Asta Fanney Sigurðardóttir

Asta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is an Icelandic artist who, this year, represented the country at this year’s Venice Biennale. A visual artist, performer, musician and poet, Asta treats the transmission of ideas as an esoteric technology – and a dialogue between human and inhuman forces. 

Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Sunday and White Studio

Nell Whittaker At the time this interview will come out, you will have already presented your work in Venice, but for now, you’re still working on it. What can you tell me at this stage?
Asta Fanney Sigurðardóttir What have you heard? 
NW Well, the material I’ve read describes it as something interested in intuition. Perhaps it’s mediating the connective spaces between us that are often expressed in the digital, but which also might be esoteric. You talk about cartography, and I would think that that’s a way of thinking about spatial relations not just as physical distances, but also maybe mental or temporal connections. Am I on the right track here?
AFS It’s nice to hear how people approach things. The work is very simple, but layered. The space in Venice is a former boat-making workshop, so I’m thinking a lot about vessels, transporting information as well as things. Navigating places in, with or through vessels, thinking about what kind of objects are used in these scenarios, but imbuing them with ideas, not locations. I got obsessed with buoys – how they’re shaped, and the fact that they’re connected to the far deep but still float on the surface. They’re signals of danger but also safe passage. These vessels are inhabited, like charms or amulets, filled with presence or a charged energy. 

NW How much of the work is about speech? You work with words, and certain words affect the real world – for instance, saying “I do” is a legal commitment to marriage.
AFS Every aspect of the work is layered with an approach to language and how we use words and where we put them. Recently, I was reading the story of Pandora’s Box and discovered that it wasn’t really a box – that’s a translation error. It was really a vase, like a jar. Vase, in Icelandic, is vasi, but it is also called a pocket. If you were to translate this story into Icelandic, it could also seem that Pandora has a pocket, and that the only thing left in the pocket is hope. 

NW How much has humour played a role in the development of the work?
AFS Usually, I use humour a lot – I use it as a tool, like a key. Because this is a serious platform, the humour hasn’t been as prominent as in my other works, as the pressure is so great. But recently, I was looking at the footage of a video work that will be in the piece, and it’s actually quite hilarious, although it’s deeply sad at the same time.

NW You’ve been working on the commission for a long time now. How has it evolved over time?
AFS Most of the time, it’s like a buoy in the water. I’ve been looking at buoys from all around the world, and some of them look very much like vases. But sometimes I get these superficial clues of what my work is, and then it feels like it’s a floating buoy, and then I take it from there and down where the roots are, down to the deep, to see what it’s connected to. It allows for something to be totally in the open, but there is a cord running down to something else. There’s a word in Icelandic for when you have two really high rocks and there’s nothing in between them – a chasm, or rift. We call it gjá. The process has been a lot like taking a step into the ravine and finding that an invisible bridge is there – I hope it’s here, and here, but it only appears when you take it. So it’s been a very particular process. I like to work in that way, not knowing what it will become. You are the adventure, and the process is the adventure, and it will unfold before your eyes. .