Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson

Libia Castro (ES) & Ólafur Ólafsson (IS) are based in Rotterdam and Berlin. The artists have been collaborating since 1997, they met during their post-graduate study in The Netherlands, after having studied design in Germany and art in The Netherlands (L) and art in Iceland and The Netherlands (Ó). With a conceptual and multidisciplinary approach and a contextual and site related practice Libia and Ólafur's works go from the creation of situations and experiential environments, to interventions, sculpture, video and photography.  "Our work has developed through our dialogue, experiences on different sites and our interest in Conceptual Art and art movements like Fluxus, Life Art, Feminist Art, Arte Povera, Social Sculpture, Situationism and Neoconcretism".

In much of their work, Libia and Ólafur collaborate with other people; groups, individuals and other artists. Their work focuses on spatial, existential, social and political questions. At the same time as reflecting on everyday life in the different places they work, they wish to sensitize perception racing existential and critical questions on a.o. labour, socio-economical inequalities, migration, identity, decision-making, urban space and how globalization affects society and peoples life. "In our work Avant-garde Citizens; f.i. we wish to address the growing situation of migratory conflict, reflecting on the tensions between the capitalist globalised world, freedom of movement and the consequent and growing tendency of nations to protect their territories from undocumented immigration - the friction between belonging and exclusion. In the music-video Caregivers we investigate a recent phenomenon in the labour sector in Italy, that of East European women (mainly Ukrainian) migrating to the country to work as in-home caregivers of elderly Italians in most of the cases to send money back to their husbands and children they left behind".

Libia's & Ólafur's work has been exhibited individually and in group shows among others at; Manifesta 7 Principle Hope, Rovereto, Italy 2008; Reykjavik's Art Museum, Iceland 2008; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2008; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2008; CAC Málaga, Spain 2007; Akureyri Art Museum, Iceland 2006; CAC Vilnius, Lithuania 2006; Art in General, New York, USA 2006; De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 2005; The Triennial for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture, Hasselt, Belgium (2005), Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 2004; Platform CAC Istanbul,Turkey 2003 and The Havana Biennale, Cuba 2003.
Their work has been reviewed in publications such as; Contemporary (UK),  Untitled (UK), Art.es (ES), Artecontexto (ES), Art in America (USA), C -Magazine (CA), Time Out Istanbul (TR), NRC (NL), Metropolis M (NL), Mister Motly (NL), Sjónauki (IS), XXI Magazien for Architecture (TR), Kunstbeeld (NL), Arte-e-Critica (IT) and in numerous catalogues and other specialized publications.  Libia & Ólafur have won the shortlist basis price of Prix de Rome 2009 in The Netherlands and in 2007 were nominated for the French prize Prix Gilles Dusein for photography and video. The year 2006 they were nominated for the cultural price of DV in Iceland. They have also been awarded various grants and residencies and thought and given workshops and lectures at various art academies and universities in bachelor and master degrees.

For DAI they have run our Diyarbakir edition of the project Here As The Centre Of The World