The official Icelandic representation at the 54th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia will be the Spanish-Icelandic duo of Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, whose collaborations explore the political, socio-economic, and personal forces that affect life in the present day. Their work, which has taken them to cities around the world, and often develops out of their personal interactions with people and places, can be characterized as an artistic interpretation of culture and the complex relationships that compose it. Castro and Ólafsson’s exhibition for Venice, Under Deconstruction, will explore current socio-political issues in Iceland and elsewhere, using video, performance, sculpture, sound, and music interventions. The 2011 exhibition is organized by the Icelandic Art Center in Reykjavík, Iceland, under the commissionership of Dorothée Kirch, and is curated by Ellen Blumenstein.

Within the Pavilion of Iceland, located at the Palazzo Zenobio at the Collegio Armeno Moorat-Raphael in Dorsoduro, Castro and Ólafsson will present a musically-inflected video installation, Constitution of The Republic of Iceland (2008-2011). In conjunction with this work, the artists will also present a Venice-based iteration of their ongoing project, Your Country Doesn’t Exist (2003-present), which will consist of a video registration of a performance in Venice, on view in the Pavilion, and a sound intervention broadcast regularly via public loudspeakers at a public space in the city.

For Constitution of The Republic of Iceland, Castro and Ólafsson worked together with Icelandic composer Karólína Eiríksdóttir to create a score to which the Icelandic Constitution could be performed with soprano, baritone, piano, double bass, and a mixed chamber choir. The composition was first publicly performed in March 2008 in Iceland, six months before the collapse of the country’s banking system. The video to be presented in Venice is of a recent performance of the work staged and broadcast on Icelandic TV and at Hafnarborg Cultural Centre in Hafnarborg, Iceland, in February of this year.