Artist talk (in Icelandic)
May 18th 2025 at 15:00
All the artists with work in our exhibition Among Gods and Mortals: Icelandic Artists in Varanasi will be present in the museum and give an artist talk in Icelandic. There will be chance to meet the artists and ask questions in English afterwards.
Einar Falur Ingólfsson
Eygló Harðadóttir
Guðjón Ketilsson
Margrét H. Blöndal
Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson
Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir
Curator: Pari Stave
An evening with Guðrún Eva Mínervudóttir (in Icelandic)
May 22nd 2025 at 19:30
Guðrún Eva was born in Reykjavík in 1976 but raised all over the country, including in Mosfellssveit, Kirkjubæjarklaustur and Garður in Gerðahreppur. She completed her matriculation examination from Hamrahlíð High School in 1996 and graduated from the University of Iceland in 2007 with a BA in philosophy. Guðrún Eva has been nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize four times and won it in 2011 for the novel Allt með kossi vekur. She has been nominated for the DV Cultural Prize three times and won it twice; in 2005 for Yosoy and in 2014 for Englaryk. She also received Award in early 2019 for the short story collection Ástin Texas. In 2021, she was nominated for the Nordic Literature Prize. She has also received recognition from RÚV for her writing and the Literary Prize for her novel Í skugga trjánna. In addition to writing fiction, Guðrún Eva works part-time as a writing teacher at the Iceland Academy of the Arts.
Yoga hour
June 14th 2025 at 15:30
In collaboration with the Indian Embassy in Iceland we are offering a free Yoga practice.
Come and join us for this event.
Darmowa joga w muzeum – we współpracy z Indyjską Ambasadą w Islandii zapraszamy na darmową praktykę Jogi.
Dołącz do nas!
Curator talk with Pari Stave
July 5th 2025 at 15:30
Pari Stave is a curator, art historian, and museum administrator. She is the head curator for exhibitions at the National Gallery of Iceland, and the former director of Skaftfell Art Center. Prior to moving to Iceland in 20023, she worked for nine years in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Pari Stave is the curator of Among Gods and Mortals: Icelandic Artists in Varanasi with artists: Einar Falur Ingólfsson, Eygló Harðardóttir, Guðjón Ketilsson, Margrét H. Blöndal, Sigurður, Árni Sigurðsson, Sólveig Aðalsteinsdóttir.
Come and join us for this talk at 3PM on 5th of July.
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.
Blooming days in collaboration with the town of Hveragerði
August 14 – 17th 2025
Program will follow soon.