A celebration, the end has come.

The illusion is decaying, the fish has come back to bite us. We once thought ourselves greater than all else, killing the largest of beasts, taking what we wanted without consequence, holding the flopping fish of otherness and staring into its wide and fearful eyes saying “I am not you, I am not dying”.

Goodgonebadwrong assumes the end of human dominance, the end of a moral high ground, the end of self-imposed hierarchy, as it swims back into the belly of the whale. Working in close conversation, Brák Jónsdóttir, Hugo Llanes, Anna Reutinger and Sigurður Ámundason have created works which take the position of the collectively consumed, allowing the slow seepage of digestive fluids to decompose their singular ways of thinking and doing. From within this belly, mysterious bones signal a future fate, the forlorn but familiar faces of those whose names are long forgotten stare into the abyss, the womb of doom tells stories of joyful decomposition and those clinging to the last threads of a dream self-affirm, “I’m a fucking good person”. 

Together, we raise a glass to the life that will go on without us.

Calling into question the positioning flexed in the reading and writing of history, Anna Reutinger’s quilts reference medieval depictions of the wound in the side of Christ portrayed vertically to resemble a vulva. Bringing the symbolic, ornamental and illustrative into tension, Reutinger produces a layering of imagery which appears to be one thing from a distance but another upon closer inspection. Stitched from a combination of her own drawings and those of Ámundason, these works produce neo-heraldic symbols—not those denoting prestige or elitism but rather signaling the end of hierarchy, between types of labor, between humans and non humans, between genders and materials.

Photo credit: Sisters Lumière

Nýlistasafnið (The Living Art Museum), Reykjavik, IS.
2023