Events
Galleri Gången, January 1974. Sigga standing beside a large artwork created by children working with her at CHI. This piece, made from all sorts of waste material, extends from floor to ceiling. © From the book Art Can Heal, written by Ágústa Oddsdóttir, on the Life and Work of Sigríður Björnsdóttir, published by König Books 2023
Address
Villa Vassilieff
21, avenue du Maine
75015 Paris
21, avenue du Maine
75015 Paris
Accessibility
Montparnasse – Bienvenüe metro station, Exit 2, Lines 4, 6, 12 and 13
Villa Vassilieff is accessible to visitors using wheeled devices or who have mobility difficulties thanks to special facilities (access ramp, adapted toilets, and a lift).
In addition, several reserved parking spaces are available close to the Villa Vassilieff:
• in front of 4 rue d’Alençon, 75015 Paris
• in front of 7 rue Antoine Bourdelle, 75015 Paris
• in front of 23 rue de l’Arrivée, 75015 Paris
Consult the map of adapted parking spaces in Paris here.
On the invitation by AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions, Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care imagined “Care as Methodology”, a series of events that aim to practice and reflect collectively on intersections of care and art. For the second event of this series, Ágústa Oddsdóttir, Egill Sæbjörnsson and Tamara Singh will gather for a conversation on art as healing practice.
Building on the book Art Can Heal: The Life and Work of Sigríður Björnsdóttir1, the figure of this pioneering art therapist, artist, life partner and collaborator of Dieter Roth, will be at the heart of this event. Since 1952, Sigríður Björnsdóttir has been developing methods to support hospitalized children by addressing their emotions through art therapy. Rooted in the post-war era, her approach aimed at creating a safe space for emotional expression, empowering individuals to regain control over their lives, particularly in the face of trauma. In ancient cultures, long before the boundaries between art, medicine and religion were clearly defined, artistic expression was deeply intertwined with spiritual and therapeutic practices. It served as a life-affirming practice, transcending today’s view of art as an aesthetic pursuit.
Sigríður recognized that the tangible elements of our environment – touching the soil, leaves, or other organic matter – possess a unique capacity to reconnect us with the world and highlight our interdependent relationship with both human and non-human. This perspective on touch aligns with the work of Tamara Singh, a member of the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care. T. Singh, a mental health professional, horticultural therapist, art therapist and artist, who works with people feeling marginalized within French society. Her practice emphasizes fostering trust, joy and play.
These themes are also central to the work of artists Ágústa Oddsdóttir and her son Egill Sæbjörnsson, both influenced by the experience of art therapy. Ágústa, highlights ingenuity and resilience of women artists who strove to maintain their artistic practice with the constraints and demands of domestic life. Like many Icelandic women, they repurposed old clothes and socks to create new, wearable objects. This tradition gave rise to Ágústa’s ongoing sculpture series, Mom’s Balls, begun in the 1990s. Each ball, crafted from torn clothing belonging to family members, carries the secrets of its origin – encapsulating past and future memories and the threads of transgenerational connection. Egil Sæbjörnsson in his artistic work, highlights the therapeutic effects of creative expression by combining technology, sculpture and sound.
Practical information
Tuesday, December 3, 2024, from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
The conversation will be held in English.
1
Art Can Heal: The Life and Work of Sigríður Björnsdóttir, written by Ágústa Oddsdóttir and coordinated by Egill Sæbjörnsson, published in 2023 by Walther Konig.
Art Can Heal: The Life and Work of Sigríður Björnsdóttir, written by Ágústa Oddsdóttir and coordinated by Egill Sæbjörnsson, published in 2023 by Walther Konig.
Ágústa Oddsdóttir is born in 1947, and is currently based between Reykjavík, Kjós, and Berlin. Having built a career as a sociology teacher and translator for 15 years, in 1988 she began attending art therapy workshops with Sigríður Björnsdóttir as a way to work through her creative and emotional exhaustion. These sessions inspired Ágústa to study art education at the Iceland College of Education, and then attend The Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts (now Iceland University of the Arts), graduating in 1997 at the age of 50. Ágústa’s way into art has been based on her work and experience with Sigríđur Björnsdóttir and aims at expressing her emotions and memories, recycling, and the views of the different generations of the 20th and 21st century. The book Art Can Heal is written by visual artist Ágústa Oddsdóttir as an attempt to share the magic that she experienced while attending art therapy with Sigríđur Björnsdóttir.
Sigríđur Björnsdóttir is an Icelandic artist and pioneer of art therapy. She was born in 1929 at Flaga in Skaftártunga, South Iceland, and currently lives and works in Reykjavík. From 1957 to 1964 she was married to the Swiss German artist Dieter Roth. She started to develop her unique method to help sick children explore and express themselves through art when she worked as an intern at children’s hospitals in London and Copenhagen during the summers of 1952 to 1957. During her career, Sigríður became sought after worldwide to lecture and curate exhibitions about her groundbreaking therapy work with children at international congresses in, for example, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Sao Paolo, Chicago, Melbourne, New Dehli, Manila, and Athens.
Egill Sæbjörnsson is a visual artist, musician, and architecture interventionist born in 1973 in Iceland and currently based in Berlin. He has been making artworks that bring together 3D environments, digital projections, technology, and sound since the 1990s. Sæbjörnsson conceives his work as a technological continuation of painting and sculpture, exploring the space between the virtual and physical. Sæbjörnsson’s works have been exhibited in The Martin Gropius Bau Berlin, Royal College of Art London, PS1 MoMA New York, The Watermill Center, Museum of Modern Art Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Roma, The Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Amos Rex Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Oi Futuro Rio de Janeiro, Biennale Dakar, and The National Gallery of Prague. He represented Iceland at The 57th Biennale Arte in Venice, and in 2019 he was nominated for the Ars Fennica Art Prize in Finland.
Tamara Singh is a mental health professional, an horticultural therapist and an art therapist, using creative writing and visual arts as primary media in the healing process. Formerly at NYU Langone Hospital in NYC and at the Parisian psychiatric hospital Sainte Anne, she continues to work today for independent cultural institutions and in private practice with a network of psychotherapists offering support to artists, queer/trans, and post-colonial communities. Co-founder and board member of two NGOs she also advocates for mental health initiatives in spaces of solidarity. As an artist, Tamara Singh works with volumes. A trained weaver, she “listens more often to things rather than beings, for they are her ancestors talking” (Birago Diop). She works with willow, rush, clay, soil, arranging meaning and organic matter in ephemeral displays. After washing her hands, she continues to explore spatial and volume on cello, through poetry, with voice, with images (short film).
The Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, started in 2020 in the Greater Paris region, is a diverse group of practitioners of arts, crafts, philosophies, healing and therapy coming from vastly spread geographies. Neither a classical collective nor a rigid structure, the Initiative is researching and reinventing modes of sustainable institutionalism. Based on friendships as well as professional bonds, it functions as an ecosystem and fosters interdependence and solidarity beyond identity. The focus on care is enacted as a flow of activities that nurture individuals and sustain social, environmental and political bonds, focusing as much on processes and methods as on outcomes. Through fluid artistic and curatorial ventures, the Initiative embraces the languages, energies, histories, landscapes, bodies, and materials that reflect a non-extractive and sensitive relationship to the human and non-human alike.
