In the Undergrowth traces our entanglements with land, sea, forest, plant life and the quiet vitality of what often lies beneath notice. It listens for ways of relating to the world—particularly to the textures and temporalities of undergrowth—that are grounded in lived experience, cultural memory and embodied ways of knowing. 

Many of these ways have long been upheld within Indigenous and ancestral knowledge systems, rooted in particular places, languages and lifeways. Yet, through the lens of history, such traditions have often been cast as peripheral to dominant worldviews—those shaped by academic, colonial and extractive frameworks that claim universality. We recognize these knowledges not as static or belonging to the past, but as adaptive, resilient and continually shaped by the urgencies of the present.

The exhibition In the Undergrowth is not a fixed terrain, but a living, layered ecology—one that holds grief, protest, transformation and sensory knowledge. The artists approach these themes from divergent, yet deeply entangled perspectives. Some work intimately with organic materials or ritual action, grounding their practice in site, memory and bodily presence. Others take up perceptual thresholds, using abstraction or poetic speculation to evoke what lies beneath visibility and language. Across their works, this “undergrowth” emerges both as literal and metaphorical space: one of decay and renewal, historical sediment, and emotional resonance and resilience—a zone where dominant structures begin to loosen and new forms of relating may take root.

Artists: Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki, US/CA), Edda Karólína Ævarsdóttir (IS), Eva Ísleifs (IS), Gústav Geir Bollason (IS), Hallgerður Hallgrímsdóttir (IS), Nancy Holt (US), Ragna Róbertsdóttir (IS), Regn Evu (IS), Sigrún Hrólfsdóttir (IS), Sigurður Guðmundsson (IS), Tuija Hansen (CA), Vikram Pradhan (IN/IS) & Wiola Ujazdowska (PL/IS)