Hugarflug 2025 - Unstable Systems by Sigmundur Pall Freysteinsson

Unstable Systems Instability can be a creative force in art, design, and architecture. Artists, designers, and scholars work both with and against systems that are ever-changing, fragile, or unpredictable. Whether dealing with technological systems, ecosystems, social structures, or sensory experiences, instability is often a prerequisite for creation. Instability opens pathways for new ideas and processes, reshaping how we approach and redesign the systems that shape our lives. It can also refer to the creative act itself—one that does not follow predetermined trajectories or established norms. Art, design, and architecture serve as tools to disrupt stable systems and/or shed new light on systems that appear stable but in reality, they are not. No system is truly stable, and when we resist that instability, it becomes a problem. Instability is perhaps the only certainty we can rely on. Hugarflug 2025, the annual conference on artistic research, will take place on September 11–12. It will serve as a platform for research that engages with instability across various systems—from technological advancements such as AI and interactive systems to issues related to politics, society, and the environment. We will explore how instability functions as a tool for generating new possibilities while also fueling unrest and transformation within society and academia. The Iceland University of the Arts invites proposals of all kinds, including presentations of ongoing or completed research by our faculty, students, and collaborators.

Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research

11. - 12. September 2025

Iceland University of the Arts

Anne Griffiths
Researcher

Griffiths’ practice draws on collections, from formal archives to private hoards, to explore how systems of classification shape knowledge and identity. Working across analogue and digital media, she employs collage in its broadest sense to examine the processes of collecting, cataloguing, repairing, and display. Her work frequently returns to the Enlightenment, interrogating its taxonomies through reimagined archival forms. Using traditional techniques such as kintsugi and mummification, Griffiths celebrates the fragile, overlooked, and impermanent. Her installations embrace ambiguity and contradiction, balancing the meticulous with the absurd, and the factual with the fantastical, to uncover new relationships across time, gender, class, and culture.

Pillow Archive

Anne Griffiths

Thursday, 11. september, 2025 - 13:40 - 15:10

3x20 min Presentation + 3x10 min Discussion

Moderator: Ragna Bjarnadóttir

Room:

Pillow Archive explores the archive as an unstable and partial construct, one shaped as much by exclusion and silence as by preservation. In this talk, artist and researcher Anne Griffiths presents an installation that reimagines archival practice through embroidered eighteenth-century quotations that reflect on women’s historical exclusion from botany. By repurposing pillowcases, domestic textiles tied to private life and interior space, the work transforms sites of rest into surfaces of critical reflection. Using the cross-stitch, a form long associated with feminine obedience and moral instruction, each embroidered word becomes a quiet act of resistance, referencing the linguistic and educational barriers that denied women access to Latin, scientific discourse, and the official record. Pillow Archive proposes a counter-archive: soft, subjective, and embodied. This talk invites audiences to consider how histories are made, unmade, and remade through material traces.

Tip

Tip