As a visitor to Reykjavík, among the first things I observed was the changing light. Constantly in flux. I was surprised by its daily shifts, even under cloud cover. The sun was never stable. It arrived and departed from slightly different points in the sky. Sometimes it seemed to only circle overhead. I found it increasingly hard to keep track of time.
These naïve observations generated much speculation about how environments shape perception and about how matter might influence ideas of orientation. What effect does such unstable light have over the course of a year, several years, lifetimes, or generations? How does one navigate extremes of atmosphere without becoming disoriented, especially given that disorientation in this landscape specifically can be so physically injurious? For artists, who are visually attuned to light’s influence on the world around us, what does it mean to be perpetually orienting one’s body against forces—the strength of the sun and the angle of the Earth—that in other regions are rarely perceptible at human scale?
I met many artists in Reykjavík who, in various ways, were preoccupied with questions of orientation, wayfinding, and histories of technology as components of ecologically driven practices. Many were engaged in conceptual forms of artmaking that attend to conditions of the world around us, without resorting to didacticism. Connecting these practices is a focus on material research realized through abstraction, conceptualism, and ideas of embodiment that offer elegant commentaries on the challenges of existing in a world that feels perpetually on the brink of collapse.
It is true that nature is entirely unstable. As a concept, it’s an aggregation of aesthetic histories and troubled theories that would place the human at the centre of relations structuring the “natural” as other; as a physical reality, Earth’s ecosystems have been permanently destabilized by human activity. What follows is the result of studio visits with two artists whose work often begins with the specificity of land and the environments of Iceland, and telescope rapidly out from there to develop frameworks for understanding how we, as humans, position ourselves against and within natural forces.
Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir, Transmission, 2021, The Nordic House. Photograph: Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir
Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir: Magnetic Cacophonies
The Earth’s magnetic field is one of the most powerful forces of nature. It shields all life on Earth from cosmic radiation, solar and galactic, and humans have co-evolved with it. For Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir, the magnetism produced by the Earth’s iron core is a long-standing research preoccupation. In projects that encompass drawing, installation, performance and video, she sets out parameters for artworks to come into being, gathering materials and always following the lead of the provisional objects that become her subjects. This involves working with water, magnets, iron, rocks, trees and other lively entities to see what emerges. Her methodology is almost classically conceptual: she determines the conditions for a work and then lets it unfold with little intervention. In disavowing her agency as the artist, in refusing a teleological approach, she allows a work’s constituent matter room for mutual encounter and influence.
Recent series of paper works, or what would conventionally be called drawings, are more like material performances, incorporating magnetized elements, water and mineral pigments to produce abstractions that resemble maps and topographic forms. The pigments shift according to the flow of water and force of magnetic attraction. Bleeding contour lines, wayward marks, sharp central nodes and radiating washes all mimic the aesthetics of wayfinding technologies, recalling analog cartography and satellite spatial renderings in equal measure. Without referring to actual landscapes, they draw out an idea of imagined space; as spectators to this process, it’s possible to project ourselves into these looping, fluvial aggregations. A topographic view emerges, with water, air, and mineral components shaped by magnetism and gravity, as though the map were drawing itself.
In other works, Anna Rún attends to histories of geomagnetism across human and geologic timescales. Transmission (2021) and Three Norths (2022) use the magnetic needle of a compass to address the Earth’s electromagnetic field as it changes over time. Each installation consists of three rock samples of different ages from different geologic strata, with compass needles suspended above. Since rocks embed the direction and intensity of the magnetic field at the time of their formation, and because the polarity of the Earth has been in flux over eons (although it is largely unchanged during the age of humans), the needles all point in different directions, rather than aligning with what is the current magnetic north. With minimal means, it speaks to the contingency of one’s bodily orientation, unmooring one’s sense of place. Since the cardinal directions—south, east, west, north—can’t truly be understood as stable, the definitional limits of ‘north’ become provisional, not permanent.
A brief digression: the magnetic compass was invented during the Chinese Han dynasty, around 200 BCE, and was made of lodestone, or magnetite ore. Initially its primary use was for divination and it was referred to as a “south pointer,” the desired direction of orientation. It wasn’t until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that compasses became more widely used as tools of military navigation and expedition, on land and at sea. Eventually, it became a technology that enabled travel across oceans at a new scale, ushering in eras of colonial expansion and a vast reorganization of spatial relationships across the planet. At an individual scale, the positioning of oneself within the world also changed. Rather than the multiplanar, 360-degree view that observational wayfinding required,[1] the compass necessitated linear positionality, an opposition between two fixed poles where the compass-holding subject is always centred.
Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir: Root Compass, sketch for Multipolar, 2024, National Gallery of Iceland
In Anna Rún’s latest exhibition, Multipolar, such shifts in orientation are examined in greater detail. Opening at the National Gallery of Iceland this April, it’s a project that uses speculation and science to underscore geomagnetism as a social, political, and environmental force, and will contain her largest selection of works to date. Across the long scales of geologic time, she asks us to imagine a different Earth, where, as she says, “a cacophony of magnetism courses through the planet.” The exhibition is structured around a large installation that encompasses the viewer in a linear grid painted on the walls, floor, and ceiling. With compass points and degree notations marked out, the entire space is conceived as a navigational device, a 360-degree horizon that refutes the possibility of meaningful orientation in a future without the distinction of poles. A second sculpture marks true north (the geographical point at the Earth’s axis) with a red fabric rope bisecting the gallery by slowly winding and rewinding itself, a nod at the imperceptible but continual rotation of the Earth. She is also at work on a large suite of drawings that continue her processual and performative investigations, using more illustrative methods to consider how the magnetic field is used by animals for navigation, a phenomenon that is still being widely studied by scientists.
It is now thought that there have been eras of the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth where there were multiple poles, and new theories demonstrate that a multipolar world transitioned to a dipolar world about 1.7 billion years ago.[2] Even in a dipolar world, the magnetic poles are not fixed but are almost constantly flipping and reversing, typically every few hundred thousand years, something Anna Rún calls “the longest performance on the planet.” Life on Earth evolved with a changing magnetosphere, but present-day navigational technologies did not. Without the protection of the magnetic field, all satellite technologies and the electrical communications grid of the planet would essentially collapse. The instability of magnetic north is also well documented; it’s currently traversing Nunavut territory in Canada’s far northeast, rapidly moving toward Siberia. Given the acute and intense threats to the Earth’s polar regions—resource extraction, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, plastics, toxin accumulation—it’s possible to read this movement as a speculative figure, a fight or flight migration of an invisible force at one of the Earth’s most vulnerable points.
What would it possibly mean to live in a multipolar world? This call to speculation would, for one, upend neo-colonial thinking that determines the global north as a dominant political and economic force. Ideas of “the north” are already elastic; it’s a term of contingencies, balancing histories of colonial exploration, extraction and oppression, with the self-determination of Indigenous communities from around the circumpolar region. In a multipolar world, would a restructuring of direction enable more collective forms of relation and identities less governed by nation-state borders? When the primary point of navigation is always the self—compasses and GPS-enabled smartphones suggest a Cartesian positionality—then all directions remain relative to the device-holding subject. But imagine future humans thriving in a multipolar world with entirely different forms of collective navigational technology! It’s a provocation, one that nods at science fiction narratives and a deep future, but still considers an ethics of sustainability in imagining a world with less binary alignments.
Bryndís Björnsdóttir: spread from blámi book, 2022
Bryndís (dísa) Björnsdóttir: Nature’s Contingency
Coal, crystals, salt licks, sulphur, gunpowder, geothermal landscapes, snails, bauxite—this is an idiosyncratic list of chemical, biological and industrial elements representing many histories of material knowledge. It is also the terrain of Bryndís (dísa) Björnsdóttir’s work, a practice that investigates how biological species, minerals, and technological inventions accrue symbolic meaning through political economies and natural histories. As a researcher, she unearths connections that span time periods and geographies in original, unexpected ways; aesthetically, she presents that work by foregrounding the speculative, imaginative and futurist aspects of historical encounters. Publishing has been a central component of her work from the outset; she ran an artist bookstore, Útúrdúr, for several years and is committed to artists’ books and digital platforms to engage audiences in the wider dissemination of ideas, both outside and within exhibition contexts.
Conceptually, much of dísa’s work addresses the positionality of Iceland as an island in a global context, often by intertwining the study of outer space with the study of the deep sea. The blámi (or blueness) seriesaddresses the proximity of the sea, and its simultaneities, by unravelling many different aspects of “blue”—as a concept, symbol, or feeling. The series includes installation and video works, and its speculations are well-refined in the artist’s book of the same title. Imagery of blue clay is rendered through an electron microscope, such that the infinitesimal details become abstract glitches, like a freeze-frame of ice crystals or permanent TV static, which are combined with short, factual fragments of text. The rhythmic mixing of subjects is highly unnerving and sublime: chemical contaminants interact with bodies and biological processes; the production of blue pigment (an accident) leads to the invention of the process of distilling cyanide; a true blue pigment, not found in nature (the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky are, after all, illusions produced by distance); and “blue growth” recalls the excesses of late capitalism, as corporations rush to claim mineral deposits from untouched ocean depths. Together, they underscore the ocean as a figure embedded in the human psyche through unparalleled metaphors—distance, longing, infinity, the unknown, mythology, mystery, health, danger, so many more—even as they’ve been paradoxically reduced in scale by the immediacy of global communication and the realization of speculative valuations.
Many of the latent ideas in the blueness series around the interconnections between scientific discovery, technological development, colonial histories, and neo-colonial mineral extraction resurface in IMMUNE/ÓNÆM (2020-2022), a collaborative curatorial project exploring ecological microspheres across Nordic ecosystems through an exhibition, publication and online platform. Seven participating collectives and artists read and responded to Travels in Iceland, an eighteenth-century, highly comprehensive report on five years of life in Iceland, commissioned by Danish authorities ostensibly to better understand the available resources and the establishment of a trade monopoly. At the time, the island’s geographic and economic isolation was assured through occupying powers; then, as now, the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions were desired for resources, and trade routes formed broad constellations around their end nodes.
Bryndís Björnsdóttir: Image of Vallonia excentrica in a macroscope, 2007. Photograph: Þorkell Lindberg Þórarinsson
The resulting projects found long-distance, deeply connected parallels in ecological and social histories of colonization that are resonant present-day. The HIGHS Collective—an acronym of herring, iron, gunpowder, humans, and sugar, collaboratively led by Jamaican dancer Olando Whyte and Swedish artist Rut Karin Zettergren—triangulates Iceland with Jamaica and Newfoundland through the histories of salted cod and ackee, foods used as part of the slave trade. Salt was historically lacking in Iceland, so when fish was exported it was mostly dried. Remarkably, “in 1760, the Danish King commanded that one person of foreign origin was required to live in each Icelandic harbor, so as to teach Icelanders how to make salt fish the same way as in Newfoundland. There the salt fish industry had originated and bloomed when salt fish which was found not to be suitable for the general market could be used in the transatlantic trade as a food source for enslaved people.”[3] For all its obvious economic and colonizing motivations, the demand is an odd encouragement of cross-cultural exchange; what possibilities of resistance emerge through histories of such forged connections when occupation is upended through the exchange of cultural knowledge? HIGHS develops these research threads into projects that imagine futurist possibilities for more radical, anti-colonial outcomes. Here, the centuries-old idea of establishing salt production in Iceland, as documented in the report, is transformed into a speculative possibility for lab-grown food contained for future space travel.
Inspired by Afrofuturism and the historical and present-day activities of NASA, Contingency Sample is a new collaboration that dísa and the HIGHS Collective are developing to further examine material, transatlantic connections between Jamaica, Iceland and Greenland. The title refers to the samples of moon rock that Apollo 11 astronauts collected during the 1969 lunar landing (training for which was undertaken in Iceland), collected hurriedly to ensure that at least one sample would return. In concept, a contingency sample is a kind of synecdoche, where a fragment stands in for the whole. What then, in our fumbling present, would a contingency sample for Earth be? The project, which is set to be exhibited in summer 2025 at Verksmiðjan, Hjalteyri, in North Iceland, examines mineral elements, including bauxite, sulfur, iron and others that connect histories of colonial infrastructure with future alternatives to the neo-colonial explorations of the present. Narratives connecting the deep sea with outer space are both speculative and wonderous, as well as capitalist and extractive, but at the core is a debate around differing ideas of the commons: are these spaces possible to protect and what would a future look like if they were? Both are internationally legislated, but such laws are increasingly being challenged in the name of exploration, a thin veil that neatly covers for extraction interests alongside billionaire tourism.
There is an interesting term for organisms that live by surviving in excesses of temperature, salinity, radiation or toxicity: extremophile. Among these are snails, which can be found living in sulfur-rich geothermal areas around the planet, including in Iceland adjacent to volcanoes and in the deep sea alongside hydrothermal vents.[4] In the short video Sulfur Blaze (2022), dísa traced the impact of this chemical element by making substantial and idiosyncratic observations about its history and use, while the camera crawled along a purple plastic surface, the inside of an empty jacuzzi, to connect the healing appeal of thermal waters with the toxicity of the same chemical element. The work contains a short, direct reference to Donna Haraway—“We are all compost, says Donna ”—referring to the theorist’s call to consider our human selves as part of a multispecies world, a vision where all species and living things “are at stake to each other.”[5] Haraway’s multispecies thinking holds high currency in contemporary art, rightfully so, but re-reading this call for compost as a mobilizing term now is difficult. Year after year, global temperatures rise, fires and floods that were once catastrophes are horrifically routine, the extinction and extermination of life on Earth is happening. We are indeed compost, but the results of this toxic composting of plastics and chemicals on a global scale remains unknown—eventually we will all become extremophiles as a necessity of survival.
We know that distinctions between the natural and industrial are increasingly unstable, as technologies of extraction and imminent ecological collapse shape discourses of study, popular influence, and protest movements alike. In the last decade, ideas about multispecies relations, philosophies of new materialism, theories of the speculative and the weird have all come to the fore. In this context, where nature and culture are consistently theorized as inseparable, one of the contributions of art might be to articulate collective responsibilities toward the matter(s) of the Earth, even if it takes action beyond aesthetics to demand change. Taking elemental subjects on their own terms, not representing them aesthetically but engaging with them such as they are, is an ethical imperative, one that demands viewers likewise attend to the tiny details and cosmic forces of ecosystems in parallel.
The article was first published in Art in Iceland, no 4, 2024
[1] For example, Polynesian seafarers could navigate long journeys across the Pacific through knowledge of the stars, planets and swells but needed to be constantly observing the world as it unfolded around them, a kind of continually unfolding navigation.
[2] This date is from the following study: P. E. Driscoll, “Simulating 2 Ga of geodynamo history”, Geophysical Research Letters 43 (2016): doi:10.1002/2016GL068858.
[3] Olando Whyte and Rut Karin Zettergren in IMMUNE/ÓNÆM, ed. Bryndís Björnsdóttir (Reykjavík, 2022).
[4] See for example: Jason Daley, “Deep-Sea Snail Builds Its Own Ironclad Suit of Armor. But Even That Can’t Protect It From Ocean Mining”, Smithsonian Magazine, 25 July 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/deep-sea-snail-iron-shell-first-creature-declared-endangered-ocean-mining-180972727/. And: https://www.nioz.nl/en/blog/niozatsea-iceage-kr-kolbeinsey-ridge-expedition-to-hydrothermal-vents-near-iceland
[5] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
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