hringvellIR / THINGVELLIR TURNING (2018)
Thingvellir National Park, 2019.
Gerdarsafn Art Museum, Kópavogur Iceland. Cycle Music & Art Festival, Inclusively Exclusive
hringvellIR / THINGVELLIR TURNING (2018)
Thingvellir National Park, 2019.
Gerdarsafn Art Museum, Kópavogur Iceland. Cycle Music & Art Festival, Inclusively Exclusive
hringvellIR / THINGVELLIR TURNING (2018)
Thingvellir National Park, 2019.
Gerdarsafn Art Museum, Kópavogur Iceland. Cycle Music & Art Festival, Inclusively Exclusive
ANNA RÚN TRYGGVADÓTTIR
An ODE -PORIFERAL PHASES 2020
Kunstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin Germany
An Ode – Poriferal Phases brought marine sponges, industrial polyurethane foam, granite glacial erratics, a five-metre tree trunk, saline solutions and mechanical systems into a slowly changing installation. Across a gallery of more than one hundred square metres, sculptures rotated counterclockwise at speeds that were only just perceptible. Salt water dripped and crystallised; porous materials absorbed liquid; soft sponges hardened into stone-like forms. Sound, movement and material change unfolded through repetition and duration.
The work’s relations are poriferal: open, permeable, vulnerable and sustained through exchange. Natural and synthetic sponges appear together, complicating any stable opposition between organic life and manufactured matter. Submerged sponges open to receive water; fixed in this expanded state, they become fossil-like. Anna Rún has described synthetic foam as a prospective fossil of the human carbon footprint, entering the geological strata of the future.
The granite stones carry another history of displacement. Transported from Scandinavia into northern Germany by glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age, they were later collected from agricultural fields as obstructions. Their movement across geological time reframes questions of what belongs to a place and what appears foreign within it.
Counterclockwise rotation links the installation to ecological cycles rather than linear progress. Nothing resolves into a final state: the works remain performative sculptures, changing at rates that resist immediate perception. An Ode asks for attention to these quiet frequencies and to the consequences of human intervention, without imagining the artist or viewer as separate from the material world under consideration.
Artist Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir ́s performative sculptures are patient teachers who show us how we are shaped by the reality we create for ourselves and bring our awareness to our relationship with nature. They ask us what it means to bring nature indoors and which elements in us are nurtured by wanting to be immersed in nature. The works share a silent roar, sounds of movement, similar to that which we can hear from the inside of our body, to the outside.
The situations and objects that Tryggvadóttir creates want to perform. They are very present and feel like moving. They have a longing for kinesis. Scaling occurs as we move between the synthetic and the natural, objects of different sizes and ages, some made last month, others formed millions of years ago. The objects each have vibrations in as it seems altering states as part of an installation of becoming. Liquid runs dry, resulting in salt residue.
In the world of arresting objects, brought together and assembled by Tryggvadóttir from various realities, an inner logic is developed that has engaging qualities, maneuvering the elements. It is a kind of reversed alchemy in dialogue with ancient times when the most knowledgeable people on earth were at once a philosopher, healer, mathematician, physician, theologist and alchemist, and to whom the fundamental understanding of the crossovers of those knowledge-meridians were the very fertile ground to be explored.
Curator Birta Gudjonsdottir
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