‘You know, all of a sudden, life doesn’t feel quite hehe haha anymore, it feels rather, rather serious. I’ve got to do things with my life but it’s so scary, I am just a bean – small and scurried, afraid and worried.’

Seeking Solace delves into the stark contrast between the outward face of professional life and the

internal struggles modern individuals face. Throughout the work, office staff members share deeply

personal and slightly unhinged revelations to old Icelandic folk songs, a private and personal momentstemming from deep within their psyche, a glitch in their performative, professional front.  By juxtaposing the troubled, personal confessions and the archaic but majestic folk songs, the impostor syndrome in the lyrics becomes even more apparent. While the lyrics are intimate and unrelenting, the folk songs are reassuring and comforting – a paradox that many relate to from their own lives in regard to their inner dialogue as opposed to external circumstances.

Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir (1993) is an artist, musician and composer based in Amsterdam and Reykjavík. She’s interested in storytelling and creating engulfing experiences within spaces, often inspired by the mundanity of everyday life. Her creative process is a balance between caprice and compulsive research and in her works she employs normalised human behaviours and experiences critically, displacing them into an artistic context. By placing these mundane, everyday happenings in unconventional and absurd scenes, she aims to challenge our understanding of our heavily constructed social reality, reflecting on our ability to create new meaning and to forge our reality – always asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’