Digital Editions
Newsletters
Subscribe
Digital Editions
Newsletters
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Venice Biennale 2022
preview

Icelandic pavilion: The magnetic attraction of light and sound

Sigurður Guðjónsson’s mesmerising work in the cavernous Artiglierie uses the movement of metal particles around a magnet

J.S. Marcus
11 April 2022
Share
Magic circle: the Reykjavik-based artist in front of his 2021 light-and-sound work, Fluorescent  Photo: Saga Sigurdardottir

Magic circle: the Reykjavik-based artist in front of his 2021 light-and-sound work, Fluorescent Photo: Saga Sigurdardottir

Iceland has taken part in the Venice Biennale since 1984, but the country’s pavilion has regularly changed venues. After around two decades in Alvar Aalto’s Finnish pavilion building, Icelandic artists set up shop everywhere from a 14th-century Grand Canal palace, where Ragnar Kjartansson enacted a live painter’s studio in 2009, to a 20th-century Giudecca warehouse, where Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir used synthetic hair to create a large-scale installation in 2019. This year the Icelandic pavilion will move to the Arsenale’s 450-year-old Artiglierie building, where video artist Sigurður Guðjónsson makes full use of a seven-metre-high naval workshop space with an immersive, dual-projection piece called Perpetual Motion.

Sigurður, 46, used a high-speed 4K video camera equipped to film metal dust scattering and gathering around a magnet. In post-production, he refined the imagery by altering the speed, colour and direction of the metal fragments. The finished imagery is projected on a vertical screen and along the floor. The projections are accompanied by an atmospheric soundtrack—which Sigurður calls a “soundscape”—that the artist created with composer and sound technician Valgeir Sigurðsson, known for his collaborations with Björk.

Sigurður’s piece is curated by the Spanish art historian Mónica Bello, who is the curator and head of arts at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Bello sees Sigurður as an ideal representative of his country’s distinctive topography, marked by active volcanoes, waterfalls large and small, barren lava fields, blue-and-white glaciers and otherworldly neon-green moss. “In Iceland, you can get obsessed about the transformation of matter,” she says.

Fusion of natural and industrial

Sigurður says he is inspired by what he calls “wasteland”, such as Skeiðarársandur, a glacial outwash plain near Iceland’s south-west coast, depicted in his 2012 work Veil. He also cites the man-made wastelands of industry as an influence, and the completed soundtrack of Perpetual MOTION suggests a fusion of the natural and the industrial, like wind rushing through a working factory.

Sigurður calls Perpetual Motion a “multisensory sculpture”. And it’s colourful, to boot. Though the metal dust and the magnet are somewhere between steel- and charcoal-grey, he has used light to bring out tones from blue to yellow to purple. “It’s an interesting palette,” he says.

After Venice, Perpetual Motion will return to Iceland, to inaugurate the new building of Sigurður’s Reykjavik gallery, Berg Contemporary. Towering, ever-changing particles accompanied by shifting, alien sounds may not merit a single interpretation, and some viewers may go so far as to contemplate the spiritual implications of infinity. Does the artist expect that? “Yeah, hopefully,” he says.

Iceland

Artist: Sigurður Guðjónsson

Organisers: Mónica Bello; Icelandic Art Center

Where: Arsenale

Website

Venice Biennale 2022IcelandSound ArtVenice Biennale 2022 national pavilions
Share
Subscribe to The Art Newspaper’s digital newsletter for your daily digest of essential news, views and analysis from the international art world delivered directly to your inbox.
Newsletter sign-up
Information
About
Contact
Cookie policy
Data protection
Privacy policy
Frequently Asked Questions
Subscription T&Cs
Terms and conditions
Advertise
Sister Papers
Sponsorship policy
Follow us
Instagram
Bluesky
LinkedIn
Facebook
TikTok
YouTube
© The Art Newspaper

Related content

Public artnews
31 October 2018

Phallic-shaped sculpture erected in Reykjavik

“Little mer-sausage”, part of the Icelandic capital’s Cycle festival of music and art, has divided opinion

Amah-Rose Abrams
Icelandreview
24 November 2023

As the Fagradalsfjall volcano threatens Iceland, an art biennial in Reykjavik explores societal collapse

Sequences features works that meditate on the unseen forces that dictate the outcome of our lives

Tom Seymour
Venice Biennale 2022review
19 April 2022

Venice Biennale 2022: the must-see pavilions in the Giardini

From America's African facelift to the scents of hope and fear, here are the exhibitions we loved at the heart of the big event

Alison Cole, José da Silva, Aimee Dawson, Gareth Harris, Hannah McGivern and Tom Seymour
Museums & Heritagenews
27 November 2023

As Iceland braces for the winter, museums lobby for more storage

Fifteen years since Iceland’s banking crisis, funding cuts have left the nation’s art in a state of potential peril

Tom Seymour