After a lengthy period of research, Roni Horn realised Library of Water, equally known by its Icelandic title Vatnasafn: a long-term, multi-faceted installation in the small town of Stykkishólmur on the southwest coast of Iceland.

Within the converted building (originally constructed in 1950 as a small library), Horn has created a long-term installation which connects the inside to the outside and incorporates many of the Horn’s abiding concerns with weather, water, words and identities. The artist has described the place as “a lighthouse in which the viewer becomes the light”.

Where there was once a library of books, there is now a series of collections gathered by Horn and her collaborators in Iceland. These include Water, Selected, a constellation of identical floor-to-ceiling glass columns containing water originally gathered as blocks of ice from twenty-four glaciers across the country. All the glaciers have receded since the ice was collected and one of them, Ok, has now disappeared.