Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2011
The Spanish‐Icelandic artist duo Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson have been chosen to exhibit on Iceland's behalf at the 54th International Art Exhibition ‐ La Biennale di Venezia 2011. Castro, born 1969 in Madrid, and Ólafsson, born 1973 in Reykjavík, met in the Netherlands in 1997 and have been collaborating since. From the outset, their work caught attention in the Netherlands and in Iceland, and soon internationally, earning them in 2009 the third prize of the prestigious Dutch art award Prix de Rome, for their video Lobbyists. Building up a body of work using a variety of media, they have developed a conceptual approach with a sense of play, transgression, and inventiveness, often based on intense research into a given subject area. Castro and Ólafsson‘s exhibition at the Reykjavík Arts Festival in the year 2005 had the title: The Noise of Money / El Ruido del Dinero.