Among Gods and Mortals: Icelandic Artists in Varanasi

Time, and space in which to work are two essential conditions for creativity. For visual artists, the studio is a sanctuary, a personal realm for contemplation and industry. This exhibition is the result of a project that posed the question: What happens when artists are transported to a studio far away from the comfort zone of the familiar?

Among Gods and Mortals offers a view into the experience of six accomplished and well-established Icelandic artists whose works shown here were conceived in connection with recent stays at Kriti Gallery and Anandvan Residency, in Varanasi, India. Situated in a verdant garden in a private enclave, the residency compound comprises individual studios with sleeping accommodations and a common dining room – all within one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in human history. The residency is at once a workplace and base camp for excursions into the many-layered worlds of Varanasi (also called Banaras), the spiritual city known in the Hindu faith as the “abode of the gods,” with its many temples and shrines devoted to fervent worship. Varanasi is a city of extremes, of the endless parade of life teeming in the streets and the solemn mourning of the dead at the cremation pyres along the sacred Ganges River.

Photographer and writer Einar Falur Ingólfsson was the first of the six artists to travel to Varanasi, in 1999. His friend, the Indian photographer Dayanita Singh, later introduced him to Navneet Raman and Petra Manefeld (gracious hosts and founders, in 2007, of Kriti Gallery), and Ajay Pandey, the learned historian who guides the artist in residence through the city, inflecting the tours with insights into India’s culture. Eventually, over the course of several return visits, Einar Falur got the idea to bring a group of artists from Iceland to Kriti to see what might emerge from their time spent in the holy city.

It is hard to imagine two more disparate landscapes and cultures than those of Iceland and India. On the one hand there is Iceland, located in the sub-Arctic, sparsely populated, geographically and historically remote, and of relative cultural homogeneity; and India, on the other hand, bordering on tropical latitudes, densely populated, ancient, and layered with a complex history at the cross-roads of diverse cultural influences.

The Icelanders who traveled to Varanasi were following in the footsteps of a long line of artists seeking inspiration and enlightenment there. Yet their purpose was not to illustrate or interpret what they found; rather, it was to allow the intense sensorial experience of the travel to India to wash over them, to see where it might lead within their own practices.

Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir

When Sólveig traveled to India for the first time, in 2023, she had already been working on drawings that explored the expressive potential of simple calligraphic lines. For much of her time at Kriti she explored the winding streets of the Varanasi, closely attending to the continuum of everyday life, such as the endless linear flow of the Ganges, or the undulating profiles of the sacred Gangatiri cows, which she sketched during her stay. Upon returning home to Reykjavík, Sólveig decided to use a roughly textured hemp paper and India ink to create her 8-panel drawing. She took a course in Chinese calligraphy and trained in the technique of controlling a thick brush to form bold, meandering lines. Seen together the drawings form a horizontal line across the sheets of paper. Later, it occurred to her that the source of the Ganges in the glaciers of the Himalayas rhymed, in a way, with the glacial rivers of Iceland. Her fascination with the ubiquitous cows was another rhyme, connecting the cow divinity of the Hindu tradition with the mythical Auðhumla, the nourishing primal cow in the creation narrative of the Prose Edda. Auðhumla became the title of the series of drawings. A series of sculptures entitled Betula (Birch) is a kind of counterpoint to the two-dimensional, horizontal line drawings. Formed from whittled birch branches and anchored to wooden bases, their delicate lines of the branches rise vertically like tendrils of smoke.

Margrét H. Blöndal

Traveling to India for the first time in October 2024, Margrét also thought of archetypes that occur across space, time, and human experience. The energy of Varanasi awakened a reflection onto her own past, mirrored in what she observed around her. “I travelled back in time externally and internally. It was beautiful. It was intense. It was universal. The wide spectrum of life is somehow accepted, and its bareness is clear and pure and sharp and raw.” The paintings in the exhibition were created in her Kriti studio over the course of a month. Photographs of striking details seen during the course of the day later served as memory aids for the paintings, which convey heightened sensations of “the humidity, beauty, intensity, heat, sacredness, alertness, nurture and harassing car horns.”

Margrét arrived at Kriti physically stiffened due to lack of her usual mobility. At the same time, she was dissatisfied by the firm consistency of the water-soluble oil paint she had brought with her. After being given a bottle of Ayurvedic pain-relieving oil for her body that she tried mixing it with the paint. Applying it to paper, working on the floor, she discovered that the paint behaved with just the fluidity she needed. “I knew as one knows that this particular oil would be the key into the works and that is exactly what happened, and we started moving.

Eygló Harðardóttir

Eygló first stayed at the Kriti Residency in 2020, for the past years has been making and exhibiting work influenced by her stay there. As an artist, she is deeply engaged with the elemental sources of materials she uses and has studied both papermaking and the “alchemy” of making paint. For her residency in 2024 she brought with her a set of pure pigments – lapis lazuli, malachite, verdigris, rose madder, turquoise, indigo — acquired in Jaipur, where she also had visited the studio of the acclaimed artist S. Shakir Ali, who offered insight into the miniature painting tradition. “The works I made have a direct reference to this tradition when it comes to material. I used traditional miniature brushes to achieve the delicacy and finesse of the strokes and historical natural pigments from plants, semi-precious stones etc.”

The painting series Raga – Tilbrigði í lit /Colours of Raga was inspired by a concert of raga music that took place one night in the palace next to the Kriti studios, where the musicians and audience sat close together. During the concert Eygló was moved to make delicate pencil drawings using the technique automatism, the process of drawing without glancing at the paper. Raga literally means coloring, or tinging, or dyeing, and it refers to the improvisational aspect of classical Indian music, which is structured along melodic motifs. The experience of drawing in response to the music inspired the circular shapes that form the both the paintings, and a sculpture, Áhrif/Impact, constructed of thin copper sheets, etched with lines.

Einar Falur Ingólfsson

Throughout much of his career as a photographer, Einar Falur has explored notions of time, whether in multi-year projects where he has retraced the paths of earlier photographers and artists to understand how the landscapes they depicted have changed, or when, most recently, he documented the daily changes in the weather over the course of a year. In Varanasi, “I began to think about the deep and fascinating layers of time that can be seen everywhere, whether in the buildings built on top of each other over centuries, in peeling paint layers on house walls, or in culture and human life.” Einar Falur has spent several months in Varanasi over the years, recording the passage of time in two series. There are the “timelines” that comprise color photographs shot with a medium-format camera, where the same view taken at the same angle year after year shows the accretions of change taking place in the textures and colours of the architecture. Another series encompasses video works shot in a specific location and shown on a continuous loop like moving photographs of life in the streets. “In my work I am also continuously in visual discussions with artists and photographers who have both worked in India before me and affected my way of seeing in various ways. And the work is always a diary of my own life as well, one man in the mass of millions passing by.”

Guðjón Ketilsson

A visit to the archeological site at Sarnath in 2023 left a deep impression on Guðjón. Located on the outskirts of Varansi, Sarnath is the sacred site of Gautama Buddha’s first teaching, according to the Lalitastara sutra. The site is notable for its many carved votive stone stupas. “The cylindrical stone forms, each one unique, no two alike, all of which are in their own way abstract images of Buddha, aroused in me associations with some of my earlier works.” In much the same way that Guðjón had explored architectural and human forms in the past, he embarked on a new series of pencil drawings on rough paper that played with the idea of the stupa form, though without directly emulating it. Returning to Iceland, these studies of cylindrical shapes extended to an extraordinary series of wood sculptures made with a lathe, resulting in 25 unique structures, painted in varying shades of saffron and installed on pedestals. The saffron hues “appeared to me literally everywhere in Varanasi. In retrospect, I visualize countless variations of the color. When Indians talk about the color saffron, they are not necessarily talking about one specific color with precision, but the name “saffron” covers all kinds of color tones from pale reddish yellow to orange.” Other works in the exhibition include two large-scale photo collages composed of a vibrant and dizzying array of images taken in the streets of Varansi. These images are compositions, very much inspired by the clear and colorful Indian miniature paintings.

Sigurður Arni Sigurðsson

In his paintings, Sigurður Arni explores the use of shadow in rendering the illusions of receding perspective and three-dimensionality on the canvas surface. In a sense, he challenges what painting is, breaking it down into basic elements where the background of the canvas (the base of the painting) is part of the visual structure and the color surface. During his stay in India, in 2023, his eye was naturally drawn to the sight of bodies on the planar field of the landscape, and to the juxtapositions of both subtle and intense color. “The women cutting grass in the fields were dressed in beautifully woven red and sky-blue silk, in stark contrast to the pale grass. The gardeners in the public parks were elegantly adorned in orange jackets, like blooming summer flowers, while the beggar at the door blended so seamlessly with the clay-colored ground that he was barely visible. One is constantly reminded of these contrasts: wealth and destitution, fertility and barrenness, the magnificence of spirit in craftsmanship and design versus the basest instincts and poorest conditions of human existence, life and death.” The extreme contrasts of India led Sigurður Arni to rethink the canvas, leaving edges bare (unprimed) for the first time to create a kind of frame integrated within the confines of the paintings’ borders. Thus, the images of flat, rectangular fields of color with perforated holes seem to float on the naked canvas. “What is new and intriguing for me in these works is the bareness of the concept. A certain dimension and space are created, which is simultaneously exposed and deconstructed. Something is formed, but what forms it also destroys it at the same time. It builds up and breaks down.”

Pari Stave