That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau

The National Gallery of Iceland is pleased to present Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir’s highly-acclaimed That’s a Very Large Number — A Commerzbau, commissioned for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. The site-specific installation of sculptural works will be reconceived for National Gallery, responding to the architectural conditions of the museum, which overlooks Tjörnin and the City of Reykjavík.

At the Icelandic Pavilion, commissioned by Auður Jörundsdóttir, Director of the Icelandic Art Center, and curated by Dan Byers, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art, in Massachusetts, That’s a Very Large Number — A Commerzbau playfully subverted expectations of beauty, value, and utility within the framework of the global art event. Hildigunnur is known for her nuanced artistic practice, which looks critically at the worldwide systems of production and distribution and the strange lives of the products they create. Her work draws attention to the small, disposable objects that are often the mass-produced accessories of material culture: packing materials, price tags, signage, and systems of display. She casts these objects in new roles, changing their value and meaning entirely as they are experienced outside of their original function.

 The title for Hildigunnur’s Icelandic Pavilion drew inspiration from the tradition of the ‘Merzbau’, a concept pioneered by German dada artist Kurt Schwitters, who created collage-like, immersive environments from scavenged materials and objects. Schwitters began using the term ‘Merz’ after incorporating a snippet from a newspaper with the latter half of the word ‘Commerz’ in one of his works. Hildigunnur reintroduces the ‘com’, creating her ‘commerzbau’ from commercial fabrications and the castaways of commerce, all tailored to the architecture of the space. She has said: 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.