In the Collection of Imperfection - Unnar Örn J. Auðarson

Unnar Örn’s installation is constructed around a collection of artifacts borrowed from the storage rooms of Reykjavik city museums of photography, cultural history and municipal archives. The exhibition is intended to reach outside the walls of the art museum and create a dialogue with the methods of registration and the role of museums in present day society.

Along with the objects and artifacts, the exhibition includes works by Unnar Örn that serve as footnotes to ideas about the archiving of nations’ collective memories. One of the objects in the exhibition is an album of more than 200 photographs by a bank worker, Sigurður Guttormsson (b.1906- d. 1998), who traveled around Iceland in the years 1930 to 1945. The photographs he collected were intended to show the living conditions of working class Icelanders and to document a class division that the photographer considered to be an ongoing situation in Icelandic society. The exhibition is a part of Unnar Örn’s ongoing research into the idea of imperfection that started in 2007.