Motivational Award 2023: Ásgerður Birna Björnsdóttir

Her exhibition, A Twitch and a Tug, received deserved attention. Solar cells, placed on the outside walls of the building powered video works on LED screens, showing sprouting walnuts and potatoes. Natural light and weather controlled the exhibition’s appearance each day. Blue plastic cords that transferred energy from the sun to the machines in the installation hung on the museum walls, reminiscent of organic nerves. There were also sprouting potatoes and walnuts in small pockets on the walls, following their own calling in the material’s eternal cycle. The white space had lightness and a certain levity, mixed with astonishment and anxiety, against the magic of nature. The work contained a direct fusion of the organic and the digital, which caused viewers to ponder how the line between the two is always getting blurrier. The jury found the exhibition powerful and the activity of the machines and the organisms, which largely takes place outside the direct perception of man, focused our views on the basic attributes of life and growth on the earth, and man’s often clumsy attempts to harness and control this energy.