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Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir

*1976

A.k.a. Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir

Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, born 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, lives and works in Reykjavík, Iceland. Gunnarsdóttir studied at UCLA in Los Angeles and at the School of Visual Arts in New York.Ásdís is known for her performances that take place in unconventional places and her video installations consisting of three dimensionality and visual phsycadelic poetry. Treating videos as songs, Ásdís vj´s together combination of her videos and reads poetry over them. Her art work can vary from large video installations and performances to spoken word poetry and photography. Her performance at the Berlinale film festival was called “The Abstract Prophecy Conference”. It was a 45 min long “journey to the psychedelic vastness of the feminie mind. The artist controls an abstract PowerPoint blended in with music, videos, performances and poetry”. A one woman show where she mixes video art and skype performances into the stage. Ásdís started making performances through skype in 2007 where she had a new performance every Sunday afternoon by the computer. The audience would call in that hour for a performance. Since then she has on and off used the online medium for performance and video making, where improvising plays a big part of the art. In 2011 she made a large video installation called “Improvised, immediate past” in the show “Momentum”, she recorded a performance and did not allow herself to edit it, it was a one take and projected onto the walls, live size from 3 different angles. This way she wanted to release her control over the video medium and celebrate the “Power of now”, the beauty in the details. Ásdís is a part of an artist group that is called “Theater of Artists” that makes glamorous evenings of performances in the basement of The National Theater in Iceland. In the fall of 2011 Ásdís along with Ragnar Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson lead a residency in Banff called “The Soiree Retreat” where artists got together every week and made an evening of Soirees, full of poetry, videos and singing.

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