Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson


For the last twenty years, the collaborative artist team, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, has been practicing and producing in the field of contemporary art on an international stage with projects and exhibitions in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the USA. They have built a reputation, resonant in contemporary art as well as in animal studies, human geography, museology, the environmental sciences and more. It has been their strategic intent to explore a non-anthropocentric agenda, and to drive the idea that contemporary art is a significant tool to this end, made possible by the application of unique blends of method, material and cross-disciplinary appropriation.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson’s artwork is multidisciplinary in nature, most usually taking the form of installation, involving anything from sculptural interventions, found objects and materials, video, audio, drawing, photography and texts. Notwithstanding their participation in International Biennales and major gallery shows, their adherence to the significance and advantage of site-specificity have often led them strategically to exhibit in some tiny and otherwise most obscure venues.

With multiple project monographs to their name, the production of their work is unashamedly driven and facilitated by intensive research and interdisciplinary associations;  as artists, they consider art to be both the most promising platform and the most likely instrument by which the fusion and mutual complication or disturbance of traditionally discrete knowledge-fields will succeed in effecting significant and increasingly-urgent cultural and behavioural change.

And change is the only show in town…

They ask what it means in the context of crisis, (e.g. mass extinction and the Anthropocene), to consider and practice art as a tool of disruption and mediation, how situations involving complex, cross-disciplinary and cross cultural relationships can effectively be deconstructed and their stories productively reconfigured and told. As a consequence of their approach, through many projects, the artists have invested and directed their energies towards alliances and conversations across multiple fields in exhibitions, associated seminars and international conferences. For them, every exhibition made, is a provocation of sorts and is used to create opportunities for extending discourse, often between people who would otherwise rarely, if ever, engage. Over this time and as a consequence, they have exhibited and otherwise continue to be involved with many other internationally significant artists and theorists across the world.

In 2021, they prepare for a 20 year-retrospective exhibition at Ger∂arsafn, Kópavogur Art Museum (Sept 2021) and  continue to develop their ongoing Visitations project in Iceland (Sept 2021) and for  Alaska (at Anchorage Museum – April 2022). 

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir (PhD) is Professor and MA programme director at the Iceland University of the Arts

Mark Wilson (PhD) is Professor in Fine Art at the University of Cumbria, Institute of the Arts, UK

Snæbjörnsdóttir Wilson are 2015-22 Polar Lab Artists-in-Residence with the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, USA, leading to the forthcoming solo exhibition in April 2022