Current

For her exhibition Green Growth at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, marking the conclusion of her residency, Steinunn Önnudóttir is creating a site-specific installation that explores the fragile balance between decay and growth. She engages with the visual and material language of these processes, making visible the subtle, often overlooked dynamics that permeate urban space. 

Sequences Real-Time Art Festival is seeking a curator or curatorial team for its 13th international art biennale , scheduled to take place in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 2027.

Marta's talk will be about creating an exhibition based on archives and contemporary art, curating exhibitions of ephemeral art and the Venice Biennale with Ukrainian artists during far right governance.

 
The Icelandic Art Prize 2025 was awarded on March 20 in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions.

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.

CALL FOR PROJECTS - 9th Edition of the Photographic Encounters of ViaSilva 

Les Rencontres Photographiques de ViaSilva - “the ViaSilva Photographic Encounters” - is an artistic initiative created in 2016 and organized by the association Les Ailes de Caïus, the public urban planning company SPLA ViaSilva, and the publishing house Les Editions de Juillet.

Its purpose is to annually invite photographers to participate in residencies within the ViaSilva area, a neighborhood under construction on the outskirts of Rennes, Brittany. This land, historically agricultural, is now rapidly transforming and urbanizing, exemplifying the global phenomenon of expanding metropolitan regions across the world.

At the end of their exploratory stage, they exhibit their work in various Breton venues : the Net Plus Gallery, metro stations, city parks, and several regional train stations. Some of them are determined by the current and annually evolving partnership agreements. These exhibitions are accompanied by the publication of a monograph in collaboration with Les Editions de Juillet.

In 2025 (year of residency) and 2026 (year of presentation), the association Les Ailes de Caïus, which oversees the project, plans to collaborate with Arctic Lab and ArtsIceland to offer the long-term residency (ON edition of 2026) to an Icelandic artist.

Following a review of the candidates' personal work and backgrounds, the jury - consisting of representatives from the three organizing organizations - will carefully consider projects that could complement the artistic proposals presented in the ViaSilva area over the past 8 years.

KEY INFORMATION :

• Application deadline : was 15th of March 2025 ; now extended to 25th of March 2025!

• Residency of at least a month between May and July 2025 ; 

• Exhibition and publication between June and August 2026 ; 

• The laureate will be granted free accommodation and transportation, a residency budget of €5000 and access to an electric bike on-site ; 

• Proficiency in French is not mandatory but appreciated, as the artist must be able to work independently during their residency. A certain level of proficiency in English is essential.

MORE DETAILED INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND ON THE ONLINE APPLICATION FORM:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScNd7ayBPBbRVDRiJxQZA1ikzkrKxpHYAxZYo1QV-1v2k64-Q/viewform

Please contact Cécile for any information:  cecile.lombardie@ailesdecaius.fr

Seven are nominated for the Icelandic Art Prize 2025. The awards are presented in two categories: Artist of the Year and the Motivational Award of the Year. The Icelandic Art Prize will be presented for the 8th time on Thursday, March 20th, at Iðnó.

The Icelandic Art Center has allocated travel grants to 30 artists in the first distribution of the year 2025, totaling 1.8 million Icelandic króna.

The exhibition Outside Looking In, Inside Looking Out, has travelled to several countries and will finally be set up in May in Tokyo, Japan. Icelandic Art Center has travel with a chest full of art around the world, making its first stop in New York in May 2023. The chest is not only an art-crate for transportation but also acts as an art exhibition that showcase works by established and emerging Icelandic artists.

Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir´s exhibition, That´s a Very Large Number - A Commerzbau, commissioned for the Icelandic Pavilion in Venice 2024 will open at the National Gallery of Iceland in February 2025.

On a cold and windy day in early December, we met 31-year-old Icelandic artist Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir. She welcomed us into her colorful, cozy studio in Laugardalur, Reykjavík, located near the fine arts department of the Icelandic University of the Arts. Kristín's artistic practice is vibrant and humorous, yet also enigmatic. Her work weaves together her inner landscape with contemporary events and mindsets. We sat down with her to discuss her creative process.

Text: Auður Mist Eydal
Video: Nadia Vallano

An online workshop in English for applicants applying for the upcoming deadline of the Icelandic Visual Arts Fund on Wednesday February 15 at 10:00

The art scene is thriving in Iceland, and it can truly be said that the year starts with great energy in the visual arts.

19th Tallinn Print Triennial is looking for a production assistant

Borderland Poetics: Rewilding Tongues announces an open call for the production assistant position at 19th Tallinn Print Triennial.

The production assistant position is an opportunity for emerging cultural professionals based in Finland, Iceland or Wales to gain first-hand international work experience and contribute to preparing and producing a major art event. This is a paid opportunity that promotes cooperation between Wales and the Nordic-Baltic region.

Hamraborg Festival returns for its fifth edition. Hamraborg Festival is an artists-run festival happening every year in the heart of Kópavogur. This year it will be held 29th August - 5th September.  Deadline for applications is February 12th, 15:00. 

The deadline for the Icelandic Visual Arts Fund is Monday, February 24, at 16:00.

The Stephan G. Stephansson Icelandic Society has partnered with the Icelandic National League of North America (INLNA) to launch a new artist residency award in the name of Stephansson, an esteemed Icelandic poet. Supported by the INLNA, six weeks of time in the Buttermaker’s House Artist Residency will be made available for 1-3 eligible artists. Artists with Icelandic heritage or artists of any heritage working on projects relating to Iceland may apply. Emerging and established artists are encouraged to apply. The Buttermaker’s House is a fully restored historic farm house originally built in 1913 including bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and work space. Submissions close March 1st, winners will be announced April 1st. 

Iceland Photography Festival is an international festival held every other year, now from January 17th to 26th. The festival takes place at fourteen exhibition venues in the capital region. The festival directors are Katrín Elvarsdóttir and Pétur Thomsen. The festival lasts for nine days, but most of the exhibitions run much longer. The festival's website, www.tipf.is features the schedule and links to all exhibitions and events.

The first guest of Talk Series this year is artist Yann Toma. He will give a talk at the Reykjavík Art Museum - Hafnarhús, on Thursday January 23rd at 20:00.

Toma is a French contemporary artist and a researcher. He positions his work and his reflection on the border of the artistic expression, always involved in political and social events. Toma places the artist as responsible for social debate. As a mediator he can invite people to get involved, to take part of a collaborative energy. Toma collaborates with entreprises, political scientists as well as philosophers. With projects always anchored in a societal context, Yann Toma's fundamental idea is to rebuild the link. Connecting with ourselves, our collective memory, and the transforming power generated by the mass, art is used here as a means of materializing energy flows but also as an energy in its own right.

The Icelandic Art Center awards travel grants to Icelandic or Iceland based visual artists.

The Icelandic Art Center is pleased to announce that Reykjavík-based artist Ásta Fanney

Sigurðardóttir will represent Iceland at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di

Venezia in 2026.

Conference on Contemporary Art Policy in Iceland held by the Ministry of Culture and The Icelandic Art Center.

The keynote speaker at the conference is Mikkel Bogh, Professor at the Copenhagen University and former Director at the National Gallery of Denmark and former Rector of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Mr. Bogh willgive a talk on cultural policy, the new museum reform in Denmark and new understandings of what museum practice is and can be.

The conference is held in The House of Collections at the National Gallery of Iceland, Monday December 9 between 15:00-17:00.

Sunday the 24th of November marks the last day of the Icelandic Pavilion this year at the Venice Biennale in Italy. Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir´s exhibition "This is a Very Large Number (Commerzbau)" has been on view for seven months.

The exhibition will open again in Iceland in February, at the National Gallery of Iceland.

Austria's representative at this year's Venice Biennale is the artist Anna Jermolaewa. She was born in the Soviet Union in 1970 but fled the country at the age of nineteen and settled in Austria. She was one of the founding members of an opposition party in the Soviet Union and one of the editors of a newspaper that was highly critical of the authorities. Jermolaewa and her colleagues were thus involved in a criminal case where they were accused of inciting opposition to the authorities and of spreading propaganda and that is why she decided to escape the country.

Submissions for nomination proposals are now open for the Icelandic Visual Art Prize, set to be awarded for the eighth time in 2025. 

In recent years, there has been significant progress in terms of diversity and accessibility within the art world, which has historically been rather homogenous. Western exhibition spaces have traditionally been dominated by works from cisgender, heterosexual, non-disabled white men. However, this mindset has been shifting and improving over the past few decades, thanks to individuals and projects dedicated to promoting inclusion within the art world.

In October 2025, the Sequences art festival will take place for the twelfth time. The curator of the festival is Daría Sól Andrews.

To mark the 25th anniversary of the joint Nordic embassy complex in Berlin, the exhibition Summation reflects upon Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s words “Each autonomous, and yet together”, formulated in 1999 as the guiding principle for the embassies’ unique collaboration in their new united premises.

The following article reflects the author’s experience visiting the exhibition Thresholds on the island La Certosa in the Venetian Lagoon. The exhibition is part of this year’s German Pavilion curated by Çağla Ilk, on view until the 24th of November. Some incidents and encounters are fictitious.

The Greek-Icelandic art festival Head2Head will take place across various locations in Reykjavík

Artist Andreas Brunner has been selected from a group of applicants for a residency at the guest studio Künstlerhaus Bethanien in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, Germany. For the past five years, Icelandic visual artists and visual artists with a strong connection to the Icelandic art scene have been able to apply to stay in the studio.

If I had to use one adjective to describe the current Venice Biennale, I think I would choose the word refreshing. Don't get me wrong, the works are often very moving, as the main subject of this year's Bienniale is the struggle of many, different, marginalized groups. I use the word refreshing to describe my experience of this particular Biennale in the context of previous Biennales, and there are several reasons for that.

Icelandic or Iceland-based visual artists can apply for travel grants for exhibitions, projects, and residences abroad taking place around October — January. The deadline is October 1.

Wooden piles, limestone, brick, and Istrian stone, the four materials used to build the UNESCO World Heritage Site Venice, Italy. This is where I reside during my two-month internship at the 60th International Biennale Arte. The sounds of chatter echo in the narrow streets where your eyes come across historic Renaissance frescos amidst medieval architecture. The amount of beauty is inspiring; at times overwhelming, yet amongst the charm and medieval nostalgia, something feels peculiar. It hits me as I sit below a Platano tree in San Giacomo Square, its bark reminiscent of a Van Gogh watercolor painting. If this city is built on wooden piles in the Mediterranean Sea, how do the sparse trees survive on this island? How does a seed grow through limestone and brick without soil in the middle of a lagoon? I wonder if it´s a coincidence that the biannual festival resides in the island's greenest quarters, accurately named Giardini or “The Gardens”. With the ongoing genocide in Palestine, I am reminded of the resilience of artists creating in conditions that are now quite the antithesis of the lush biennale gardens.

Icelandic visual artists, or artists with a significant connection to the Icelandic art scene, can apply for a funded one-year residency at  in Berlin. The residency period is May 1, 2025 – April 15, 2026.

Art in Iceland is looking to welcome a new member to the Editorial Board for the fifth issue of the magazine, to be published in March 2025. As part of the Editorial Board this individual will contribute their knowledge and experience to co-leading the editorial program and production of the magazine with current board members. This is a freelance, compensated position with the opportunity to influence the ongoing development of the magazine. This includes engaging energetically, creatively and practically with significant ideas in contemporary art in Iceland, internationally, and at the intersection of these contexts.

Sigurður Guðjónsson opened his solo exhibition Scopes of Inner Transit in Francisco Carolinum art museum in Linz Austria on August 30. Curator is Susanne Watzenboeck.

The Nordic Art Fair CHART will take place from 29 August — 01 September, with a VIP preview on 29 August, at Charlottenborg in the heart of Copenhagen by Kongens Nytorv. Three Icelandic galleries will take part in the art fair along with many artists. CHART 2024 will focus on bringing established, internationally-renowned artists in the Nordics, together with the next generation of rising stars.



BERG Contemporary presents two artists of different generations and media, John Zurier and Þórdís Erla Zoëga.



i8’s presentation at Chart 2024 features artworks by established artists associated with the gallery’s history. The exhibition showcases important works from each artist’s respective practice spanning several decades, as well as more recent creations.

The artists are Birgir Andrésson, Ingólfur Arnarsson, Ólafur Elíasson, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Kristján Guðmundsson, Sigurður Guðmundsson, Roni Horn, Callum Innes, Ragnar Kjartansson, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Karin Sander, Lawrence Weiner.



The art fair partners with Louisiana Channel and screens a number of video interviews recorded with artists exhibiting at CHART 2024, such as Ragnar Kjartansson, Roni Horn, Karin Sander and Sigurður Guðmundsson.



Þula will exhibit a duo presentation by two artists: Áslaug Íris Katrín Friðjónsdóttir and Davíð Örn Halldórsson. Both artists approach their work with fluent abstract forms.

For the Performance Programme at CHART 2024, Margrét Bjarnadóttir will perform ‘PEOPLE PLEASE.’ During the performance, a group of people will walk around Kongens Nytorv with protest signs that have text pieces by the artist written on them. Unlike protest signs which normally aim to be clear and direct and not open to misunderstanding, here, the messages are deliberately left open and ambiguous.

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.

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.

The Icelandic Art Center is facilitating an online workshop

in English for applicants applying for the upcoming deadline of the Icelandic

Visual Arts Fund.

Melanie Ubaldo has been selected from a group of applicants for a three month residency program at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. 

The residency will run from June – August 2025. The residency program includes 24-hour access to a private furnished studio space; regular studio visits from Visiting Critics; Field Trips to museums, galleries, and other cultural venues; and participation in Artist Talks. Residents become part of a growing network of international artists and curators who are ISCP alumni. An ISCP residency has often led to critical advancement inthe practice of the artist and curators in residence.

“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.

In this episode of Icelandic Art Center’s Out there podcast Becky and Tinna speak with artists Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir and Unnar Örn, who are board members at Safnasafnið, The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum. The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum was founded in 1995 by Níels Hafstein and Magnhildur Sigurðardóttir in Svalbardseyri, in north Iceland. For over 30 years the founders and board of the museum have focused their attention on collecting work, and often extensive bodies of works, by artists whose contributions to art have existed outside the cultural mainstream and collections, otherwise considered folk, naïve or outsider. We discuss the role of the museum, some of the language around categorizing art and artists, and the summer exhibitions.

The deadline for the autumn application round in 2024 of The Visual Arts Fund is 16.00 on Monday, August 19.

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 29th biennial Reykjavík Arts Festival takes place from the 1st to the 16th of June, 2024. The celebration includes 38 diverse exhibitions, performances, and concerts held within the capital region, as well as various locations around Iceland.

The Huet Repolt residency in Belgium will offer its yearly residency period in 2025 to an Icelandic artist.

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. 

Icelandic or Iceland-based visual artists can apply for travel grants for exhibitions, projects, and residences abroad taking place around June — September 2024. The deadline is June 1.

In the new episode of Icelandic Art Center’s Out there podcast Becky and Tinna speak with art historian and curator Heiðar Kári Rannversson about his work locally and internationally, and recently opened exhibitions Sóley Ragnarsdóttir, Queen of Hearts and Þór Vigfússon, Numbers, places in Gerðarsafn.

Icelandic Art Center announces an open call for a three-month residency grant at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP).

The Icelandic Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.

Artist Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir presents That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau at La Biennale di Venezia, taking place from 20 April – 24 November 2024. This uncanny exhibition, curated by Dan Byers, features an intriguing selection of new sculptures and installations, which animate the strange relationships formed between us and our world of mass-produced objects. The Icelandic Pavilion is located in the Artigliere in the Arsenale for the second time. 

Una Björg Magnúsdóttir is set to open her final exhibition, “Lost Manuals” on the 11th of April 2024 in Berlin, during her closing month at Künstlerhaus Bethanienand residency, which the artist commenced in the spring of 2023.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2024 was awarded on March 14th in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions. 

The Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum and the Living Art Museum have come together in collaboration with The Nordic House and initiated a symposium focused on the collection of outsider art. The symposium will examine the environment of museums with specific goals and collection values, their role within the ecosystem of art, and where they are headed.

Artist and coordinator of the Icelandic Art Prize Tinna Guðmundsdóttir  joins Becky & Tinna to discuss the nominations for the 2024 Icelandic Art Prize awards.

It is with great joy that the Visual Arts Council announces the nominations for the Icelandic Art Prize awards for 2024. The award will be presented for the seventh time on March 14th at Iðnó, Reykjavík.

The Icelandic Art Prize will take place for the seventh time on March 14 in Iðnó.

The program starts with performances and a „Welcome drink“ at 19:30, followed by the award ceremony at 20:00.

The first guest of Talk Series this year is Dr. Sabeth Buchmann, a Professor of Modern and Postmodern Art and the Head of the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Due to a system malfunction the deadline for the Visual Arts Fund has extended until Tuesday February 13 at 16.00.

Una Björg Magnúsdóttir grants us a glimpse to the other side of the coin, in her studio at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Una is a grantee of Icelandic Art Center. In April this year you can see her solo show at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Artist Egill Sæbjörnsson joins Becky & Tinna to discuss his solo exhibit at the National Gallery of Iceland titled Egill Sæbjörnsson and Infinite Friends of the Universe. In the exhibition, Egill invites an infinite number of friends to join in an instance of togetherness in the endless playroom of art. The exhibition is on view until February 25th 2024, so make sure you make the visit whilst you can!

The Icelandic Art Center offers assistance with application preparation and information
presentation for the upcoming fund deadline.

The Reykjavík Art Book Fair returns this 23rd to 26th May. The fair will be held at the Reykjavík Art Museum - Hafnarhús.

The Icelandic Art Center is pleased to share the title and further details of Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir’s presentation for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2024. The Reykjavík-based artist will present That’s a Very Large Number — A Commerzbau by Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, an exhibition of new sculpture and installation works, curated by American curator Dan Byers. That’s a Very Large Number —A Commerzbau will respond to the Icelandic Pavilion and the Biennale Arte 2024 itself, with an uncanny exhibition that playfully subverts expectations of beauty, value, and utility within the framework of a global art event.

At the end of January we will welcome Isabella Rjeille co-curator of the next New Museum Triannele as a guest at our Visitors Program. Isabella will visit artists and curators for a few days. The Visitors Program is an important part of Icelandic Art Center's activities.

Application deadline February 1

The deadline for the first application round in 2024 is at 16.00 Monday, February 12. 

The role of the fund is to award project grants in the field of visual arts and art research.

It's the last day to catch Billboard Commercial Break - Art in Public Space by Haraldur Jónsson.

For three years running Billboard commissions artists to create an artwork in public space in collaboration with Y gallery and Reykjavík Art Museum.

During the period 1.-3.January 2024 there has been a Commercial Break on Billboards 550 screens across the city of Reykjavík. During this time Haraldur Jónsson has presented an exhibition of a new work called Ummyndanir which has revealed a new chapter each day since the new year began.

A selection committee which was appointed to review the applications with representatives from Y gallery, Reykjavík Art Museum, Billboard and The Association of Icelandic Artists. The committees selection results in the represented artist for each iteration of the project.

In this episode Becky & Tinna meet artist Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir to discuss Null Island (Nulleyja), her current mid-career retrospective at Reykjavík Art Museum – Kjarvalsstaðir.

An open call for nomination proposals for the Icelandic Visual Art Prize, which will be awarded for the seventh time in 2024.

In this episode of the Icelandic Art Center’s podcast “Out There” Tereza Eyrún Hofová takes over the podcast and talks to Teo Ala-Ruona, Johhan Rosenberg, and Netti Nüganen.

The Sequences Biennale opened on October 13 with an extensive program and exhibition openings with over 50 artists participating.

On Friday 13 October, Sequences Art Biennial opens its 11th edition ‘Can’t See’, which will run until 22 October in Reykjavik, Iceland. Curated by Marika Agu, Maria Arusoo, Kaarin Kivirähk, and Sten Ojavee from the Estonian Centre of Contemporary Art, ‘Can’t See’ features over 50 of the most exciting emerging and established artists from the Nordic and Baltic regions, interwoven with visionary international artists.

Steinunn Önnudóttir awarded one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson joins Becky and Þórhildur Tinna in this episode and they travel along the spectrum of emotions including love and understanding, fear satire and fakery.

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.

Billboard presents an open call for artists to create artwork in public space in collaboration with Y gallery and Reykjavík Art Museum.

In this episode Becky & Tinna critically unpack For Those Who Couldn’t Cross the Sea with curator Elham Fakouri and Sabina Westerholm, director of the Nordic House.

Sequences Biennial is delighted to announce the full list of participating artists for its 11th edition, which will open to the public from 13. – 22. October in Reykjavík, Iceland. Titled Can’t See, the Biennial explores the ever-growing threat of ecological destruction by delving into spaces that cannot be perceived by the human eye, from the depths of the sea and layers of the soil, imagining the debris of the past and visions of the future.

Icelandic visual artists, or artists with a significant connection to the Icelandic art scene, can apply for a funded one-year residency at  in Berlin. The residency period is May 1, 2024 – April 15, 2025.

The deadline for the second application round in 2023 is at 16.00 Monday, August 21.

The long-awaited, but very short, summer in Iceland not only brings with it 24 hours of sunlight but also an abundance of visual art exhibitions at various sites around the island. The ring road circles Iceland and connects most towns and villages. It is a splendid path to utilize and navigate various exhibition spaces and outdoor artwork.

In this episode Becky and Tinna speak with Sigurður Guðmundsson, artist and co-founder of the international contemporary art museum ARS LONGA, initiated with Þór Vigfússon and Ineke Guðmundsson in 2021 and based in Djúpivogur.

World Weather Network: Einar Falur‘s Daily Weather Reports draw to an end

Kristín Helga Ríkharðsdóttir has been selected from a group of applicants for a three month residency program at International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). The residency will run from June – August 2024. The residency program includes 24-hour access to a private furnished studio space; regular studio visits from Visiting Critics; Field Trips to museums, galleries, and other cultural venues; and participation in Artist Talks. Residents become part of a growing network of international artists and curators who are ISCP alumni. An ISCP residency has often led to critical advancement in the practice of the artist and curators in residence.

The Icelandic Art Center visited Amsterdam last week with the nomadic exhibition curated by H.K. Rannversson. The exhibition Outside Looking In, Inside Looking Out will travel to around the world in the coming year with the next stop in Finland this Autumn. The exhibition showcases works by established and emerging artists from Iceland. This exhibition project is a collaborative platform between the Icelandic Art Center, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs & Business Iceland, promoting visual art from Iceland abroad.

The 11th edition of Sequences Biennial, entitled Can’t See, will take place over ten days, from 13-22 October 2023 in Reykjavík, Iceland. The festival will bring visitors together at the darkest time of the year, for an exchange of energy and ideas, with a programme featuring exhibitions, performances, lectures, walks, guided tours and more.

In October 2021, the artist collective Lucky 3 presented one of their most remarkable performances during the Sequences Real Time Art Festival. Darren Mark, Dýrfinna Benita Basalan and Melanie Ubaldo silently mopped the floor of the artist-run space OPEN for 8 hours straight, occasionally uttering the Filipino word puti meaning white in English. The moment a white person entered the space, one artist from the trio would mop the floor around them, giving that person the impression of not being welcome.

This summer kicks off with a number of exhibitions slated to open worldwide and presenting artworks by Ragnar Kjartansson, Shoplifter, Rúrí, Elín Hansdóttir, Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir and Heiða Helgadóttir. Furthermore the longterm Nordic Art and Culture Initiative opens in Buffalo AKG Art Museum in June.

Iceland’s representative at the Venice Biennale 2022, , opens a large-scale installation at the . The exhibition is titled “Conductive Path” and takes over the entire 2000 sq m space. In preparations of the exhibition, Sigurður and philosopher Jóhannes Dagsson sat down to discuss the context of the work, time and energy. 

As a part of many event in the divserse programme of Stockholm Art Week, Market Art Fair is taking place May 12-14 in two locations in in exquisite Stockholm.

This episode of Out There features the exhibition series THE WHEEL I – V, represented by Kristín Dagmar Jóhannesdóttir curator of “THE WHEEL V: All is Well”, the last and final iteration of the 5 year annual series, and Haraldur Jónsson visual artist and chairman of the exhibition committee of the Reykjavík Association of Sculptors.

The project assistant positions are an opportunity for students or recent graduates to gain 1 or 2 month long first-hand work experience and contribute to preparing and producing a major art event. This is a paid opportunity that promotes cooperation between the Nordic and Baltic countries.

Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir's exhibition opening which marks the end of her one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien

Icelandic Art Center is pleased to announce an open call for a new three-month artist’s residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). The residency will run from June – August 2024.

The new episode focuses on the artist-led studio and exhibition space OPEN with its members, Arnar Ásgeirsson and Örn Alexander who came to the studio to speak to Becky and Þórhildur Tinna.

In the new Out There episode Becky and Tinna converse with Pari Stave, director at Skaftfell Art Center.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2023 was awarded on March 16 in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions.

Here are some of the exhibitions and events around the world
in 2023 that have had Icelandic artists participating, some even yet to come.
Whether it is exhibitions, festivals or events these are the artists from
Iceland that have been presented internationally this year. You can also follow
us on our  or  as we list the
artists presenting abroad regularly in a series of stories throughout the year.
You can also just revisit our website where we will be making updates. If
you are based in one of these places, or are planning to visit, do make your
way and check out the artists that are on now or soon.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2023 will be awarded on March 16 in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions.

The new episode focuses on Tracing Fragments with an exhibition review with the exhibition’s Curator Daría Sól Andrews and Brynja Sveinsdóttir, Director at Gerðarsafn.

One of the Icelandic Art Center’s tasks is to facilite information about local fundraising options and other opportunities for the Icelandic visual art field.

Recently Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir relocated to Berlin from Reykjavík for a one-year residency at
Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The Icelandic Art Center and Künstlerhaus Bethanien
have since 2020 collaborated on granting Icelandic artists the opportunity to
attend the residency.

In this episode Becky and Tinna talk with Maria Alyokhina, or Masha from Pussy Riot, about the exhibition Velvet Terrorism in Kling & Bang Gallery which has generated important response in the local and international context.

The deadline for the first application round in 2023 is at 16.00 Monday February 20.

We would like to extend a huge thank you for all the collaborations, dialogues, and support throughout the year of 2022. We at the Icelandic Art Center are proud of our projects, new as well as on-going ones, such as the Icelandic Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, the Icelandic Art Prize, the World Weather Network, Borderland Poetics – exchange program and many more.

In 2022 various museums, exhibition spaces and artists in/from Iceland have published books independently and catalogues alongside their exhibitions and other publications with their projects.

We have made a small selection of Icelandic art books published this year to assist and inspire you in finding the right gift for your art-minded loved ones.

The Icelandic Art Prize awards ceremony will take place in March 2023 for the seventh time in Reykjavík. The Icelandic Arts Council has an open call for nomination proposals in two categories: the Visual Art Prize and the Motivational Award.

Various galleries and exhibition spaces organise special exhibitions and markets dedicated to the upcoming holiday season.

The Icelandic Art Center announces that Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir has been selected to represent Iceland at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2024. The Biennale Arte is one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world and as such it is a great honour for an artists to be selected as the national representative. Iceland has exhibited at the Biennale Arte since the 1960’s and has presented its own national pavilion since 1984. Many of Iceland’s leading artists have been chosen to represent the country at the Biennale Arte, e.g. Jóhannes Kjarval, Ragnar Kjartansson, Shoplifter, Sigurður Guðjónsson, Rúrí and Egill Sæbjörnsson. The Icelandic Art Center continues to be the commissioner of the Icelandic Pavilion, since 2007, at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia on behalf of the Icelandic Ministry of Culture and Business Affairs.

Thanks to everyone who visited The Icelandic Pavilion over the last months. We are extremely happy with the report from La Biennale di Venezia that the 59th international art exhibition has the highest visitor attendance in the 127-year history of the Biennale Arte. Great news as this biennale season marks the first time The Icelandic Pavilion was located at La Biennale Di Venezia, Arsenale.

Currently a few Icelandic artists are presented in exhibitions around the world.

La Biennale Captures the Current Zeitgeist for Indigenous Voices to be Heard, but Are We Really Listening?

If there ever was a perfect time for Indigenous voices to be heard at the Venice Biennale, it would be now. That is, given that the curatorial concept is anchored in Post-humanism. Relevantly reflected in the amount of Indigenous artists presenting this year. It should, however, be considered what it means for Indigenous artists to enter the „stage“ of the Biennale given its dark and unjust history towards Indigenous people.

Art in Iceland is currently seeking writers, artists, voices and critical thinkers to write for the publication.

Non-binary & non-gender-conforming manifestations at la biennale arte 2022

For the first time in its 121 year history, women outnumber male artists in the main halls of the Venice Biennale with over 80% female artists. This year, the 59th international art exhibition has also a small number of non-binary, queer and transgender artists exhibiting.

Una Björg Magnúsdóttir has been selected from a group of applicants for a year-long residency program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The stay lasts from spring 2023 – spring 2024. The studio provides artists who live there with access to a powerful, international network; curators, collectors, journalists and others working in the sector. In addition, the institute organizes exhibitions, publications and various events for the artists in residence. During the residency artists exhibit at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Billboard presents an open call for artists to create an artwork in public space in collaboration with Y gallery and Reykjavík Art Museum.

From September 11 – 24 a few Icelandic artists are participating in the group show “Tectonic Threads” on display at Mana Contemporary, 888 Newark Avenue, New York. Exhibiting Artists: Sigi Ahl, Fanny Allié, Elodie Blanchard, Hildur Bjarnadottir, Joy Curtis, Ingunn Fjola Ingthorsdottir, Ragna Froda, Asta Gudmundsdottir, Ragnheidur Gudmundsdottir, Heidi Hankaniemi, Elana Herzog, Victoria Manganiello, Luam Melake, Jessie Mordine Young, Maria Elena Pombo, Courtney Puckett, Anna Thora Karlsdottir, Thuridur Ros Sigurthorsdottir, Shoplifter, Janis Stemmermann, Thorbjorg Thordardottir.

From September 5-15, 2022, the Nordic House Reykjavík presents a holistic program of think tanks and performances, lectures and exhibitions.

Borderland Poetics announces the participants of the assistant exchange programme 2022: Brigit Arop, Eglė Agne Benkunskytė and Lukas Strolia

The Minister of Culture and Business Affairs has appointed a new Visual Art Council for a three-year term, 2022-2025. The first meeting with all five council members took place in August.

In connection with the World Weather Network an incense ceremony instigated by Scottish artist Katie Paterson will take place in The Living Art Museum this Saturday September 3 at 15:00.

If you are in Copenhagen this weekend, don’t miss the 4 galleries, 1 publisher and at least 9 artists from Iceland at CHART this year.⁠

The International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2022 is titled The Milk of Dreams and is curated by Cecilia Alemani. The exhibition draws its title from a book by the surrealist writer and artist Leonora Carrington, in which various peculiar hybrid beings accompany grotesque poetic stories. Alemani uses Carrington’s creative vision to visually actualise a new way of approaching embodiment in today’s technological age whilst reflecting on the status of the human being in relation to other species and the earth.[1]

The 11th edition of Sequences will take place in October 2023. Marika Agu, Maria Arusoo, Kaarin Kiviähk and Sten Ojave are this edition’s curators,who work together at the Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), based in Tallinn, Estonia. The curatorial collective was appointed as the next festival’s curators through the selection process of an open call.

The second episode of the second season of Icelandic Art Center’s podcast ‘Out There’ is out there.

Einar Falur’s regular weather-reports part of the World Weather Network are going strong.

Icelandic Art Center is with 27 other arts organisations across the world participating in the World Weather Network, a ground-breaking constellation of ‘weather stations’ located across the world in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests, observatories, lighthouses and cities.

In today’s art world, many artworks and exhibitions rely heavily on texts to guide their audience. When one reads the blurb accompanying a book or a film, it consists of a brief synopsis so the consumer can gather whether they are interested in engaging with the material or not. In visual art, however, one has already consumed the content and can then read a short analysis to deepen one’s perception of the work.

Art festivals and seasonal art venues open all around the country with the arrival of the sunshine. When traveling around Iceland this summer you’ll find plenty to see and do, whether it is visiting museums and exhibition spaces like Safnasafnið (open from May – September) and Gletta (open during summer), or art festivals like LungA (10 – 17 July) and Rolling Snowball (opens 9 July).

As I walked through the exhibitions and pavilions at the 59th edition of the international art exhibition in Venice, I noticed a strong theme decisively reflecting what is happening outside the “art world”. One of the most noticeable topics addressed, as Cecilia Alemani presents in her statement, is the de-centring of the western idea of the “human”, and celebrating other perspectives in its place[1]. This theme pervades the biennale: and can be found in many of the pavilions as well as in the central exhibition curated by Alemani.

Icelandic Art Center joins groundbreaking alliance of artists and writers in 28 countries across the world to form the World Weather Network in response to global climate crisis

Films at the 59th Biennale: Fit for the White Cube or the Silver Screen?

In recent decades fine arts has become more open to various art mediums, much like cinema which can incorporate many mediums in one film. Fittingly this year’s Biennale Arte: The 59th International Art Exhibition contains many video installations, all of them varying and testing the multiple ways in which cinema or video can belong within the frameworks of fine arts. At the biennale the ciné-videos span from pieces under a minute to feature length films. Some of them form a sculpture, some add to the ambience of other work, some are interactive and others follow the traditions of film narrative. I couldn’t help but wonder whether the medium is always fit for people who are passing through to look at Art.

A transdisciplinary collaboration between visual artists, performing artists, and scientists – coinciding with documenta fifteen.

Stockholm Art Week is a platform showcasing leading Nordic art fairs alongside many of Stockholm’s prominent museums, institutions, and art spaces that will arrange special programs, events, and pop-up exhibitions throughout the duration of the week. The annual celebration of Stockholm’s vibrant art scene aims to promote the visual arts to a wider audience and showcase Sweden as a global art destination.

The duo Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir (b. 1955) & Mark Wilson (b. 1954) are the recipients of the Art Prize 2022 for their exhibition Visitatons at Akureyri Art Museum.

The undersigned Commissioners, Curators and Artists of National Pavilions at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia express our joint support for democratic values, peace and freedom.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2022 will be awarded on February 25 in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions.

Having moved through the music and art worlds of Iceland and Berlin as a curator, art director and a performer, Gudny Gudmundsdottir is now opening a new commercial space in Berlin’s Mitte gallery district.

The exhibition Parallel Dimensions I / II brings together 17 leading contemporary Icelandic artists and works that highlights the diversity of media and material. The focus is on artists who push and defy the boundaries of art, technology, and science. They support and promote systems, experiment with time and space, and invent new methods to utilise material.

In this short video, artist Katrín Inga Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir talks about her practice and her show Land Self Love with art theorist Dr. Erum Naqvi and gallerist Guðný Guðmundsdóttir.

The Icelandic Photography Festival (TIPF) is an international festival held January of every other year. The festival was first held in 2012 (under the name “Photography Days”). The Festival’s main objective is to support and advance the photographic medium as an art form. The festival’s program includes photographic exhibitions with international and Icelandic artists, portfolio review, lectures, and photo book presentations.

Regelbau 411 is opening the exhibition Lightroom by Sigurður Guðjónsson on January 18th 2021. The exhibition presents a journey into the core of technology and its relics. Through seven video installations, Guðjónsson intricately reflects on devices and machines that have been overtaken by current technological developments and gradually become memories of our collective past.

After many months, team effort, a pandemic, a successful kickstarter campaign and more, the fully female-led self-funded project Höfuðstöðin by Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir and Lilja Baldurs is open to the public, and we could not be more excited.

Ragnheiður Sigurðardóttir Bjarnarson and Snaebjorn Brynjarsson are the magic couple behind Midpunkt, a gallery in the basement of an old ice cream shop Ragnheiður’s family ran in Kópavogur when she was a child. Championing inclusivity through open calls and all kinds of experimental and immersive practices, the gallery aims to do things differently—to date, they have had more shows and performances than you can count. There is a lot of method and care that has gone into the consideration of the space, and Ragnheiður tells the oral history of the gallery’s inception in her conversation with us below.

A collaboration between Sigurður Atli Sigurðsson and Olga Lilja Ólafsdóttir, Y Gallery opened in June this year in a disused gas station in the depths of a Hamraborg car park. The site of the gallery itself has the potential to create fertile ground for thought about modernism and Icelandic car culture, expanding the possibilities of viewing sculpture and installation from public space. We spoke to Sigurður Atli below on the inception of the project and the types of art to invest into, it’s dream-big plans and artist-first ethos.

We interviewed the four artists behind OPEN gallery, Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir, Örn Alexander Ámundason, Una Margrét Árnadóttir and Arnar Ásgeirsson, as part of a spotlight on emerging artist-lead spaces in Iceland. Primarily in use as a studio for their respective practices, the artists of OPEN on Grandi are insistent that they are more closed than they are—well—open. That layer of irony was doused over our conversation too—which includes a more general oral history of the space, including its evolving exhibitions and performances. It seems their reputation is somewhat larger and more impressive than they intended it to be, but it is nevertheless deserved—the combination of four artists running a space, all with an amass of experience as intrepid curators, artists and educators has created something pretty special. Read below about the space and their growing archive, which consists of wolf piss, personalised merchandise and other treasures.

The exhibition Ti Zero is dedicated to investigating a central theme of contemporary culture: the meeting between art, science and society. Several of the most celebrated artists
in the contemporary art scene are exhibiting among them is the Icelandic artist
.

Tacit Gaze is an installation of Raisa Foster and Arna Valsdóttir’s collaborative video works in the Gallery at the Culture House Laikku. The mosaic-like work of art aims to create for the audience a sensory feel of silent

Time Has Come is the title for the tenth Sequences art biennale, held between 15-24 October 2021. The title is a reference to the ephemeral social space which the festival makes for itself each time.

To learn the history of Kaupvangsstræti, Akureyri’s Art Street, we first need to look into the foundation of KEA (Eyjafjörður Co-operative Society) – an organisation of farmers from the district founded in late 19th Century which was a key influence in the development of Akureyri during the 20th Century.

This autumn’s guest in our visitors program is Gregory Volk, who is staying with us for 5 weeks and will be doing a lecture as part of our TALK series and teaching as a guest lecturer at the Iceland University of the Arts.

Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir has been selected from a group of applicants for a year-long residency program at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. The stay lasts from spring 2022-spring 2023. The studio committee provides artists who live there with access to a powerful, international network; curators, collectors, journalists and others working in the sector. In addition, the institute organizes exhibitions, publications and various events for the artists in residence. During the residency artists exhibit at Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Time Has Come is the title for the tenth Sequences art biennale, held between 15-24 October 2021. The title is a reference to the ephemeral social space which the festival makes for itself each time.

The partners of the Borderland Poetics announce the participants of the assistant exchange programme 2021: Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir, Kamilija Tekle Cizaite and Simona Šulnytė, who will work for 1 – 2 months at CCA and Tallinn Photomonth (Tallinn/Narva, Estonia), Sequences festival (Reykjavik, Iceland) and Rupert (Vilnius, Lithuania). The participants were selected via an open call that received 32 applications from Estonia, Lithuania and Iceland. The participants were selected by the team members of the events they will work with.

This autumn Icelandic artist Steinunn Thórarinsdóttir will be opening two sculpture exhibitions, ARMORS and CONNECTIONS, in public spaces in Denmark.

CHART, the leading Nordic event for contemporary art, will take place at Kunsthal Charlottenborg from 26 -29 August 2021. After last year’s de-centred approach, CHART 2021 returns to its historic home in the heart of Copenhagen, bringing together the best contemporary art galleries from the Nordics and creating a single-entry point into the region’s gallery scene.

Plan-B Art Festival takes place for the 6th time this weekend.
Plan-B Art Festival is a contemporary art festival held every year in the small
picturesque town of Borgarnes in the West Region of Iceland. About 1 hour drive
from the capital, Reykjavík.The festival is a platform for the vibrant Icelandic
and international contemporary art scene. Plan-B is first of its kind in the West
of Iceland and one of few Icelandic festivals that focuses mainly on contemporary
art and the conversation between diverse media.

Iceland’s endless summer days have us travelling all around the country, and whether you are an urbanite wanting to stick to the bigger cities and nearby towns, or a nature-lover looking for a breath of fresh(er) air, there is always an exciting exhibition around the corner waiting to be stumbled upon.

With warmer temperatures gracing our weather forecasts, July is the perfect month to hit the road and discover some of the year-round or summer-only art spaces that the Icelandic countryside has to offer.

Ineffable
and quiet with an astute sensitivity to space; these architectural and sensory descriptors
draw on the characteristics of Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir’s works as they inhabit
the newly opened Reykjavík Art Museum- Ásmundarsafn alongside Ásmundur Sveinsson’s
sculptures.

A two screen film installation “Uncontainable truth” (2021)
by opens at on the 11th of June
in Berlin.

Art is at the heart of Iceland’s dynamic culture. Throughout history, Icelanders have been regarded as innovative and gifted creators, from sculpture and painting to composing and acting.

Learn more about Icelandic art, culture, and history with our exclusive series featuring artists and museum directors throughout Iceland.

An online discussion on the uniqueness of Icelandic Art and Artists and the major influences at work. The talk is between Markus Thor Andresson, chief curator at the Reykjavík Art Museum and Tina Rivers Ryan, Curator at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY and Gregory Volk a renowned art critic and freelance curator.

The group show Góðir Gestir, featuring Icelandic artists opens on 6th of May at Cecilia Hillstrom Gallery in Stockholm. The show is curated in cooperation with artist Carl Boutard, who is based in Iceland, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

Celebrate Icelandic art, culture, history and more with our new short video series highlighting the creative arts throughout Iceland, presented by Iceland Naturally and the Icelandic Art Center. Each week from April 22 to May 13, we will release a new episode that highlights different aspects of Icelandic art and features knowledgeable speakers including the Director of the National Gallery of Iceland and the Director of the Reykjavik Art Museum, among many more.

At the entrance to Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson’s solo exhibition Earth, Water, Air, Fire at Künstlerhaus Betha- nien, a black hole opens as an ink drawing on paper in contrasting colours.

For
Ursula Le Guin and others, science fiction functions as a test ground for social
practice, where strange, transgressive worlds emerge in response to systemic forms
of oppression. These ideas are at the forefront of an exhibition curated by Helena
Aðalsteinsdóttir at Kling & Bang, ‘Yes, a falling tree makes a sound (and it
has a lot to say)’.

The duo Libia Castro (b. 1970) & Ólafur Ólafsson (b. 1973) are the recipients of the Art Prize 2021 for their collective performance with the Magic Team In Search of Magic – A Proposal for a New Constitution for The Republic of Iceland. 

The duo Libia Castro (b. 1970) & Ólafur Ólafsson (b. 1973) are the recipients of the Art Prize 2021 for their collective performance with the Magic Team In Search of Magic – A Proposal for a New Constitution for The Republic of Iceland. In a conversation with Valur Brynjar Antonson the duo discussed this major art event that took place on the 3rd of October 2020 at Reykjavik Art Museum, the streets of the city center, outside the Prime Minister’s office and the Parliament building on Austurvöllur Square.

Three Artists from Iceland in Conversation, an online event, took place in March 2021. The event featured conversations with three unique artists from Iceland Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir, Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir and Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson and moderated by Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch, editor and curator based in Berlin.

We are pleased to invite you to an online event, featuring conversations with three unique artists from Iceland Hulda Rós Gudnadóttir, Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir and Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson.

The Icelandic Visual Arts Council presents the Icelandic Art Prize 2021, providing support to outstanding visual artists as well as encouraging new artistic creation.

In Klængur Gunnarsson’s films, slow and eerie confrontations with an outside in the landscape focus our attention on liminal moments and places we might usually ignore. The works are sensitively perceiving the frictions in our natural world, trying to engage with an otherwise indifferent suburban and cold environment. Narrators and anonymous characters populate the scenes, treading a line between the poetic and the political. We talked to Gunnarsson on his working process, influences and Reykjavik, exploring personal and societal confrontations with nature.

The Icelandic Art Prize 2021 will be awarded on March 16 in Reykjavík. The awards provide recognition to outstanding visual artists and exhibitions.

The Marshall House opened in 2017 on Grandagarður in a former fishing factory. Architects Ásmundur Hrafn Sturluson and Steinþór Kári Kárason of Kurtogpí Architects conceived of the idea when other buildings that shielded the factory from view were torn down. After being impressed by the structure and with the desire to find a home for artist-led spaces, he laid out plans along with Börkur Arnarson for a new art center that would bring security to the then precarious gallery Kling & Bang and to the long-running The Living Art Museum. Alongside these entities, it would also come to house a Reykjavik location for Ólafur Elíasson and a restaurant.

With Christmas, just two hops and jumps away, now is the last chance to go shopping art for Christmas. Below, a list of Christmas markets, bazaars and salons in and around Reykjavík and online:

We sat down with to discuss his current exhibition at Harbinger Project Space, feelings of doom and optimism and the liminal space of color. In paintings, sculptures and 3D printed models, Hendrik cites a multitude of references in more depth of thought than he admits, asking large questions about the role of the artist and the role of art in our strange pandemic-stricken, climate-collapsing reality.

The Art Gallery of Ontario announces the Toronto premiere of Death is Elsewhere (2019), an immersive video installation by acclaimed performance and video artist Ragnar Kjartansson (Icelandic, b. 1976).

With support from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and Promote Iceland the Icelandic Art Center has signed an agreement with the Venice Biennale’s office regarding an exhibition space in Arsenale, one of the biennale’s main exhibition venue. Around six hundred thousand visitors usually visit the Arsenale for each biennale, which means that the number of guests in the Icelandic pavilion will be almost twenty times higher than in recent years.

On 3rd October 2020, an unusually
large collective of the public—art workers, students, people from all walks of life—could
be seen marching down Tryggvagata in Reykjavik. Large hand-sewn pink banners reading
‘Nýju stjórnarskrána takk’ [The new constitution please!]
were carried by us—an enthused collective hoping for the rights and possibilities
enshrined in

The second conversation in the series Collaborations in Contemporary Art is to be streamed live on Friday, October 16th at 13:00 where Hanna Styrmisdóttir will have a conversation with renowned artist Magnús Pálsson.

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson is currently artist-in-residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he will have an upcoming exhibition. The group show ‘Autumn Bulbs II’ at Reykjavik Art Museum runs from 24 September – 18 October 2020.

A! is a four-day international performance festival held every year, now for the sixth time. The festival is a collaboration between Akureyri Art Museum, Akureyri Culture Society, Akureyri Theater, LÓKAL International Theater Festival, Reykjavík Dance Festival and Icelandic Art Centre.

For the project the artists along with Cycle Music and Art Festival and Reykjavík Arts Festival have invited a group of composers and musicians to join them in an open collaboration on composing music to the “Proposal for a new Constitution for the Republic of Iceland” written in 2011, by a democratically elected 25 member Constitutional Council (and later appointed by Parliament), in the aftermath of the economical and political meltdown of October 2008.

This September, Reykjavík Art Museum holds a group exhibition outside the museum walls for the second time. Eight artists present new work in a diverse and original manner around the city and in the public spaces made available through modern technology.

This sharing of ‘psychological elasticity’ is everywhere in Common Ground at Korpúlfsstaðir, which imbues the home with the political current of immigration, and the diverse patchwork of our individual experiences. The show holds traces of childhood in bric-a-brac hanging sculptures, where a lullaby is heard from underneath a child’s bed sheet and a giant swing oscillates in the centre of the exhibition space. Each artist has responded to the theme of Common Ground and the home individually, and yet this sensitivity to personal emotion and memory is also what characterises the exhibition as a whole.

For the occasion of Therme Art x Messe in St Agnes, multimedia artist and musician Egill Sæbjörnsson has conceived a special site-specific artwork entitled Flying Waters.

The annual Berlin Art Week will take place from 9—13 September 2020. Icelandic artist Katrín Inga Jónsdóttir Hjördísardóttir will exhibit at the newly opened Gallery Guðmundsdóttir in Berlin.

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s powerful performance piece Il Cielo in Una Stanza (The Sky in a Room) will be presented next month in a church in Milan, marking “the painful months spent imagining the sky in a room” during the coronavirus lockdown, say the project organisers.

The eighth edition of CHART will take place from 28 – 30 August 2020. This year, it is taking place in a de-centered format across the five Nordic capitals Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and Reykjavík. 28 leading art galleries will host special events and exhibitions as part of CHART’s 2020 program.

At Yellow Solo, Danziger Straße 162a Berlin, until 11th of July 2020. "Exorcising Ancient Ghosts" is a sensual, bilingual audio sculpture based on Castro & Ólafsson’s research into the rights of women and foreigners in ancient Greek society. The work started in the ancient greek region of Naples during the project “Il Ventre di Napoli” in 2010, and it was finalized for the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. After being exhibited in several international institutions, the installation will be shown for the first time in Berlin by Yellow Solo.Libia Castro (Spain) & Ólafur Ólafsson (Iceland) are an artist collective formed in 1997 in The Netherlands, living in Rotterdam and Berlin, and residing regularly in Reykjavik and Málaga. They represented Iceland at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and their works have been seen in other major international exhibitions such as Manifesta 7 (2008), the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2012) or the 19th Sydney Biennial (2014).Their practice is collaborative, conceptual, socio-politicly engaged and interdisciplinary. They work with a variety of media, often collaborating with other people and groups - activists, artists, composers, musicians and other professionals.

Ólafur Elíasson’s newest exhibition at i8, Beyond human time, brings together recent watercolour artworks by the artist. Watercolours have been a sustained interest of Elíasson’s that he has used since 2009 to investigate colour, movement, and time. The works often conjure subtle illusions of space and light through the repeated application of thin, transparent washes onto a single sheet of paper in a meticulous, highly physical production process.

Are you going on a road-trip this summer around Iceland? We have selected a few highlights.

Hildur Bjarnadóttir, Guðjón Ketilsson, Brynjar Sigurðarson
& Veronika Sedlmair at 44th edition of Tendenser, the Nordic Contemporary Crafts Biennial. Earth, Wind, Fire, Water – Nordic Contemporary Crafts is the 44th edition of the exhibition series Tendenser (Tendencies) at Galleri F 15 in Moss, Norway. For nearly fifty years, Tendenser has been one of the leading platforms for contemporary craft in the Nordic region. First presented in 1971 as an annual exhibition highlighting Norwegian practitioners, Tendenser has since expanded to a biennial format, incorporating trends from across the Nordic countries.

Get insights into artists practices through our Instagram stories. For the past weeks we have been getting weekly sneak peeks into artists studios and their practices. You can view all the material on our Instagram account where we have saved these for you to view anytime.

We just published a comprehensive map and a guide to the Icelandic art scene. The map can be found at museums and galleries all over Iceland.

The 59th Venice Biennale will take place in 2022 following the decision by biennial officials to postpone the Architecture Biennale until May 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak. The world’s most prestigious biennial was initially due to take place next year.

“The decision to postpone the Biennale Architettura to May 2021 is an acknowledgment that it is impossible to move forward within the set time limits in the realisation of such a complex and worldwide exhibition, due to the persistence of a series of objective difficulties caused by the effects [of] the health emergency underway,” says a biennial statement.

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson has been selected as the first artist, in a five year agreement between the Icelandic Art Center and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, for a year long residency from May 2020 onwards.

Reykjavik Arts Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and preparations have been under way for the past two years planning ahead for a mind blowing 3 week festival in June. It should come as no surprise that the worldwide epidemic of Covid-19 has now interfered with these plans and it is clear that the people of Reykjavik will not be ready for a city-wide festival in June, even if the worst of the epidemic might be behind us at that time.

Guðjón Ketilsson is the recipient of the Art Prize for his exhibition Teikn in Reykjanes Art Museum.

Elín Hansdottir has been selected as the first artist, in a five year agreement between the Icelandic Art Center and Künstlerhaus Bethanien , for a year-long residency from May 2020 onwards.

The Icelandic Visual Arts Council invites you to the Icelandic Art Prize 2020 and a conference on the creation of an Icelandic Fine Arts Policy.

The Icelandic Art Prize will be awarded for the second time on February 20.

Eygló Harðardóttir (b. 1964) is the recipient of the Art Award 2019 for her aptly named exhibition Another Space in The Living Art Museum. With work which simultaneously was dainty and coarse, made from delicate materials, the artist opened up doorways for the viewer to enter and increase their perception and sensitivity instead of the usual rationalism. Eygló seems concerned with the viewers sensing that there is no one correct answer, that all dimensions are equally important and that their experience can be personal and limitless.

The Icelandic Art Prize will be awarded for the second time on February 21.

Ragna Róbertsdóttir is an established Icelandic artist who has been active since the 80’s, exhibiting her work both in Iceland and abroad. She lives and works between Iceland and Berlin, but her artistic practice maintains a strong relationship with her motherland, a link which is visible in the materials she chooses for her work: lava, sea salt, seashells, stones, elements taken from the Icelandic landscape.

Sigurður Guðjónsson was awarded the Icelandic Art Prize 2018 for the exhibition Inlight, which was on show last year from late September until the middle of October congratulations on that!

The Icelandic art Prize will be awarded for the first time on February 22. Nominated artists are Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Hulda Vilhjálmsdóttir and Sigurður Guðjónsson.

Elín Hansdóttir is one hard working artist I’ve come to find out, after interviewing her and researching her work over the past few months. It was only just last night, while watching the new art docu-series ‘Opnun’, that featured her on television, that I was reminded once again of her relentless creative quest for new viewpoints. She started the year off by receiving the Icelandic Optimism Award from the president, as well as being recently nominated for the DV Culture Prize in Reykjavík. Her shows ‘Simulacra’ and ‘Disruption’ last year came with rave reviews, taking the her visitors on a hunt for the surreal, new perceptions and peculiarity. She has exhibited widely in Europe as well as the US, in addition to having held eight solo exhibitions here in Iceland, therefore I was pleased and thankful to be able to get a few questions in with this busy artist.

It’s hard to find yourself without an intense spark of enjoyment when surrounded with Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir’s colourful artistry, whether it be her wearable pieces of furry clothing, sculpturesque masks made from human hair or her neon-light infused glass windows full of braids. She has showcased her work all over the world, with her latest installment currently happening in Australia and a collection with mega-brand &Other stories recently launched. Therefore I was more than delighted when she was able to take the time out to share a little chat with me in between her travels.

Celebrating their 20 years of collaboration this year, the Icelandic Love Corporation consists of Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir (b. 1973), Jóní Jónsdóttir (b. 1972) and Eirún Sigurðardóttir (b. 1971), that have been working together since 1996. They recently opened an extensive new exhibition titled Love conquers all at the Aros Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark, where they display their playful approach towards art in various media and we wanted to learn more about it.

Playing with themes such as transformation and disguise, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir’s poetic performances have become known to many. Often treating videos as songs while reciting poetry, her work can vary from large installations to photography and take on different forms. She was born in 1976 in Madison, Wisconsin and has studied at UCLA in Los Angeles and at the School of Visual Arts in New York, although she now lives and works in Iceland.

Sigurður Guðjónsson’s dark and mysterious works exploit many variations of time based media. Using mainly video, his work could very well be classified simultaneously as musical works. His work has been featured in numerous shows all over the world and he has now joined Reykjavik’s newest gallery BERG Contemporary, where he will open his new show today. He was gracious enough to let me catch a sneak peek inside his new works and experiments.

Erla S. Haraldsdóttir lives and works in Berlin, doing paintings, animation, videos, and photomontage that appropriate and restructure reality.

Steinunn Marta Önnudóttir is the founder of Icelandic gallery Harbinger. Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir has been an artistic advisor for the gallery ever since it started and she’s the one in charge of the gallery’s summer program this year.

Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir is a Berlin based Icelandic artist and the initiator of the art project Keep Frozen. The project has taken place in Germany as well as in Iceland. We met up with her during the project’s symposium in Reykjavik called Reclaimed Landscapes in February. Its aim was to provide a forum for multi-disciplinary dialogues about art practice as research and I was keen to learn more about it.

i8 Gallery in Reykjavík recently announced that a new artist had joined their list; Arna Óttarsdóttir (b. 1986), who is now the youngest artist represented by the gallery. Arna’s first solo-exhibition at the gallery was opened on November 5th displaying 9 tapestries that she created after having taught herself the art of weaving.

Magnús Logi Kristinsson welcomed me to his studio at the Performance Art Center in Helsinki, Finland, where he has lived for over 10 years now.

Time and Time and Again is based upon the life and works of Icelandic conceptual artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson, but rather than produce straight documentary the creators of the film have produced a fictional narrative that examines the creative drive and the nature of time itself.

Born in 1984, Ámundason completed his studies at the Malmö Art Academy in 2011.

Since finishing his postgraduate studies from the Glasgow School of Art in 2006, Arnfinnur Amazeen has been living and working in Copenhagen.

Now on view at the Reykjavik Art Museum – Hafnarhús are three exhibitions. A video installation by Sara Björnsdóttir, a noteworthy exhibition of drawings by Dan Perjovschi and the one I will discuss here: a group exhibition titled Power of Passage, curated by Hafþór Yngvason, director of the museum.

The Icelandic Art Center is proud to present Relay – the word passed on – a monthly column. We invited Skaftfell, Center for Visual Art in East Iceland to be the first contributors and asked them to nominate a second one. In this first column you´ll get a glimpse into the art scene in the remote East fjords of Iceland.