Nono Lisa was installed in The Hut, a container gallery run by a local artist. The exhibitors chose where it would be placed, I chose the park outside Reykjavík Art Museum Kjarvalsstaðir. The work addressed vandalism and disrespect toward art in a wider context. The choice of location reflected how art is both labour and work, echoing the dual role of artists who often balance wage labour with artistic production.
For the piece I used a reproduction of the world’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, chosen both for its universal recognition and its history of theft and vandalism. Ironically, the events around the exhibition mirrored the concept: the glass was smashed twice, and eventually the work itself was stolen. Thus the “actual” exhibition lasted little more than a day; those who came later found only an empty hut with shards of glass on the floor.
The title Nono Lisa refers to the Mona Lisa but also plays on its absence and negation. The work reflects on artistic existence within Iceland’s small society, often unaware of larger cultural dimensions, while simultaneously rich in creative persistence and energy. It also considers envy and cultural deficit: artistic envy as a destructive, unconscious drive, and “cultural deprivation” as a state in which society undervalues or even resents the role of art.
Nono Lisa was both a reproduction and an original – a copy that depended on its prototype yet became its own image, suspended between art history, local culture, and the precarious life of artworks in public space.
Sara Björnsdóttir 