Absolute Darkness

Embrace your shadow and powerlessness, embrace the darkness!

The darkness is warm and enveloping. There, one can sleep peacefully and travel through dreamland, or vanish back into the womb. Be defenseless. But the darkness is also terrifying, the realm of nightmares and loneliness, the domain of hungry ghosts who wander in search of relief or satisfaction. They are constantly drawn to the light that casts shadows on others, yet they can never truly sate their hunger, such is the deafening emptiness; the storm they force us to battle with, endlessly.

Absolute darkness is the final chapter in a tetralogy about darkness and the exposure of the human body. The first work in the series, The Darkness Embraces, premiered at the Norður og niður arts festival on the winter solstice in 2017. The video installation Öræfi, created in collaboration with Pierre-Alain Giraud, was projected onto the oil tanks at the Marshall House during the opening of the Winter Lights Festival in Reykjavík in February 2018. The third part, Fragments from the Dark, was shown at the Reykjavík Arts Festival in 2018, in the courtyard of the Reykjavík Art Museum – Hafnarhús.