Michael Richardt will perform the durational piece DA Friday 7th February from 12-6 p.m. and 7-9 p.m. in Gerðarsafn. The work is a part of the exhibition Stare. All are welcome!
Michael Richardt (b.1980) is a performance artist specializing in time-based and long duration performance. The documentary My Mother Is Pink about his mother was nominated for Best Art Documentary at the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival and won the Outstanding Excellence Award at the Desert Edge Global Film Festival in India. Richardt worked for Marina Abramović performing at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Henie Onstad Art Centre and has shown at Nikolaj Art Gallery, Vraa Exhibition, Reykjanes Art Museum, Nordic House and Nitja center for contemporary art. This summer he will appear as Raphael in the TV-show Felix and Klara on Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, RÚV.
Stare:
The works are radical whispers and we need to step closer to hear the unrest. It resides in personal narratives, stories of the world told from the unique perspective of each artist. Brimming with life the works tread around the artists’ selves in the exhibition Stare, which was opened at Gerðarsafn during the Iceland Photo Festival 2025.
The people in the exhibition stand exposed before the audience. They invite us to come closer, to gaze at them. But they also stare back at the viewer, far from being powerless subjects of the photographer; rather, they are the main actors. We are welcome to bear witness to their story but do so on their territory.
The photographic medium plays a leading role in the exhibition with imperfection characterizing many of the images, where carefully constructed composition and technical perfection are cast aside to approach sincerity, attempting rather to show life as it is. Rawness is employed to make us see from an emotional level and show us the energy, trauma, chaos, and drama of life, but also the humour and creativity. Traditional rules of the photographic medium are broken in an ode to the medium. Here, great beauty lies, but it is not the beauty of fine literature and landscape painting; instead we have buzzing and punk lyrics, diary entries and open hearts, bodily fluids and vulnerability. Which becomes unbreakable in its fragile softness.
