More than five years ago, Erla S. Haraldsdóttir started using images of everyday environments, which she transformed in order to disrupt the public’s perception and eventually get it to reflect on the possibility of an alternative reality. How would spectators react to the possibility of having an oriental bazaar in the centre of Reykjavik, which until recently was quite homogenous as a community? From one exhibition to another, Haraldsdóttir gave different publics the opportunity of experiencing a drastic change in their most common surroundings, thereby confronting them with such volatile issues as tolerance towards the other or simply alternative environmental realities.
Recently the development of this concept has led her to create environments where a well-known neighbourhood such as Kreuzberg or Alexanderplatz in Berlin is turned into an animated scenery, in which authentically filmed people operate. An intermediate stage were her strip cartoon sketches Monday Stories (2003), shown at the Centre culturel du Mexique in Paris. Drawn from her immediate experience of daily life in Reykjavik, these graphite renderings (containing occasional collage elements) of incidents that she first records on video and tape, question if there is a difference between the artistic rendering of real life and the non-artistic documentation of it.

(Halldór Björn Runólfsson)