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In the Icelandic Pavilion, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir’s Mythmaking Takes Its Most Fluid Form

"Pocket Universe" is an exercise in imagination, where buoys, board games, poems and the collective search for meaning open new avenues of understanding.

The Icelandic Pavilion offers one of the most ethereal, poetic experiences currently on in Venice—a fluid exercise in mythmaking and imagination. Titled “Pocket Universe,” the exhibition conceived by Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is an expansive storytelling environment in which visitors drift through a sequence of gestures, whispering presences and sensory associations dispersed across the space. Rather than beginning with a closed concept, she created the conditions to call forth a “fixed framework” within which creative improvisation and imagination take place.

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A distinctly Icelandic attitude characterizes the entire exhibition: a heightened awareness of the most minimal multisensory presences and a quiet indulgence in the temporal flow of events, suspended in time and space until they find their final resolution. Something anchors this sensibility—likely the result of an ancestral animistic spirituality that endured even after the imposition of Christianity. Observer first encountered Sigurðardóttir during Sequences, the country’s biannual festival of durational art, when the pavilion’s concept was still solidifying in the artist’s mind. In that moment, she spoke about her notion of art as a gesture of imaginative possibility. “It’s like pointing at something, giving a cue that something is happening. It’s already opening up possibilities,” she said at the time. “It can be really simple; it doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to be put in front of people, putting forward the possibility of an alternative, another outcome, hope or a different way of seeing the world. I know it’s such a basic thing, but it’s still so grounded in the reality we are living.”

Her work in Venice is an “invisible performance” in constant transformation, and she will remain in Venice for eight months to add works, change existing ones and activate the space through performances that will only be seen by some. In that way, the pavilion serves as a liminal threshold where this ludic storytelling exercise can be revived, reactivating local symbologies and elemental archetypes that intermingle to generate alternative ways of perceiving reality.

“It gives people a chance to think about things differently, or to imagine things differently,” she told Observer more recently, noting how difficult it is to dislodge other ways of seeing from people entirely. “You can just open up those little doors, but you’re not going to change the entire human being. When you’re locked down because of the things around you, it opens up like a tiny window of freedom.”

Sigurðardóttir describes the pavilion as “a drawing of thoughts,” a palimpsest that........

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