about the project
Heike Liss and Soffia Sæmundsóttir share a long-standing friendship that began while they were both in Art School in California. WISH YOU WERE HERE was driven by the urge to collaborate, to find forms and expressions of creative exchange while living on two different continents. The two artists started their search for a suitable project by sending each other handmade postcards depicting landscape. During their long journeys from Iceland to California, or from Chile to Iceland, or from Iceland to Switzerland, the postcards were stamped and sorted by myriad machines, seen by curious or incurious eyes, and passed through countless unknown hands. Precious little pieces of art were transformed into witnesses of time, coated with perceptible traces of life. Something to touch. Something that touches us. It became clear that the postcards were not merely a means to find a project, but in fact were the project. A process oriented project. A mail art project. Keep in touch…
about the artists
Heike Liss is a multi-media artist who takes her cues from the people and the world around her. After studying Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, she pursued a Master’s degree in Studio Art at Mills College in Oakland, California. Heike’s award-winning work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries and at film festivals. She has collaborated with choreographers Sonsherée Giles and François Verret, musicians Marcus Weiss, Caroline Penwarden, GAW, and Theresa Wong, multi-media artists Ellen Lake, Nomi Talisman, and Michael Trigilio, as well as poet Lyn Hejinian, among many others. Since 2014 Heike is performing live visuals with her long-time collaborator and travelling companion Fred Frith, as well as other musical improvisers such as Ikue Mori, Thea Farhadian and Shelley Hirsch. She lives and works in Oakland and Basel and teaches transdisciplinary art at the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia.
Soffía Sæmundsdóttir works mainly in painting and drawing. She is inspired by landscape and nature and seeks unknown places to explore. She is a printmaking graduate from the Icelandic College of Arts and Craft and received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Mills College in Oakland, California. Soffía’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group shows and she has collaborated with fellow artists, as well as with printmaking associations all over the world. Artist residencies include Lukas Künstlerhaus, Ahrenshoop, Germany and the BANFF Center in Alberta, Canada. She is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptures Award and a prize winner in the Winsor and Newton Competition. Until 2015 she was the Chairman of the Icelandic Printmakers Association. Soffía lives and works in Reykjavik.