Visitations: Debatable Land and Troubled Waters

The artist duo, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have made and exhibited work internationally for over 20 years. Their pioneering approach, grounded in feminism and post-humanism, is research-based, collaborative, and interdisciplinary and explores human/non-human relations in contexts of history, culture and the environment.
Their three-year Visitations project, funded by the Icelandic Research Council and focusing on the arrivals of polar bears to Iceland from 1881 to 2016 is the basis of this lecture. Visitations re-examines this ancient, if intermittent encounter and by foregrounding polar bears as “foreign” in its multiple guises – as an individual being, a cohabitant, vagrant, alien, environmental register, remnant, artefact – Visitations contributes to current, urgent discourse on the objectification of both human and animal “others”, in a time of environmental catastrophe.