Reykjavík Grapevine - apr. 2022, Blaðsíða 12

Stran!ers In
The North
‘Visitations’ Wins The Visual Arts Prize
Words: Josie Anne Gaitens Photos: Margrét Seema Takyar & Daniel Starrason
Polar bear encounters in Iceland
tend to take a predictable form: a
bear, often weak and emaciated, is
spotted by a local. Panic ensues;
the police are called, the media
incites a brief hysteria. The bear
is shot.
This chaotic cycle, doomed to
repeat itself every few years, is
partially the subject of ‘Visita-
tions’, an exhibition by Icelan-
dic/British artistic partnership
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson—a show
that earned them the prestigious
Icelandic Visual Arts Award.
“I’ve been told by lots of people
not to say it was a surprise,”
confides Mark Wilson. “I did actu-
ally think we might be shortlisted,
but Bryndís didn’t at all.”
“I wasn’t even thinking about
it,” confirms his partner, Bryndís
Snæbjörnsdóttir. “I don’t make art
to get accolades. But at the same
time, I don’t deny how wonderful
it was to receive it.”
“I didn't think the art scene in
Iceland had quite arrived at this
point,” she continues. “I felt so
pleased that they could award the
Art Prize to something that goes
beyond this idea of the Romantic
artist.”
“Conflict and paradox”
Mark and Bryndís’s work is
about as far removed from tradi-
tional notions of visual art as
could be imagined. Shown at the
Art Museum in Akureyri from
September 2021 to January 2022,
Visitations was the culmination of
a 3-year multidisciplinary research
project , funded by Rannís ,
the Icelandic Research Fund.
Presented using a broad variety of
media—with video, photographs,
collage, drawings and zoological
remains making up just some of
the different exhibits—the project
exemplifies the artistic practice of
Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, which
they have been developing over the
past 20 years.
“Sometimes people think we
make work about animals, but we
don't—we make work about weird
human behaviour,” explains Mark.
“We use a particular animal and
the interface that humans have
with that animal to explore differ-
ent interests, and often to reveal
a lack of consensus; conflict and
paradox.”
A personal connection
Mark and Bryndís have been creat-
ing work together since 1999, and
polar bears—or rather, the weird
human behaviours associated with
them—have frequently been the
focus of their artistic exploration.
“It started from a very personal
perspective,” says Bryndís. “It had
to do with my name—Snæbjörn-
sdóttir [‘snow bear’s daughter’, in
English]. I lived in Scotland for
many years, and I was quite persis-
tent that people would be able to
say my surname. I don't know why,
but it became hugely important for
me.”
A transformational moment
came when Bryndís visited a
museum store room in Scotland,
and was confronted by the sight
of hundreds of stuffed animals of
every kind. The experience, she
says, “activated this deep feeling
of some kind of loss. You know—
what have we done? What are we
doing?”
T h e u n s e t t l i n g i n c i d e n t
provided unexpected momen-
tum and helped to crystallise the
approach Bryndís wanted to take
with her practice. The couple
soon completed their first project,
‘nanoq: flat out and bluesome’: an
artists’ survey of taxidermy polar
bears in Scotland.
Making connections
This first collaborative work
confirmed not only the pair’s
enduring interest in polar bear
experiences, but also their desire
to involve partners from outside
the artistic sphere, an element of
their practice that has remained
a consistent thread throughout
their various projects. From histo-
rians, folklorists and zoologists,
to farmers, pet owners and hunt-
ers, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson see
collaboration as an essential part
of their work.
“This thing about ‘the artist,
the genius’… I always felt like this
was total nonsense—and I still do,
basically,” Bryndís says, waving her
hands dismissively. “Art is about
bringing people together.”
“It’s about making unlikely
connections on every level,” agrees
Mark. “We work a lot with other
disciplines, and we talk a lot about
the importance of that.”
Ill-fated visitors
For Visitations, the artists focussed
their work around two polar bear
arrivals to Iceland in 2008. The two
‘vagrants’—as non-native visitors
are known—both came ashore on
the North coast of Iceland, within
weeks of each other. Both were
shot and killed, although there
was serious discussion of trying to
tranquillise the second one.
In a macabre twist of fate, Bryn-
dís had the strange experience of
encountering this particular bear
twice: once living, and again after
its death. She was able to accom-
pany the press to see it, running
hungry and scared, across the
wild expanses of Skagafjördur.
The second encounter came when
she and Mark were conducting
research at The Icelandic Institute
of Natural History. It was here that
they discovered that many of the
skeletons of bears killed in Iceland
are kept for scientific purposes.
“On one of our first visits there,
they just lent us the bones of that
particular bear.” Bryndís says,
almost incredulously, as if she still
can’t quite believe such a thing
took place.
“Again, you have these kind of
moments,” she continues. “You’re
driving your car and in the back of
the car are the bones of the bear
that you saw living. It’s difficult to
let it go; it haunts you.”
The idea of the stranger
This complex idea of a haunting, of
a relationship with a species that
is mediated by a heady combina-
tion of folklore and fear, forms
the basis of Visitations. The bones
that Bryndís and Mark drove
home that day were also an exhibit
in the show; not wired together
and displayed as in museums, as
if they still inhabited the ghostly
form of an absent animal, but in a
stacked heap in a box. An indisput-
able container of evidence of what
happened when a bear met a man.
“More abstractly, we’re look-
ing at the idea of the stranger, and
the idea of hospitality” says Mark.
“How do you deal with a stranger,
when the stranger constitutes a
threat? Because obviously, histori-
cally, there’s only been one answer
to that question.”
‘Visitations: Polar Bears out of Place’
took place at Akureyri Art Museum
from 25.09.2021 - 09.01.2022, and
was curated by Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir.
Learn more at visitations.lhi.is
“People think
we make work
about animals,
but we don't—
we make
work about
weird human
behaviour”
12The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 04— 2022Culture
The exhibition in Akureyri
If you find bones in their car, don't worry; they're just from polar bears