In her space-consuming installations and interventions, artist Anna Rún Tryggvadottir addresses the friction between the natural and the man-made. She questions the possibility of alternative narratives to the prevailing Western notion of human beings governing the natural world. Her works are haptic and textural, inspired by natural operative systems and our relationship with natural formations. For her work, she creates situations in which technologically driven systems enable and explore the kinetic and cyclical behavior of natural elements. Chosen materials are set in perpetual motion or brought into a collaborative gesture with one another.
The solo exhibition An Ode – poriferal phases at Künstlerhaus Bethanien gives a broad insight into Tryggvadottir’s process-based approach for the first time in Germany. With her work Garden, 2017, she constructed a terrain/topography of transformation processes that brought the individual behavior of its materials, beyond human control, to the fore. Allowing space for the materials themselves, for an undefined and vulnerable performance. Under the title An Ode – poriferal phases, a series of objects consisting of natural and artificial materials is presented as a performative (presence of a) spectrum from lifeless to perished life forms. Each of her works questions the politics and agendas of the materials used, by playing with their properties and exploring intersections between the naturally and humanly constructed as a metaphor for the components of our lives.

Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir is a grantee of the Icelandic Visual Arts Fund, Icelandic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Icelandic Artist Salary Fund, Icelandic Art Center and of a private funder.