What if you weren’t in a museum, or at a gallery, or reading an art publication, and someone put a piece in a strategic public location wherein you were forced to confront art without seeking it out?

Does that change your perspective, your reception, your thinking? Would you meddle deeper into the questions and means that constitute mainstream artistic approach, or would you simply move on and let the confrontation pass as another moment in your timeline?

These are the kinds of questions artsave might be asking in their nomadic approach to artistic experimentation. In asking these questions, artsave is making an explicit statement about the social, economic, and political power of art and their inviting you to not only join in the discussion, but become a part of the process.

Deeming themselves a nomadic research laboratory, artsave started its container experiment last year, placing a large shipping container at the Reykjavík harbor during the summer.

This year, they will install the container in Húsavík in the north where they are holding a competition for the exterior design of said container. The use of the container is attributed to its symbolic association to globalization.

Artsave states: “In times of the modern nomad, containers turn into flexible architecture with different connotations – mobile research labs, exhibition containers for installations and actions, container camps creating temporary living space or modular survival architecture.”

As Alexander Klose stated in Container Prinzip 2009, the container plays “on the energy of the mobile and the situational.”

The competition invites all kids and students from the Húsavík, Mývatn and Akureyri area to participate in “proposing a design for the exterior walls of the artsave container.”

“This can be an overall painting, drawing, sticker foil, spray paint, surface cladding or whatever you can think of. It is also possible to incorporate the roof space of the container and to include a 3-D installation using wood or other materials on top of the container or on the container side.”

The design must follow a theme or convey a story and be able to be executed within five days.

As the group’s name plays on the recent financial referendum, Icesave, artsave was formed partially as a reactionary movement to recent financial crises in Iceland. As their comprehensive website states:

“The decline of the Icelandic Kronur makes overseas collaborations for many artists nearly impossible...artsave engages to examine the social and political circumstances and the restructuring of the country after the collapse. The lab takes Iceland’s zero-point situation as an actuator and requests to question fundamental terms and to take a socio-critical position. artsave utilizes common communication channels in a subversive manner and encourages tactics that function outside established institutions and commercial usability.”

Founded in 2009, artsave merges art, activism, political and social commitment to get their message across.

“The lab has a parasitic behaviour towards the art system, uses subversive tactics and supports experimental communication at the borders of the disciplines. artsave encourages the creation of utopias in times of capitalism, supports projects without commercial agenda and demands a critical art practice with a non-profit aim and a social benefit.”

Utilizing public space as such and calling on the community to contribute designs, artsave is continuing a dialogue about the great role the public has in reclaiming its collective voice in Iceland.

The experiments also confront otherwise non-art enthusiasts across generations to look at something curious, striking, revealing, or whatever to spark a thought process in the individual that hopefully extends outside the realms of conventional artistic musings.

Just asking the questions, artsave seems to be projecting, is enough to spark a movement. Even if not participating in the contest, look for the execution of the container design in September in Húsavík at Hestamidstödin Saltvík.

If you think you or your group’s ideas can contribute to this extraordinary experiment, go to www.artsave.is for more information.

Aina Fuller – ainafuller@gmail.com