The Icelandic Pavilion offers one of the most ethereal, poetic experiences currently in existence in Venice – a seamless exercise in myth-making and fantasy. The exhibition titled “Pocket Universe” by Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is a vast storytelling environment where visitors are swept along by a series of gestures, whispering presences and sensory associations spread across the space. Rather than starting with a closed concept, I created the conditions necessary to invoke a “fixed framework” within which creative improvisation and imagination took place.
The entire exhibition is characterized by a distinctly Icelandic attitude: a heightened awareness of minimal multi-sensory presence and a quiet immersion in the temporal flow of events, suspended in time and space until they find their final resolution. There is something that ingrains this sensitivity, and it is most likely a result of ancestral animism that persisted even after the imposition of Christianity. The observer first encountered Sigurðardóttir during Sequences, the country’s biannual perennial art festival, when the concept of the pavilion was still firmly established in the artist’s mind. In that moment, she spoke of her concept of art as a gesture of imaginative possibility. “It’s like pointing to something, giving an indication that something is happening. It really opens 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, and put forward the possibility of there being an alternative, another outcome, hope or a different way of seeing the world. I know it’s basic, but it’s still rooted in the reality we live in.”
Her work in Venice is an “invisible performance” in constant transformation, and she will remain in Venice for eight months to add and transform existing works and revitalize the space through performances that will only be seen by some. In this way, the pavilion serves as a liminal threshold where this absurd storytelling exercise can be brought to life, reactivating the local symbols and archetypes that intersect to generate alternative ways of perceiving reality.
“It gives people an opportunity to think about things differently, or to imagine things differently,” she told the Observer recently, noting how difficult it is to completely displace other ways of seeing from people. “You can just open those little doors, but you won’t change the whole person. When you’re closed off by the things around you, it opens up like a little window of freedom.”
Sigurðardóttir describes the suite as a “drawing of ideas”, a palimpsest that works through gestures, clues and invitations: the viewer encounters one thing, then another, gradually drawing his or her own picture. But everyone’s picture is different. Through recurring motifs of portals, spheres, caves and oceans, Sigurðardóttir works in the fluid register of the symbolic, weaving together myths and folklore that share similar archetypal characters and attempting to explain the mysteries of our existence within a broader cosmic entanglement. The blue walls contribute to this feeling of buoyancy, which Sigurðardóttir links to her fascination with floats. I was busy researching its different shapes and uses, especially after arriving in Venice, where navigational marks in the water are one of the first things one notices. For her, buoys are powerful symbols: they operate in a space of uncertainty, where what lies beneath the surface cannot be seen, yet they provide guidance. “It floats, but it’s still connected to the deep,” she muses. “It has this connection to the inner Earth, but it’s still flexible.”
Language is central to Sigurðardóttir’s practice. It transitions seamlessly into poetry and music. Scores and texts exist in the space, suggesting another entry point into the narrative that remains suspended, waiting to be activated. The sound and performance are absent but still somewhat present; The artist is no longer performing, or not yet, yet the viewer is invited to perform that score or text internally. “It’s about how you trigger that sound in people’s minds,” she explained. “You are proposing something that is not universal, because each person will create something of their own. This is the field, or world, that I want to activate.”
Before his book Sequences, Sigurðardóttir began reading about the quantum world, and found a parallel with poetry in that both seemed to work around something that could not be stated directly but could be approached through the negative space surrounding it. The poem does not declare something explicitly; He revolves around him so that the reader feels his presence. “You’re not saying it directly, but you’re drawing the negative space of everything. Then you get this image of something. You can’t say it’s really there, but you feel it’s there in some way… Poetry is a beautiful thing that happens in your head. It’s a personal experience that you have in your pocket.”
This logic can be found in the pavilion: “It’s a score, but it’s also a game. It’s very serious, but it’s also fun. I love this realm of imagination.” An important source of inspiration came from board games from Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, through which Sigurdardottir observed how cultures throughout history had developed similar structures and found herself reflecting on her own ignorance of how to play those ancient instruments. “I don’t know the rules. That makes them mysterious. But without rules, anything is possible: I can invent them myself. So I started combining games, changing the rules, taking them apart, putting them back together. This becomes a starting point, as in any game.”
Sigurðardóttir resists labels for her practice. She is not known as a choreographer, and even terms like “multimedia artist” or “time-based art” seem inadequate. “I don’t think of it as time-based art either, because my relationship with time is very strange: I don’t really think that time exists in the way that we as humans perceive it in a linear way.” “I like to take time and connect it from the past to the future, and make a knot.” The work identifies a moment, then gathers ideas and energies around it – a way of bringing the spirit back into the body and discerning the present as it appears.
Rather than imposing fixed meanings, the exhibition uses the same playful approach that sparks curiosity and free exploration that Sigurdardóttir embraces in her own practice. It is always waiting for signs – not visions exactly, but a sense of possibility that can be woven into the existing fabric of reality. When no sign appears, she does practical work to stimulate her subconscious: writing, sorting pictures, trying things on, generating materials. “It’s like drawing and finding the dots, one, two, and then the picture appears. I guess that’s how I work,” she said, emphasizing that it’s also about trusting that process, even when it exists outside of traditional productive rationality. “He’ll always be what he wants to be, and you’re like a servant.”
The visual dimension of her work is no less important. Sigurðardóttir rejects the idea that visual elements are secondary to concept, insisting that an intense physical response to colours, patterns, textures and combinations of materials is also primary. However, she is drawn to moments when things don’t fit together, when social energies become awkward, awkward, fraught, or uncomfortable. Those gaps hold energy. By acknowledging or entering into it, she can change the structure of a room, a group, or a situation: “It’s about the energy in the room, the context, where you’re coming from, who’s there and everything. It’s about activating something, taking something apart and putting it back together again differently.”
She explained that the goal is not to promise healing or change the entire person, which would become another form of control. Instead, the work creates a situation: an invitation that viewers may choose to enter, embrace, or interpret differently. Every physical object in space may carry a signal about where you want to go, but there is no fixed agenda. Its openness and ability to accommodate multiple interpretations are essential. “It’s about feeling out of your inner pocket,” she said, adding that pavilion is an intuitive exercise, constantly changing the rules or putting things into another kind of relationship, challenging established norms and shared expectations. “It’s more about perspective: how you look at things, and how you can change every circumstance into a lucky situation, or make it flexible.”
The centerpiece of the pavilion is a video that follows a character called Creature Zero as he sets out to find the “original rock.” To film it, Sigurardóttir originally envisioned performing in every country in the world, but when that proved impossible, she found another way to think globally, turning to myths, folktales and cosmology from many cultures, especially stories about the creation of the world. “It’s very similar, very similar. I was taking these tales and mixing them together, but I also wanted to create a whole new story,” she explained. From these, I took the first sentences and began to weave them together, connecting the various origins with their erasure and transformation into a new global myth. “It’s very subtle, layered and almost impossible to do. I wanted the energy underneath to be that kind of thing.” Filmed in locations associated with mystical or spiritual traditions, the video highlights how this universally shared exercise in mythmaking has encouraged humans to embrace the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction as a generative starting point for renewal.
Sigurðardóttir’s multi-layered choreography in Venice suggests imagination as a shared and generative force, capable of expanding outward into multiple contemplative worlds. It suggests the existence of a collective unconscious rooted in intuition, ritual, and primitive memory, which operates at a pre-linguistic level, and can transcend the barriers of language to become a catalyst for shared emotional and metaphysical landscapes.
In this state of perpetual flux, with water as a transforming element, the pavilion proposes wonder not as an escape from reality, but rather as an existential tool for reconnecting fragmented realities through shared acts of imagination – a force that can change how a person functions in reality. The entire pavilion invites exploration, rediscovery and reactivation of the imaginative capacity that humans need in times of uncertainty. Not as an escape, but as a belief in the power of imagination to emerge, leading once again into the circle of creativity. “We are in such a dangerous time,” Sigurdardottir admitted. “But you can identify something and turn it towards the possibility that things could be different. It is a very small thing, but it opens up possibilities.” “Imagination is a source of intense power, and we can use it as a starting point to create a new world. I strongly believe in that.”
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