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

Diffractive Photographic Diptychs in the Queer Borderlands of Drag and Wrestling

Carl-Mikael Björk

Friday, 12. september, 2025 - 14:45 - 16:15

3x20 min Presentation + 3x10 min Discussion

Moderator:

Room:

Carl-Mikael Björk
Visual Artist

Carl-Mikael Björk is a visual artist and educator based in Sweden, teaching at Malmö University. With a Master of Arts in Photography, his work moves within the overlapping terrain of artistic expression and academic inquiry. His artistic research explores performativity, identity, and the shifting relations between subject and object, human and non-human. Photography is both artefact and apparatus – a practice diffracted through feminist philosophy, queer theory, and new materialism. Drawing on thinkers such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Judith Butler, he investigates how photographic processes participate in the making of knowledge and meaning.

A glance in the mirror. Mascara graces their lashes. Toned muscles shift beneath shimmering synthetic stretch. A quick rehearsal of movements backstage. Strobe lights and smoke fill the club.

This project carries photographic diptychs that diffract the queer borderlands between drag and wrestling. Expressions of hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity embrace each other through DIY culture, expressive narratives, make-up, and sparkly outfits.

The exploration of these borderlands takes shape through a diffractive methodology, where performance, performativity, and situated knowledge are part of an ongoing entanglement between image and text, gesture and theory, bodies and stories. Rather than illustrating, the photographic diptychs open up relations, gestures, and expectations – unstable constellations where identities are (re)presented and displaced.

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