Moderated by Ricardo Domeneck (poet, Brazil)

VENUE : Luxembourg Art Week, Glacis square, L-1628 Luxembourg City 

From myths to pop culture, fantasy to folklore, the two artists invited for the Luxembourg Art Week opening night at Casino Luxembourg take us on a journey through the vastness of visual presentation in our current times as well as expand our sense of the stories we tell ourselves.

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (b. 1987) is an artist, composer, and poet. A graduate of the Iceland University of the Arts, she is the author of five books. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Reykjavík Art Museum, Kling & Bang, the Living Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Nobel Prize Museum, Kulturhuset in Stockholm and Kulturhuset in Oslo and more. She received the poetry prize Ljóðstaf Jóns úr Vör in 2017 and was nominated for the Bernard Heidsieck–Centre Pompidou Literary Prize in 2021.

Sigurðardóttir’s practice evokes the transience of dreams, blending multiple worlds and artistic disciplines into one. Her works simultaneously appear and disappear, their results often evading one’s grasp as different perspectives, timelines, and storylines come together in a multifaceted whole that envelops the viewer in a familiar yet alien way. Like the surface of water, Sigurðardóttir’s works embody unseen depths while also reflecting the vastness above in a momentary glimmer. Only an afterimage seems to remain floating there, but an undercurrent looms, hidden, intangible like a nod or a wink from a stranger in the distance.

Through her innovative interdisciplinary practice, Sigurðardóttir addresses spiritual, esoteric aspects of human experience on personal and societal levels. She explores ways of moving closer to our intuition at a time when technology continues to isolate us from one another and close us off from ourselves. As such, her work often touches on the abstract and the surreal.

Esben Weile Kjær (b. 1992) is an artist based in Copenhagen. Spanning sculpture, video and performance, Esben Weile Kjær’s work draws on the history of pop culture and pop music to investigate themes of nostalgia, authenticity, and generational anxiety. In an attentive though reckless visual language, he investigates today’s event economy, often focusing on marketing tactics and the aesthetics of the entertainment industry – mainly to consider art’s relationship to its surrounding culture industries. As such, his work attempts to not only mimic other cultural modes of performance (such as those found in parties, protests, press conferences, and ballets), but to become performative pop culture in its own right—often through interventions in public and commercial spaces, using props such as podiums, confetti cannons, fences, and party lasers.

Ricardo Domeneck (b. 1977) is one of the most prolific and versatile of a generation of younger poets from Brazil. He easily moves between a variety of media, including books, video, performance, music and visual art. Apart from being a poet, he also works as a critic and translator.