Adam Buffington, PhD
Sound artist and musicologist
Hugarflug annual conference on artistic research
11. - 12. September 2025
Iceland University of the Arts
“When understanding collapses, confusion follows, and in the mess new discoveries can be made.”
With her formal education in dance, interdisciplinary artist Margrét Bjarnadóttir has cultivated a diverse oeuvre constituted by movement. Through performance, choreography, text, video and photography, Bjarnadóttir’s artistic conceptions traverse disciplinary boundaries, subverting conventional linguistic, textual and performative structures of communication and expression. Consequently, Bjarnadóttir’s practice is predicated on instability, with its fluid nature resulting in the practical and thematic presence of uncertainty, fragility and vulnerability throughout many of her works.
Informed by dialogue with Bjarnadóttir herself, I identify and analyze the role of uncertainty and fragility and their various aesthetic contextualizations within Bjarnadóttir’s output. Specifically, I will examine her 2006 performance Strength Through Embarrassment; her 2010 trio performance On Misunderstanding; her 2014 solo exhibition Life-Efi; and her 2017 collaboration No Tomorrow with Ragnar Kjartansson. By conducting such an analysis, I strive to accentuate the aesthetic and experiential significance of instability within Bjarnadóttir’s oeuvre, a body of work which, through the interdisciplinary movement and recontextualization of ideas and techniques, ultimately reveals new possibilities for formulating meaning within artistic production and experience.