SÍM

Gallerie Käytävä, Pohjoisranta 10 A 4, 00170 Helsinki

Sýningartímabil: 02.03 - 03.04. 2026

This exhibition brings together three leading Icelandic female artists whose practices reflect on land not as a passive backdrop, but as a shifting, political, and deeply affective force. Through paintings, cartography, video, and sculptures, the artists question how orientation, governance, and emotions shape our relationship with the environment. Their works move between geological time and lived experience, revealing land as something negotiated, mapped, governed, felt, and continuously reimagined.

Anna Rún Trygvadóttir presents a series of watercolours based on speculative mappings of Earth's magnetic poles, past and future. Her works remind us that the cardinal directions are not fixed but points in continuous movement. Inventions such as the magnetic compass have shaped cultural and historical perspectives, rooted in Western navigation traditions and celestial orientation. By dissolving the idea of a fixed north, Anna Rún situates the Earth within a broader cosmic and temporal continuum, where land is not anchored to stable coordinates but is instead in constant flux, shaped by invisible geomagnetic forces originating from the core of our planet. This long-term research includes investigation into the effects of the Earth's magnetic field on lifeforms outside of minerals, such as cells structure, plant life, and animals. This ongoing inquiry extends her cartographic practice beyond representation, foregrounding magnetism as a fundamental force that quietly structures both biological and planetary systems, binding geological, living, and cosmic processes into a shared
field of influence.

A. Hildur Hákonardóttir's installation entitled Sófia is an evolving work that has unfolded across three exhibitions, culminating here in a video and drawings that brings its conceptual core into focus. Originating from an exploration of touch, communication, and interconnectedness, first developed through references to Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, the work reflects on the invisible patterns that bind living systems, from human relationships to the communicative networks of birch trees. Material elements made from peat soil and sand emphasize bodily and ecological connection to the earth, while the video introduces Sófía as a symbolic figure: the mother of creation and embodiment of divine wisdom that animates the universe, flora, fauna, and humanity with breath and understanding. By foregrounding her long-overlooked presence, suggested by the marginal female figure in Michelangelo's fresco, the work seeks to recover and inscribe Sófía's name into cultural memory, releasing it outward as an act of recognition, continuity, and shared responsibility within a living cosmos.

Sigrún Hrolfsdóttir explores visible and invisible forces at play in the world. With focus on emotional, biochemical, and ecological dimensions of living systems, she approaches landscape, particularly mountains, as living bodies shaped by pressure, time, and endurance. In her work, land is not a backdrop but a sensing entity, mirroring human vulnerability and strength. Her abstract paintings draw on the quiet persistence of mountainous forms as symbols of care, resistance, and survival. Central to her feminist perspective is the idea of cooperation and conductivity between elements, exemplified by a uterus and mountains crocheted from copper thread. The forms evoke life giving capacities and protection, while copper's conductivity gestures toward connection, empathy, and interdependence between human and more-than-human worlds, revealing how environments, and social structures are intimately entangled.