On January 18th, 2021, Monday Lectures present an online talk by Danish artist and KHiO research fellow Marie Kølbæk Iversen. The talk expands on Kølbæk Iversen’s extensive and long-term project Io/I (2015-) that cross-reads between Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io, and her mythological namesake from Greek-Roman mythology: the girl Io, who was raped by Jupiter and subsequently transformed into a cow before giving birth to her son, the golden calf Epaphus.
For the past 407 years, and ever since German astronomer Simon Marius named Jupiter’s innermost moon after Io in 1614, however, Io has found herself locked in orbit around her assailant. Through Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic engagement with the myth’s various instantiations—including those of Ovid, Aeschylos, and NASA— and through works such as Io/I, Moonologue, Gravitational Shift, and Liber, Kølbæk Iversen explores strategies and potentialities for lunar Io’s escape from the gravitational pull of Jupiter.
Marie Kølbæk Iversen (*1981, Herning, Denmark) lives and works between Oslo and Copenhagen, where she graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. Kølbæk Iversen’s work has been featured in national and international exhibitions including at the Kai Art Centre in Tallinn (Estonia, 2019), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Norway, 2019), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark, 2018), the 11th Gwangju Biennial: The Eighth Climate (What Does Art Do?) (South Korea, 2016), and Biennale de l’image en mouvement (Switzerland and Australia, 2014/15). She is the receiver of awards and prizes such as the Aage and Yelva Nimb’s honorary grant, the ARKEN travel grant, and the NARP and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen grants for artistic research—with special mention. She is represented in private and public collections, among them the Danish National Gallery, the ARKEN Museum, and the Danish Arts Foundation. She is represented by Gether Contemporary.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM: Volcanos on Io, 2018