Gunnhildur Hauksdottir (IS)

Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir is an Icelandic visual artist living and working in Reykjavik and Berlin. She has studied at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavik and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam.
 
In her work, she combines elements of audio, video, performance, sculpture, drawing and text to create transient conceptual assemblies, exploring themes like cultural identity, nature, valor and fear. Her current concerns revolve around the devastation of the natural world, destruction of habitat and rapid extinction of non-human species and earth beings.

 
During her residency in Leipzig, Hauksdóttir will focus on her ongoing project, Borderline Human | Milk River Valley, which is an attempt to address those concerns. Borderline Human is a research project in collaboration with and supported by the Lichen Lab and the Barrett-Henzi Lab in Canada. For her research, Hauksdóttir travelled with a team of animal behavioral specialists to the Great Karoo in South Africa to collect observations, interviews, video and audio recordings and drawings of wild Vervet monkey troops that live on the Samara game reserve.

She is working on an installation and a dance/lecture performance informed and inspired by the dance theorist Noa Eshkol and South African lawyer, naturalist, poet and writer Eugène N. Marais, examining and animating the border between human and non-human beings.
 
The work has been on display at Postwerk in Berlin and is scheduled to be displayed in Uppsala, Sweden and Lethbridge, Canada later this year as well as in Iceland next year.