NEWS
As Iceland "celebrates" its first anniversary of THE BIG CRASH, HH opens an art exhibition titled "The Icelandic Expansion 2009" - a sarcastic title, since "The Icelandic Expansion" (Icelandic business-viking-raids on foreign shores) came to a shrieking halt one year ago. The show features a series of photographs shot last January in an unnamed country in southern Africa, showing a once invincible, now desperate Icelandic "business-viking" wandering around the poor third world suburbs, sleeping on the beach and begging in the street. Show is at The Contemporary Art Gallery, Skólavörðustígur 3, 101 Reykjavik, 7-20 October 2009.
HH was invited to be among the speakers at the opening ceremony of the art festival in Bergen Norway last May, a black tie event held at the big and festive Grieghallen, with the king and queen of Norway up front. HH's speech focused on the current crisis in Iceland and the relations between the two countries. It was recorded by Norwegian Televison, NRK, and is now available on youtube.com.
ART
Ljóðmæli (1978-1998) (1998)
Collected Poems (1978-1998) was Hallgrimur’s first and only book of poetry. It was everything that a book of modern poetry is not: Thick as a brick, crowded with cartoons and illustrations, and many pages containing three or more poems that were almost all written in old meters and drawing inspiration from all things other than modernism, such as, for example, the Edda, the romantic poet Jónas Hallgrímsson (the Icelandic Pushkin) and Ice-T, the rapper.
Being so outlandish, the book was mostly ignored by the critics. Sales were moderate. The general view is that the book was too big: Some good poems but way too many. In the past years musicians like Jón Ólafsson and Ragnheiður Gröndal have put their voices to some of the poems.
Ljóð
