That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau

The National Gallery of Iceland presents That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau a major installation by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, originally commissioned for the Icelandic Pavilion of the 2024 Venice Biennale. Playfully incisive, the exhibition, curated by Dan Byers, features sculptures and installations that probe aspects of the uncanny relationship between us and our world of mass-produced objects.  

 That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau, occupies both the museum entrance and Gallery 3, where the artist fills the space with works that appropriate the materials, products, and language of industrial manufacture and product marketing and distribution. Hildigunnur creates an immersive environment, inspired by the tradition of the ‘Merzbau,’ pioneered by German dada artist Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters began using the term ‘Merz’ in his work, after discovering a fragment of newspaper printed with the end of the word ‘Commerz.’ Here, Hildigunnur reintroduces the ‘com,’ creating ‘commerzbau,’ as a wry reference to mass-produced objects and the castaways of commerce. 

Upon entering the museum visitors encounter Approximately 7%, a LED screen broadcasting the changing advertising contents from a small part of a highway side screen on the outskirts of Reykjavík. 

At the entrance to the installation in Gallery 3, visitors encounter Infoxication, a wall made from a recycled floor panel used in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale that Hildigunnur has adorned with logos of the firms, foundations, corporations, and vendors whose products and services made her Icelandic Pavilion possible, making clear the hidden commercial systems involved in exhibiting at a global art event. The installation surface features holograms printed by a firm that specializes in holographic printing for banknotes, making the wall twinkle with over one hundred logos. 

Offering an experience that explores how objects bond to us and communicate with us, two small plastic sculptures made from the control panels of a home printer and a refrigerator blink incessantly, going in and out of sync with each other. The blinking that signals a paper jam or that you have left the refrigerator door open, with each sculpture unexpectedly producing hum-rattle of a cell phone vibration, triggering the modern-day human instinct to instantly reach for your phone. 

Small plastic toys made for dollhouses – a pizza, a steak, a dental tool, among them – have been scanned, brought to human scale, and reproduced by a German firm. The sculptures capture the toys’ strangely smooth surfaces and simplified forms, designed to only communicate as much information as needed to make their function clear. The sculptures are accompanied by a pigment print adorned with a sticker, depicting a very large number captured from the screen and keyboard of a toy cash register. The artworks invite viewers to consider the insidious way mundane, everyday objects are reproduced as teaching instruments for children, instilling consumer desire from a young age. 

Large relief sculptures embellish the gallery walls, made from the latest developments in sustainable fabrication. Produced by a Dutch firm, one sculpture is made from recycled jute coffee bags, another from recycled denim, and a third from repurposed bank suits, which have been moulded into shapes of the small, cheap packaging that are found protecting the products that we intend to purchase. The artist’s work reflects the tension between the personal pleasure to be found in our world of material objects, but also the consequences of a world full of these objects. 

Hildigunnur is known for her nuanced practice, which critically examines the global systems of production and distribution and the bizarre lives of the products they create. Her work calls attention to the objects that exist at the periphery of our vision, often the throwaway accessories of material culture: packing materials, price tags, signage, and systems of display. She looks for the beauty inherent in these objects, which have been shaped through countless aesthetic decisions, material limitations, production conditions, moral codes, deals, desires, and mistakes. Hildigunnur uses these human systems and interactions to create her artworks, harnessing the cultures and capabilities of manufacturers, fabricators, and commercial firms as part of her artistic process. She playfully subverts expectations of beauty, value, and utility, making clear commercial systems that are hiding in plain sight. The artist’s work reflects the tension between the personal pleasure to be found in our world of material objects, but also the consequences of a world full of these objects. 

Artist statement: I think that my art is shaped by the specific experience of having been brought up on a tiny island in the Atlantic, where we have seen extreme changes in only a few generations. Capitalism essentially came to us overnight, compared with its gradual development in other parts of the world. Because we are such a tiny society and capitalism arrived suddenly, it makes an ideal petri-dish to really examine this system; this commercialism, capital, and value. Some parts of these systems don’t really work in such a small society, and aspects of capitalism are just so new that this “new” way of global commercial living produces a stark contrast to the way we used to live 

Dan Byers is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Massachusetts, He is the former John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Recent projects include exhibitions with Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Pope.L, B. Ingrid Olson, Candice Lin, Deidrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford, Tony Cokes, Jonathan Berger, Liz Magor, and Renée Green. Previously, he was Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA/Boston, Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and co-curator, with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, of the 2013 Carnegie International. 

The Icelandic Pavilion for the 2024 Venice Biennale was commissioned by Auður Jörundsdóttir, Director of the Icelandic Art Center. Based in Reykjavik, the Icelandic Arts Center (IAC) is dedicated to promoting Icelandic visual arts internationally. Affiliated with Iceland’s Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs, the IAC strengthens networks between the visual arts scene in Iceland and the global cultural sphere. Through funding and logistical assistance, the IAC assists Icelandic artists and arts professionals in producing projects abroad and facilitates cooperation with public and private associations, organizations, and enterprises worldwide. The Icelandic Art Center (IAC) is commissioner of the Pavilion of Iceland at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia on behalf of the Icelandic Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs and has been commissioner since 2007. More information is available on the Icelandic Art Center’s website.