Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

Curiosity is usually where my work begins. I enter situations without necessarily knowing what the final work will be, following materials, places, people and processes over long periods of time. I think of intuition not as the opposite of research, but as accumulated knowledge becoming active. My background in anthropology informs the way I work on site: through observation, encounters, conversations and sustained attention to forms of knowledge that are often embodied rather than written down. From there, a project may become a film, a photograph, a performance, a sculpture or an installation. The medium follows the research rather than the other way around. I am drawn to systems that are enormous in scale but become tangible through very specific things: a worker’s movement, a lump of silicon, a box of frozen fish, a landscape altered by energy production. My current S-I-L-I-C-A project follows the material transformations and infrastructures behind silicon-based technologies; earlier work developed through long relationships with dockworkers and industrial fishing. Across these projects I try to make visible connections that are normally dispersed, hidden or taken for granted, while leaving space for ambiguity, material presence and the unexpected.

Artwork