Compasses transforms the gallery into a horizontal forest. Tree trunks are suspended at different heights and rotate counterclockwise at varying speeds, from movement the eye can barely register to motion fast enough to produce physical unease. Their changing positions continually open and close pathways, requiring visitors to adjust their pace and direction as they move through the installation.

 

The trees were sourced through forestry work around Reykjavík and brought into a technological system of motors and supports. Nature is neither represented at a distance nor installed as a static fragment. The trunks move, age and occupy space as active participants in a choreography that includes the visitor’s body.

 

Anna Rún extends an enquiry developed in earlier rotating works: how subtle movement can alter spatial perception and redistribute agency within an exhibition. The installation establishes its parameters but does not prescribe a single route or viewpoint. Each encounter depends on the temporary configuration of the trees, the rhythms of their counterclockwise rotation and the decisions of other people in the room.

 

The result has been described as a performance or dance of trees, but its choreography is not solely visual. It is navigational and bodily. Visitors become aware that passage through space is negotiated with moving material rather than exercised over an inert environment. By bringing a forest into the museum and setting it in cyclical motion, Compasses makes orientation relational: direction emerges through attention, adjustment and the changing positions of bodies.