Art in Iceland Art in Iceland is an annual magazine focusing on Icelandic contemporary art.

Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir: Magnetic Cacophonies The Earth’s magnetic field is one of the most powerful forces of nature. It shields all life on Earth from cosmic radiation, solar and galactic, and humans have co-evolved with it. For Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir, the magnetism produced by the Earth’s iron core is a long-standing research preoccupation. In projects that encompass drawing, installation, performance and video, she sets out parameters for artworks to come into being, gathering materials and always following the lead of the provisional objects that become her subjects. This involves working with water, magnets, iron, rocks, trees and other lively entities to see what emerges. Her methodology is almost classically conceptual: she determines the conditions for a work and then lets it unfold with little intervention. In disavowing her agency as the artist, in refusing a teleological approach, she allows a work’s constituent matter room for mutual encounter and influence.

 

 

Recent series of paper works, or what would conventionally be called drawings, are more like material performances, incorporating magnetized elements, water and mineral pigments to produce abstractions that resemble maps and topographic forms. The pigments shift according to the flow of water and force of magnetic attraction. Bleeding contour lines, wayward marks, sharp central nodes and radiating washes all mimic the aesthetics of wayfinding technologies, recalling analog cartography and satellite spatial renderings in equal measure. Without referring to actual landscapes, they draw out an idea of imagined space; as spectators to this process, it’s possible to project ourselves into these looping, fluvial aggregations. A topographic view emerges, with water, air, and mineral components shaped by magnetism and gravity, as though the map were drawing itself.

 

​

In other works, Anna Rún attends to histories of geomagnetism across human and geologic timescales. Transmission (2021) and Three Norths (2022) use the magnetic needle of a compass to address the Earth’s electromagnetic field as it changes over time. Each installation consists of three rock samples of different ages from different geologic strata, with compass needles suspended above. Since rocks embed the direction and intensity of the magnetic field at the time of their formation, and because the polarity of the Earth has been in flux over eons (although it is largely unchanged during the age of humans), the needles all point in different directions, rather than aligning with what is the current magnetic north. With minimal means, it speaks to the contingency of one’s bodily orientation, unmooring one’s sense of place. Since the cardinal directions—south, east, west, north—can’t truly be understood as stable, the definitional limits of ‘north’ become provisional, not permanent.

 

 

A brief digression: the magnetic compass was invented during the Chinese Han dynasty, around 200 BCE, and was made of lodestone, or magnetite ore. Initially its primary use was for divination and it was referred to as a “south pointer,” the desired direction of orientation. It wasn’t until the eleventh and twelfth centuries that compasses became more widely used as tools of military navigation and expedition, on land and at sea. Eventually, it became a technology that enabled travel across oceans at a new scale, ushering in eras of colonial expansion and a vast reorganization of spatial relationships across the planet. At an individual scale, the positioning of oneself within the world also changed. Rather than the multiplanar, 360-degree view that observational wayfinding required,[1] the compass necessitated linear positionality, an opposition between two fixed poles where the compass-holding subject is always centred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

​

​

​

 

 

In Anna Rún’s latest exhibition, Multipolar, such shifts in orientation are examined in greater detail. Opening at the National Gallery of Iceland this April, it’s a project that uses speculation and science to underscore geomagnetism as a social, political, and environmental force, and will contain her largest selection of works to date. Across the long scales of geologic time, she asks us to imagine a different Earth, where, as she says, “a cacophony of magnetism courses through the planet.” The exhibition is structured around a large installation that encompasses the viewer in a linear grid painted on the walls, floor, and ceiling. With compass points and degree notations marked out, the entire space is conceived as a navigational device, a 360-degree horizon that refutes the possibility of meaningful orientation in a future without the distinction of poles. A second sculpture marks true north (the geographical point at the Earth’s axis) with a red fabric rope bisecting the gallery by slowly winding and rewinding itself, a nod at the imperceptible but continual rotation of the Earth. She is also at work on a large suite of drawings that continue her processual and performative investigations, using more illustrative methods to consider how the magnetic field is used by animals for navigation, a phenomenon that is still being widely studied by scientists.

 

 

It is now thought that there have been eras of the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth where there were multiple poles, and new theories demonstrate that a multipolar world transitioned to a dipolar world about 1.7 billion years ago.[2] Even in a dipolar world, the magnetic poles are not fixed but are almost constantly flipping and reversing, typically every few hundred thousand years, something Anna Rún calls “the longest performance on the planet.” Life on Earth evolved with a changing magnetosphere, but present-day navigational technologies did not. Without the protection of the magnetic field, all satellite technologies and the electrical communications grid of the planet would essentially collapse. The instability of magnetic north is also well documented; it’s currently traversing Nunavut territory in Canada’s far northeast, rapidly moving toward Siberia. Given the acute and intense threats to the Earth’s polar regions—resource extraction, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, plastics, toxin accumulation—it’s possible to read this movement as a speculative figure, a fight or flight migration of an invisible force at one of the Earth’s most vulnerable points. What would it possibly mean to live in a multipolar world? This call to speculation would, for one, upend neo-colonial thinking that determines the global north as a dominant political and economic force. Ideas of “the north” are already elastic; it’s a term of contingencies, balancing histories of colonial exploration, extraction and oppression, with the self-determination of Indigenous communities from around the circumpolar region. In a multipolar world, would a restructuring of direction enable more collective forms of relation and identities less governed by nation-state borders? When the primary point of navigation is always the self—compasses and GPS-enabled smartphones suggest a Cartesian positionality—then all directions remain relative to the device-holding subject. But imagine future humans thriving in a multipolar world with entirely different forms of collective navigational technology! It’s a provocation, one that nods at science fiction narratives and a deep future, but still considers an ethics of sustainability in imagining a world with less binary alignments.