Gabriela Fridriksdottir

Björk: The artwork for Family Tree is by an Icelandic friend, a sculptor named Gabríela. Like me, she has four chambers in her which we call "roots," "beats," "strings" and "words." So I used this for the taxonomic structure of Family Tree… To bring together roots, beats, strings, and words, to unite all these opposing sytems, is to be a medium between disparate worlds trying to unite history, the present and the environment into a song on the radio, in a possible moment of utopia…

The work which Gabríela Friðriksdóttir is showing at the Venice Biennial 2005, Versations Tetralogia, makes oblique reference to this narrative tradition, which appears in the present day in the most unlikely forms, and often in a highly paradoxical fashion…

Gabríela Fridriksdóttir’s wild and fantastical artworks have seen her named as Iceland’s representative at the La Biennale di Venezia this year. Her Versations/Tetralogia will be a multi-media installation combining paintings, sculptures, video and music. Through these mediums she will explore "our perceptions, urges, feelings and desires, she takes arms against the chaos, excess and disorder of the present day, and considers the boundaries between these media, and their fusion and tension"…