The Icelandic Pavilion 2024

— Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir

The Icelandic Art Center is delighted to announce that Reykjavik-based artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir will represent Iceland at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (20 April – 24 November 2024). She will collaborate with American curator Dan Byers to realise her presentation, which will be an exhibition of new sculptural and installation works. The Icelandic Pavilion will be located in the Artigliere in the Arsenale for the second time in 2024.

As of today, I have been living in Venice, Italy for 17 weeks and 2 days. Ironically, This city which far from exudes home-like energy, has become my home. When I left Iceland in April, I moved out of my apartment in Hlíðar where I lived for the past 5 years. It's incredible how much stuff you can accumulate in 5 years. Drawers full of broken electronics, batteries that may or may not work, shoes so far in the back of the closet that you forgot you owned, various kitchen utensils and tupperware boxes that guests have left behind and forgotten to pick up over the years. Come to think of it, I've never actually bought my own tupperware boxes. Instead the universe has been handing them out to me at regular intervals in every shape and size,even some that seem to be part of the same set. In my apartment in Venice; however, there is only one tupperware box usually filled with yesterday's pasta.Maybe I should start having more visitors. In this home, kitchen utensils in general are in short supply. There are four espresso cups and five wine glasses, almost none of them matching. There is one wooden cutting board, which tastes like onion no matter how much you attempt to scrub the flavor away. The pieces of apple I put in my oatmeal in the morning always have an onion aftertaste. I don’t hate it anymore, I guess one can get used to anything. I have even mastered baking my notorious olive bread without measuring spoons, without measuring the deciliters, and no longer need to use a kitchen scale. There isn't even a mixer involved. I knead the dough by hand as if it’s actually the 1600s, as most other things in this apartment suggest. Our apartment consists of Baroque furniture that is quite literally falling apart, a fireplace that we are forbidden to use due to the city's status as a UNESCO World Heritage site, and wooden beams on the ceiling covered in mysterious marks as if they've been cut with a knife or perhaps an ax. Then of course there is the ghost, I felt her presence immediately during my very first night here. She appears to me in paralyzing fear in the dark, scratching within the walls, murky water appearing on the floor at night along with dead animals collecting in our garden. She regularly wakes me up at three in the morning and then again at six. She keeps me up at night, and regularly gives me nightmares that are so vivid and attuned to my psyche that they haunt me for days. When I crawl into bed at night and look up at the centuries-old beams on my bedroom ceiling, a pale green nebula stares back at me. The people who lived here before me have glued glow-in-the-dark stars on and between the beams, possibly to overcome the fear of the dark that comes with living in a haunted apartment.

“Venice is like Disneyland”, a gondolier said to me while taking me on a ride through the iconic canals. He was dressed in a blue and white striped shirt, with a beige coloured boater hat decorated with a lilac polyester ribbon, like he just jumped out of a cartoon, a caricature of his own culture. “No one is going to live here in a few years”. The guilt of being a tourist in Venice bloomed in my chest.

The theme of the Venice biennial this year Stranieri Ovunque or Foreigners Everywhere, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, examines the bitter human experience of being seen as, or feeling like an 'outsider'. Unwelcome, cast out, different. Strange. The Italian word straniero, which translates to foreigner, comes from the word strano, which can mean on one hand stranger and on the other hand strange, or weird. Many of the works in the exhibition therefore deal with the experiences of various marginalized groups; immigrants, queer people, disabled people, indigenous people, displaced people, people of various races who have been discriminated against. The works are therefore more often than not coming from artists who are creating art based on their most painful and difficult experiences. As a result, this year's exhibition is quite heavy in many ways and repeatedly leaves you with a deep sigh in your lungs and a profound sense of hopelessness. But my experience has always been that the strongest artworks are those that affect your psyche. Make you feel something.

The theme and title of the 60th international exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia is Foreigners Everywhere. In the main exhibition, at both Arsenale and Giardini, as well as in national pavilions, migration is widely highlighted alongside traditions and ways of living for indigenous peoples around the world. Many artists utilise their religions and traditions as the framework to define their experiences and identities in the art works and installations on display this Biennale season, drawing close attention to the ethnic legacies and social milieus they come from. 

I am an Icelandic girl living in an Italian city, far from Iceland's freezing temperatures,  absorbing the sun's rays and eating gelato. The sun sits high in the sky; it is the middle of the summer and I am surrounded by extraordinary food, drinks, and above all, art. Yet, in the last few days I have done nothing but binge-watch the highly addictive television series The Vampire Diaries.

Sigurður Guðjónsson

Curator: Mónica Bello

Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir: Chromo Sapiens

Curator: Birta Guðjónsdóttir

Egill Sæbjörnsson: Ugh and Boogar

Curator: Stefanie Böttcher

Christoph Büchel: THE MOSQUE

Curator: Nína Magnúsdóttir

Katrín Sigurðardóttir: Foundation

Curator: Mary Ceruti and Ilaria Bonacossa

Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson: Under DeconstructionCurator: Ellen Blumenstein

Ragnar Kjartansson: The End

Curators: Markus Thór Andrésson & Dorothée Kirch

Steingrímur Eyfjörð: The Golden Plover Has Arrived

Curator: Hanna Styrmisdóttir

Icelandic artists took part in the Venice Biennale on and off between 1960-1984.