Reykjavík Grapevine - sep. 2021, Side 12

Witness Life, And The
Loss Of It
Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir takes on the confrontation
between humanity and the natural world
Words: Hannah Jane Cohen Photos: John Pearson
Six trees rorte slowly in a dimly
lit room, outlined only by the re-
mains of their ever-fading leaves
and branches, which litter the floor
around you, crunching under your
feet as you walk. Only months
earlier, the trees were vibrant, hy-
drated and healthy—their stalks
flexible and swaying as they spun
lazily on their axis.
But, of course, they were as dead
then as they are now. Six trees
slowly exiting the world—an au-
topsy in front of your eyes, allow-
ing you to witness, in real time, the
degradation of what was once life.
Enter ‘Hringfarar’ the newest
installation by artist Anna Rún
Tryggvadóttir.
The prose of death
The aforementioned trees, Anna
explains, were sourced from lo-
cal forest brushers. “They take
out trees that either don’t need to
be there or shouldn’t be there, so
these are trees that were not de-
termined to end their lives through
me, but through another agency,
and now I’ve brought them into
this situation,” she says softly, sit-
ting back in a side-room of Haf-
narhús. “I am bringing them into
a situation where they are slowly
becoming their own shrine and
going through the process of leav-
ing their earthly existence. These
are trees that have been alive for
decades, so there is a lot of ac-
cumulated life that is vanishing.
These are the processes that living
creatures go through when exiting.
It’s almost like prose or a poem.”
Anna sees this act—this slow
witnessing of natural death—as a
confrontation for humanity.
“I am interested in what hap-
pens when you are faced with this
sort of setting because we make
decisions like these on an every-
day basis. All the decisions that we
make within our lives have some
consequence on our environment.
All of them,” she says. “I’m sort of
obsessed with the bluff that we
need to maintain and the bluff that
is necessary to do this, but at the
same time, there’s a necessity to
allow ourselves to feel the connec-
tion, to witness and to be present
for something outside of ourselves.
It’s a fundamental element of hu-
man nature and it’s really easy to
go without it, to not allow yourself
to think about it. It’s easy to only be
faced with something that is man,
or man-touched, or manmade.
And I think there is great danger
in that.”
Changing the hierarchy
Anna’s installation is part of the
‘I!avöllur: Icelandic Art In The 21st
Century’ exhibition, which saw 14
artists take over the entirety of
Hafnarhús to showcase the work
of a generation. While there were
no specific guidelines for the cre-
ators, the loose overarching con-
cept was to explore the massive
changes this generation has seen
since their coming of age, be that
social, political or ecological.
Anna’s piece fits in well. It at-
tacks the topic dead on, forcing the
viewer back into the natural world
that humanity has, especially
within our lifetimes, pushed to the
brink. It brings into focus the hier-
archies that we have become natu-
rally accustomed to—those that
deem the Earth to be the servant
of man and nature a commodity. In
light of our current climate catas-
trophe, those hierarchies are now
indisputable—unconscious tenets
of a civilization where it’s cheaper
to buy new resources than repair
old ones. Anna hopes, though, that
we can soon move beyond these be-
liefs and redesign our own univer-
sal beliefs.
“We need to re-contextualise
these ideologies, these transla-
tions of our relationship to and
with and within the natural world,”
she says. “Not only in how we talk
about things and how our system
of definitions have been laid down,
but in how we measure value. What
is our value system?”
But Anna’s questions go deep-
er—getting to the heart of our
core beliefs. “This is much more
than climate change. This has to
do with how we treat one another.
It’s on a very basic and primitive
level about interdependencies and
inter-relation,” she states. “Our
human nature is that we will al-
ways be full of contradictions. We
need to embrace that, but we also
need to make clear guidelines on
where we are a danger to ourselves
and the sustainability of us as a
species—no less the sustainability
of the entire planet. This comes
down, in some form, to ethics.”
A brutal contemplation
Anna intentionally presents
no prescribed solutions to these
problems—in fact, part of her con-
frontation is that there are no pre-
scribed solutions, for if there were,
we wouldn’t be in this situation.
“I’m a visual artist. I’m not a sci-
entist or an engineer,” she smiles.
“My work is not to produce solu-
tions; my work is to produce con-
templations and I think that’s just
as necessary for the human spirit.”
Walk through the installation
and you can’t help but be am-
bushed by the brutality of time.
A live presentation of death, it’s
a play in its most primal form—
no embalming, no shroud and no
tomb. Just a room with a rotating
machine presenting the thread
that connects us all: mortality.
“There are six bodies in this
space, six bodies rotating and
changing and dying,” Anna con-
cludes. “I think no matter who you
are or how you think about things,
your body is affected by witnessing
this.”
‘I!avöllur: Icelandic Art in the 21st
Century’ will be at Reykjavík Art
Museum Hafnarhús until October
17th, 2021.
Culture
“Our human nature is
that we will always be
full of contradictions.
We need to embrace
that, but we also
need to make clear
guidelines on where
we are a danger to
ourselves.”
12The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 09— 2021
You can't see the artist for the trees. Almost.
The shadow of decay