Intimacies Of The Everyday at National Gallery of Iceland

The National Gallery of Iceland presents the group exhibition featuring more than 60 photographs by renowned international contemporary artists, including Agnieszka Sosnowska, Joakim Eskildsen, Niall McDiarmid, Orri Jónsson, and Sally Mann.

Overview

The works in Intimacies Of The Everyday were selected from discrete series within each artist’s practice and represent decades-long and ongoing preoccupations with photographing the people and places closest to home. The exhibition is organized around the unifying idea that certain images can only be achieved by close, attentive, and sustained observation. The works in the exhibition speak eloquently to the photographers’ intimate familiarity with their subjects and thus the intrinsic tenderness in their approach. In turn, the photographs also reveal the sitters’ willing participation in the artistic process, an implied trust and understanding that at times functions as creative collaboration.

The exhibition is curated by Pari Stave, head curator for exhibitions at the National Gallery of Iceland. “We live now in a world defined by an ‘attention economy,’ in which we are fed a daily stream of images that are designed to direct our attention towards a mediated experience of consumerism, entertainment, and social and political influence,” Stave notes. “The ubiquity of smart devices and the distraction of social media and other electronically transmitted information lures our attention away from deeper engagement in everyday life. Indeed, human beings are increasingly exposed to images generated by artificial intelligence, further breaking down the separation of truth and artifice.” The works in Intimacies Of The Everyday represent the inverse to the new reality of attention distraction. The exhibition argues that certain photographs can only be created in practices cultivated through close attention, contemplation, and lived experience. Such images are captured from the flux of the quotidian, in moments of deep connectedness to the world around in ways that speak to our commonality as human beings.

The exhibition features photographs by Agnieszka Sosnowska, Joakim Eskildsen, Niall McDiarmid, Orri Jónsson, and Sally Mann. The opening is timed to coincide with the biennial Icelandic Photography Festival, January 18-26, 2025.

This show is sponsored by the American Friends of the National Gallery of Iceland, the Danish Arts Foundation, Ny Carlsberg Foundation, and the US Embassy in Iceland. Agnieszka Sosnowska and Orri Jónsson received funding support from Myndstef.