykjavik, London and Amsterdam. He is a co-founder of HARD-CORE, an Amsterdam based art organization, developing algorithmic curatorial methods since 2011 and Cosmos Carl, an online platform that only hosts hyperlinks provided by artists and curators. In 2017 he founded the interest group Félag Borgara (eng. Fellowship of Citizens), with the aim of lobbying for Basic Income in Iceland.

Félag Borgara


“When does the amateur become professional?”

“What creates a professional?”

When it comes to art-making, what determines who is deemed professional? Among the many acts and ways of making art, the idea of the ‘professional’ artist seems to be that of an individual who is able to create value acknowledged both culturally and economically, whose actions and works are validated by institutions within society. In this context, the amateur is an individual fuelled by passion and interest but unable to create cultural or economic value on a societally significant scale. The divide between the two is neither clear nor permanent; it can go and has gone through endless variations and modulations with time: they are two extremes between which individuals who partake in cultural production find themselves.

A main source of such validation is being accepted into the archive of institutions such as museums and other art and cultural centres. This creates, as pointed out by Boris Groys in his book On the New, incentive in market value because such a position is then considered a solid investment. The amateur can thus view their lack of economic value, or the lack/ withholding of a larger collective validation, as a form of resistance- yet the tides of cultural trends remain highly unpredictable. Yesterday’s trash turns too quickly into today’s treasure; today’s waste may well be adulated in the collective archive of tomorrow.

Curator: Dagrún Aðalsteinsdóttir

Sponsored by the Icelandic Art Fund