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hringvellIR / THINGVELLIR TURNING (2018)

Thingvellir National Park, Gerdarsafn Art Museum Iceland
Cycle Music and Art Festival, Inclusively Exclusive

In Thingvellir Turning, a circular section of earth at Þingvellir was lifted, placed over a concealed motor and carefully returned to the landscape. The grass-covered disc rotated counterclockwise, completing one revolution every ten minutes. Reinstalled so that the intervention was almost invisible, the moving ground initially appeared still; only sustained attention revealed that the landscape was slowly turning.

 

The work was made at a site where geological and cultural histories meet. Þingvellir lies along the boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates and is marked by continual geological movement. It also holds a central place in Icelandic political history as the site of the Alþingi’s foundation in 930. Anna Rún’s mechanical intervention brings these different temporal registers into contact: the nearly imperceptible motion of the artwork, the movement of tectonic plates and the historical meanings attached to the land.

 

The counterclockwise rotation complicates familiar ideas of temporal direction. Clockwise movement is conventionally associated with correctness and progress, while its reverse is imagined as a movement backwards. Thingvellir Turning detaches rotation from this linear opposition. Time appears instead as recurrence, circulation and geological duration.

 

The work does not present nature as untouched or permanently fixed. It stages an intervention while allowing the mechanism to disappear into its surroundings. The result occupies an unstable threshold between camouflage and disruption: the land remains recognisable, yet its movement alters the viewer’s confidence in what appears stationary beneath the body.

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‘Thingvellir Turning’ is a direct continuation of the work ‘Turning Points’ exhibited at Cycle Music and Art Festival’s last event in Berlin, Cryptopian States. The new work is mounted in Þingvellir National Park, near the old Valhalla. A historic hotel that burned to the ground.

The work involves displacement of nature, where mechanics are places underground and a circular cut of nature is slowly rotated. No traces are visible in the landscape, the rotating part lies in the same height as before, the only change is that it turns one round in ten minutes. The speed is not really visible and the human eye needs to focus to notice the movement.

In the wilderness of Þingvellir the work gains a new context. The area became a national park in the year 1930. Around the same time the industrial revolution occurred and natural areas had started to gain the status of reserved national parks.

The need to protect natural resources grew alongside humans’ access to wild nature reduced with the increased density of inhabited land. The historical and geological position of Þingvellir gives the work ‘Þingvellir Turning’ context which is extensive and touches the identity and history of the Icelandic nation. It puts the history into context of the geological time as the tectonic plates cut straight through the area and reference the spectrum of time that reaches way further than the history of humans. All the way to the basis of the rotation of the globe around itself.

 

Text from the curatorial team of Cycle Music & Art Festival 

Reviews of the exhibition:

Art in America 2019 by Wendy Vogel

Paletten by Frida Sandström
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