NEWS 2025
What do we share when we speak? What does it mean to be human? How does language shape our understanding of the world, of our reality and of ourselves?
These questions are fundamental to Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir’s research into how meaning manifests across different languages. To this end, she explores the creative power of language – its ability to connect us, to express emotions and to fall silent – while probing whether universal concepts can flow from one language and culture to another, transcending linguistic and cultural divides. Or whether meaning is ultimately bound by certain limits.
In Universality, Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir works with the interplay of text and imagery, where visuals and written language merge and the boundaries between the local and the universal blur; walls become pages, objects become phrases. By weaving together insights from linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy, the artist creates a space where the viewer is invited to consider the fragility of meaning and the essential human drive to connect with one another. The exhibition thus becomes a meditation on the translatability of words and concepts, as well as the human experience, as communicated through the system of language. Underlying it all is a focus on the concept of “human experience” and its inextricable connection to the broader phenomenon of life itself.
A living, breathing language is vast, yet finite, constantly evolving and leaving gaps as it expands into new directions. In this way, language is a reflection of the universe itself, mirroring our attempts to map both the infinite and the intimate. With each disappearing language, a worldview vanishes, taking with it the unique ways of naming, knowing and being. Thus, language contains the paradox and struggle of human existence, fleeting as it is: Can we ever truly grasp the universal? Or is our understanding – universal meaning – destined to be fractured, scattered across the many ways in which humans make sense of their worlds?
Jóna Hlíf Halldórsdóttir (b. 1978) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Akureyri in 2005, completed an MFA degree from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 2007 and an MA in art education from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2013. In recent years, Jóna Hlíf’s artistic practice has focused on exploring the concepts of time, being and the image, with special regard to illumination, space and representation. Jóna Hlíf has held various solo exhibitions in art spaces both in Iceland and abroad, including BERG Contemporary and the Akureyri Art Museum. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and her works belong to the collections of a number of museums in Iceland.
The exhibition is curated by Hólmar Hólm.
The public artwork In Times of Old was selected from a closed competition held by the Government Property Agency in collaboration with Association of Icelandic Visual Artist. The artwork will be installed in spring 2025 at Skúlagata 4 for the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries.
In Times of Old 1961-2061
The title In Times of Old is a reference to one of the opening stanzas of Völuspá, inspired by the surf and the view of Faxaflói Bay from the building in Skúlagata, along with the current renovations carried out on the building.
The artwork consists of a text work in brass and a Prussian blue sky containing the position of the stars over Reykjavík on 1 January 2061, on the 100th anniversary of the building. The text work comprises two independent sentences that are joined by the word Ocean (Hafið). Together, the sentences form a semicircle above the entrance to the building, with the words: Stars guide us home across THE OCEAN connects the countries of the world (Stjörnur varða vegi heim um HAFIÐ tengir saman lönd heimsins). Thus, the ocean finishes one sentence and begins the other. Both sentences are selected based on their connection to the history of Iceland and the building.
The first sentence refers to how in the past, when sailing across the ocean to settle in new areas and later travel, the stars were a certain constant in the sky, used to navigate the sea routes. Each word in the sentence is chosen based on ideas of alliteration, rhythm and exoteric language. The second sentence is formed in the same way, but based on the idea that the ocean is not only a divider between countries, but rather a thread that connects all countries and has been mankind’s way of transport and communication for thousands of years.
This connection between the ocean and the stars then embodies the work’s final part which will take place on 1 January 2061. The plan is to then launch into space two letters about the status of the Icelandic language and the Icelandic community, one with an optimistic view and the other one pessimistic. This is a message-in-a-bottle of sorts, with two different messages, two possibilities regarding the future. This part of the work is intrinsically connected to time being a flow towards change, towards an unknown uncertainty, but is linked to the fact that the building is being renovated for future use. In this context, the building’s centenary forms a predictable constant for the future and the work is intended to honour that.