ART
Begin again
Begin again
Multimedia installation.
Setup with video input from webcam mounted in hole in the wall, software applying movement of waves recorded with webcam to grid video, metal grid with mounted stones, found concrete block, re-purposed tar paper, iron rack, aluminium plate covered with sea shells, factory dust, found iron remnant, yarrow plants planted in holes in the floor and walls, yarrow brewed to tea/dye and applied to silk and stainless steel container, led lights, iron rods, plaster casts of holes on the floors covered with reflective material, aluminium pipe, copper pipe.
Installation at Verksmiðjan á Hjalteyri, 2025 – part of the IUA group exhibition ‘In Your Hands’.
Grateful thanks to Gústaf Geir Bollason for being there, all his assistance and resources, Sigurður and IUA for making things happen.
LOS
LOS
The Old Norse word los means the disbanding of an army, suggesting soldiers falling out of formation to go home in truce with the wide world.
Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography. That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost
The forrest is often referred to as a symbol of the unconscious. During my time at Trykkeriet, I have been losing myself in the forrests surrounding the city. Tapping into the unfathomable diversity of nuances and dialogues taking place through chemistry, color, smell and electric signals.
The exhibition features several series of works, all printed on textile with colors extracted from the forrest. Living and reactive colors interact with the chemical balances that capture the fleeting moments.
Carried by a material and biological turning point, the exhibition explores transformation and the fluid nature of reality and self. Influenced by the concept of a sun-driven system, the works draw on the forest as a dynamic ecosystem. With a non-dualistic mindset, I position all life forms and circumstances intertwined.
By embracing the unpredictable interplay of materials with their own agency, each print becomes a living fragment shaped by circumstance, time, and unseen forces. The exhibition allows for sensory encounters with the poetic complexity of the world around us and how we perceive reality.
Photos: Daniel Persson / Trykkeriet
Der Var En Gang / Stigurinn / Once on a non-existing path /
Materialization of a recorded walk above Seyðisfjörður, 2014, dimensions variable.
Various shades of ink, paper, pigment from stones, beeswax, glass plate, lamp, soil and grasfibres and grass seeds, wood.
Installation juxtaposing collected physical artefact and material from walk, transitioning these to new shapes coherent with fragmented images from revisiting the site through drawing and sculpture.
The installation contains several sculptural object in a dialogue, unfolding the “path” impressions.
Sculpture made from earth, gras-straw and grass seeds in layers alternating gradually from circle to square and back, is watered during the exhibition period and growth of grass slowly changing the figures state or ‘season’.
A 10 m long drawing is made if glyph like marks, gradually changing color. The abstract lines and figures capturing just details of the complexity of the passing landscape from the walked passage.
Figures made from stones from the same path, shapes based on “repeating” the walk re-lived through the drawn representation. The figures of pigment made from the stones dust bound with beeswax slowly gives in for the heat from the lamp above during the period of the exhibition, some collapse, others fall and combine, creating a new scenery.
Speaking in tongues
Clay, Icelandic clay and iron oxide glaze
Brilliant
Videowork (Loop, duration 7,5 min.)
Focus resting on legs of person exposed to movement and sounds and other elements, vibrating limbs – legs covered by stained nylon.
Exhibited at Herðubreið / LUNGA, Iceland. 2020.
Immaterial
Superposition
Artists book, 2024.
Risograph and mono print on paper, schrim and acetate.
Published in 30 numbered copies.
FOSS PRESS
Presented in the exhibition “A Reader” at Y Gallery, May 2024.
BTWN LNS
Sitespecific installation: Varying degree / Gradbøjninger
In the exhibition BTWN LNS with Carissa Bactay. Curated by Emilie Dalum at The Tub Gallery / Ballin, Þíngeyri Iceland.
BTWN LNS
Exhibition at THE TUB / BALINN, Þingeyri Iceland, with Carissay Bactay
Curated by Emilie Dalum.
Site-specific installations in sync with and contrast to the desolate house at Brekkugata 8, 470 Þingeyri. Working with the themes of ‘afterlife and otherworlds’, the exhibition creates dialogues across time, perceptions, and worlds we didn’t know existed.
“In B T W N L N S, Litten Nystrøm and Carissa Baktay extract material and tales from The Tub and its surroundings and gather their findings in a collaborative exhibition. Drawing on the themes ‘otherworlds and afterlife’, the artists ponder how elements of the past stretch into the present and continue to the unknown. The house forms as a space of absence and presence, where fictive truths distort our perceptions and move us into the question: what awaits beyond reality? The art objects integrate and collide, encouraging the spectator to search for their own findings, glooming traces, and unaligned symmetries.”
Curator Emilie Dalum
ENLIGHTED
UPPLJÓMIN
Commission for The city of Reykjavik for Vetrarhátið January, 2022.
ENLIGHTED is an outdoor installation by Haraldur Karlsson & Litten Nystrøm for the city of Reykjavik presented at Vetrarhátið 2022 and at Elliðaárstöð in 2024. The installation consists of a number of large (man tall) luminated sculptures inspired by the transformative power of sunlight as a source of energy for both plants, humans and other organisms. The essential light which life on earth is based on and the ephemeral, intangible force that transforms into matter by the intricate process of photosynthesis in plants; turning bright rays of energy into life. Light has the ability to change an atmosphere, focus, the way we feel and our outlook on life. The installation points at the potential and the way our perception is suseptible to change and in constant flux.
A title and headline by each structure stimulates thoughts and a encourage mind-full experience of being in solitude, encapsulated and enlighed as each structure offers one person at a time to enter, reflect and visualise a specific direction and territory in their own mind, as suggested in the title. For example; ‘Visualise what you like’ or ‘visualise a happy moment to come’, ‘visualise a dream scenario’ or ‘visualise summer 5 years from now’, ‘visualise yourself as a tree’. Offering a personal interpretations and also suggesting that each viewpoint and experience is different – as a second skin we travel in – although the setting the same.
The installation points to similarities between lifeforms, our mutual dependencies of basic substances and delicate balances on earth and the need to slow down and just be – absorbing and taking responsibility for our own happiness and presence on earth. The half transparent membrane of each sculpture allowing light to shine through as the thin layer of skin between inside and outside is a metaphor for the exchange between impression and interpretation, body mind and feelings, the concrete and the intangible.
ENLIGHTED.
Outdoor installation of structures lit up with Full Spectrum light, adding a therapeuticexperience in the darkest winter months in Iceland. Commisioned by the City of Reykjavik, 2022.
Collaboration with haraldur Karlsson
Timespan
Timespan
Timeline, Yellow Earth
Timeline, Purple View
Series of unique works, 2021-2022.
Dimension; 60 x 80 cm.
Pigment and binder on textile and wooden stretcher.
Interference
Interactive video installation at Hallgrims Church in Reykjavik.
Collaboration with Haraldur Karlsson. Commissioned by the city of Reykjavik for Vetrarhátid, 2021.
The work Interference is based on the characteristics of Hallgríms church in Reykjavík whose architecture is inspired by basalt columns, a natural geological phenomena occurring in Iceland. The installation make use of large scale video projection and custom made software to play with the perception of the column structure by rendering an alternative reality where the solid columns are flexible, bendable and obscure the churchs straight formations into abstract geometric and organic patterns. Patterns arising with a resemblance to Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle or dazzle painting, a camouflage method consisting of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other, making it difficult to estimate an objects range, speed and position.
Photography: ABCD
RHEUM
RHEUM
Harbingar Gallery, 2020
Two person exhibition with Amanda Riffo.
Curated by Claudia Hausfeld.
Catalogue text:
„ ‘ I was talking about time. It‘s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it‘s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it‘s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around, out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don‘t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.‘
‚Can other people see it?‘ asked Denver.
‚Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it‘s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It‘s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else. […] “
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tout ce qui brille voit. (All that glows sees.)
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
In this exhibition, Amanda Riffo and Litten Nystrøm explore the physical properties of visibility. Rheum, the sand in one‘s eye after sleep, stands for the slight discomfort of the unresting gaze. Both artists employ tactics that simultaneously complicate the visual and allow them to navigate its form and content, towards a kind of solidified experience.
Amanda‘s Lebanon Series is an attempt to transcend the depths of a photograph via a fragmentation of the image plane. Each photograph allows to accommodate the maximum number of specifically sized circles. By carefully drawing directly onto the document, Amanda explores the image to its tiniest detail. Her relationship to the place is part of the investigation, as a means to remember and to compartmentalize her experience. Dust Screen, in the gallery’s window, twists the street view through yet another circular fragmentation. A semi-permeable surface, Dust Screen evokes a binary visual sensation by being both an image and holes through which the very same image is visible. Optolite, a tongue-in-cheek linguistic entanglement of two quite distinct concepts, takes up the idea of seeing as both a reflection and a puncturing.
Litten employs a shiny, almost reflective fabric as a base for a print. The print, derived from a found photograph, pushes the limits of representation towards pure sensuality. Litten’s sense of belonging is embodied in a variety of residues – dust from ground rocks that she picks up along the way from traveling between homes, leftovers of paint from abandoned houses, mud from places that she connects to through personal experiences. She uses these residues to materialize something visual, to give weight to light, thereby allowing the eye to interact with what it’s seeing on a tactile level.”
Text by Claudia Hausfeld
MÝRIN
MÝRIN
Mýrin reflect upon time materialized by a gradual transformation in matter, in a borderline area between biological, geological and chemical substances and processes. Found material; Iron rich Mýrarauði, ashes, stone and clay sets a stage where material often perceived as stabile and solid is depicted as entities with fleeting properties; in their nature and as processes we design and execute to human advantage. The reality around and within us as ongoing process and reactions to circumstance, where beauty arise in constellation of color, light, gas, liquid and solids in a time named “the antroposcene” by scientists.
PLAN-B Festival, Borgarnes 2020
Loop Hole
Loop Hole
Artists book.
Risoprinted edition of 25 numbered and signed copies.
FOSS Press
Reflecting on how nothing is isolated from their surrounding, always intererring, overlapping, hiding or in dialogue with other aspects, life, material and circumstance, the artists book is comprised of a number of cut or printed holes in various material, reproduced on a Risograph printer.
Sold out.
Contact FOSS.PRESS for exhibition copy.
It’s Not True; Elvar Mar Kjartansson and Litten Nystrøm
