Strange Times Ahead: Exploring Time Beyond The Clocks At Sequences Art Festival 2017

Set your alarm for Reykjavík’s own independent biannual arts festival Sequences, which opens for the eighth time on Friday October 6. Launched in 2006 as an offshoot of the city’s vibrant arts scene, this ten-day event will present progressive visual art forms with its signature focus on time-based mediums such as performance, sonic works, film and public intervention.

The curator of the festival is Margot Norton. “I’m drawn to working on projects that disrupt what is expected and expand the definition of what an art-viewing experience can be,” she says. “Sequences festival was founded to do just that, to embrace cutting-edge visual art and provide a platform for time-based mediums that are often overlooked such as video, performance, and sound.”

“Sequences festival was founded to provide a platform for time-based mediums that are often overlooked.”

The latest incarnation is entitled ‘Sequences VIII: Elastic Hours,’ and focuses on how the term “real time” can be applied to the experience of making art, exploring how artists can use time itself as a raw material. Through the works of 20 Icelandic and international artists, Sequences VIII looks beyond the clock and investigates alternative systems for measuring time—perhaps especially pertinent to Icelanders due to the country’s strange and unusual daylight hours, which are the most traditional timekeeper of all. Through this work, the festival aims to provide a heightened awareness of our relationships with objects, society and the universe itself.

Sequences is the first arts festival in Iceland to focus solely on visual art forms, and each edition brings in a new creative director with a new vision, to keep things fresh and ticking along nicely. Amongst this year’s eclectic program of lectures, video screenings and performances, you can enjoy music by David Horvitz and the Nýló choir, drink cocoa with Ragnar Helgi Ólafsson and view the solo exhibition by 2017’s honorary artist Joan Jones, a New York-based artist who has been investigating time-based structures and the politics of spectatorship through her work since the late 1960s.

Don’t be late!

Sequences VIII runs October 6-15, in various spaces. Go to sequences.is for further information.