DIJON.- Visitors to the FRAC site in Dijon may have already discovered Katrin Sigurdardottir’s Island (2003), a piece that was acquired for the Frac Bourgogne collection last year and was shown in the exhibition The Genius of the Place 1. The piece unites many elements of the artist’s approach; while there is an fonds rêgional d'art contemporain de Bourgogne. This exhibition was produced with the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC: Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs of Burgundy), the Regional Council of Burgundy and the General Council of Côte d’Or.

The Genius of the Place : works and productions by artists from the Frac Bourgogne’s collection, Museum of Fine Arts and Palais des Etats de Bourgogne, Dijon. Curated by Eva González-Sancho, explicit reference to landscape, the architecture of the exhibition space is also clearly evoked. This island, with its cut-out edges, is closed in on itself; it has no openings, but is lit up from the inside; as a result, this small territory seems to be both a protected place and a world cut off from the outside. Today the idea of Iceland as a place of spectacular landscapes, innumerable islands and vast deserted spaces has become a cliché; this, however, is not the side of her native land that interests Katrin Sigurdardottir, who left Iceland for the United States in 1988, as a student. The elements that she devises are made mainly from wood, and assert their status as constructions by the rather rough way they are made. They evoke the landscapes of Iceland in only the most allusive manner, as a distant or imaginary memory. While nature is central to her work, the artist approaches it less for its specificity than for the relation that we have with it today. Landscape in modern art is the exact counterpart of urban space, an often nostalgic representation of a lost world, a place to safeguard from the ravages of development, a haven of peace that the city-dweller descends on at weekends or during holidays. Katrin Sigurdardottir’s work is about our perception of landscape in the age of globalisation.