The Window

Ten thousand slides are posted on windowpanes in in the main hall of the Reykjavik City Hall.

I found the slides at the flea market. Strange that one can buy such private and intimate things. Thus I am witness to the most private family stories but at the same time I discover that the intimate motives form a familiar refrain and the same family events are repeatedly photographed: baptism, birthdays, weddings, children, Christmas, travel, friends, funerals, grandchildren and great-grand-children… One must come close to the window, in order to discern the individual motives of the photographs. At a distance they dissolve into a sea of colors.

During daytime the light shines through the slides into the room. When it becomes dark outside, light is generated from within and projects the slides to the outside. The slides covered the entire area of the large windows. Slide transparencies are not resistant to fading in sunlight. Therefore, the images faded away over the time of the exhibition until all that remained were faint marks, traces of things that once were.

Ósk has used family snapshots she found in Berlin fleamarkets as material for her work. These were slides that families had made over time and which had later ended up at flea- markets because no other family members were interested in them. These were obsolete family pictures, images that had once been the joy, and centerpiece, of the registration of family history but that had now lost that purpose when no one felt a connection to those images and memories.

Ósk utilized this found imagery in many ways over a period of time. 
In an exhibition in I8 Gallery in Reykjavik Ósk exhibited the images more as they had originally been presented, with a slide projector on a screen. Except that the screen was no longer set up in a living room, as it had been originally; the images were projected outwards from the closed gallery space onto the window fronting the street. The traditional exhibition space was closed to the audience, which was able to view the show on the “display”-window of the gallery. Thus the family pictures of unrelated Berliners were projected outwards onto a narrow street in the centre of Reykjavik.