All of us at Hafnarborg would like to congratulate Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson for receiving the Icelandic Art Prize 2021, as Artists of the Year, for their work In Search of Magic – A Proposal for a New Constitution for The Republic of Iceland.

Ólafur and Libia will open their next exhibition, Magic Meeting – A Decade On, at Hafnarborg on Saturday March 20th, but the exhibition presents work based on the aforementioned performance, which was staged by the artists and The Magic Team, taking place at the Reykjavík Art Museum, in the city centre, outside the Prime Minister’s Office and the Parliament House, on October 3rd of last year.

We also congratulate everyone else honoured at this year‘s ceremony.

This summer, Hafnarborg will offer workshops for children, 6–12 years old. The groups will go on field trips in Hafnarfjörður and basic techniques of art will be introduced by exploring the environment, the museum’s exhibitions, creative work and play.

The children will work on projects in different media – drawing, painting and moulding – with the aim of developing visual focus and inspiring creative thought and personal expression. The instructor will be Ólöf Bjarnadóttir.

Two 5-day and one 4-day workshops will be available for ages 6–9 and 10–12. None of the workshops will be the same, so it is possible to attend more than one workshop, as in previous years. The workshop starting June 21st will also bring in elements of music to the creative process.

The following summer workshops are available:

June 14th–18th*
6–9 years old: 9 a.m.–12 p.m.
10–12 years old: 1–4 p.m.
*June 17th is a national holiday

June 21st–25th
6–9 years old: 9 a.m.–12 p.m.
10–12 years old: 1–4 p.m.

June 28th–July 2nd
6–9 years old: 9 a.m.–12 p.m.
10–12 years old: 1–4 p.m.

The price of the 5-day workshop is 14,000 ISK and the price of the 4-day workshop is 11,600 ISK.

• Sibling discount: full price for the first child, with a 50% discount for each additional sibling.
• Please inform us of any special needs or requirements.

Please note that there is limited availability for the summer workshops.

Registration is open from Wednesday April 28th via the website of Hafnarfjörður or directly through the registration network. For further information, please call (354) 585 5790 or send an email to [email protected].

The Hafnarborg Songfest received the Icelandic Music Award 2021 for The Music Event of the Year (Festival), in the field of classic and contemporary music, but the Songfest took place for the fourth time from July 2nd until July 12th 2020.

The programme of the Songfest consisted of eight concerts, featuring outstanding singers and musicians, as well as courses for young and old, but we were so fortunate to be able to hold the festival without restrictions in the middle of the summer, when the Songfest normally takes place.

We are deeply honoured by this acknowledgement and would like to congratulate Guðrún Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir and Francisco Javier Jáuregui, the founders and artistic directors of The Hafnarborg Songfest, on their continued success, as well as thanking them for their noble efforts in service of music and culture in Hafnarfjörður in the past years.

The Hafnarborg Songfest will take place for the fifth time from June 19th until July 4th 2021.

#SlowArtDay is celebrated on April 10th this year, when we are encouraged to slow down and look closer and longer at works of art in order to engage more deeply and make new discoveries.

Give yourself ten minutes and just look.

Hafnarborg is open today from 12 to 5 p.m. The exhibition now on view is Magic Meeting – A Decade On by Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson and The Magic Team. We encourage everyone to visit the exhibition and give themselves time to experience and enjoy the works they see.

We also suggest going for a walk in Hafnarfjörður and visiting one or more of the many public artworks of the town. On the website publicart.hafnarborg.is, you can even find a map with the location of all the public artworks in town.

Enjoy slow looking and happy #SlowArtDay.

All of us at Hafnarborg would like to congratulate Guðrún Jóhanna Ólafsdóttir and Francisco Javier Jáuregui, the founders and directors of the Hafnarborg Songfest, on the nominations for The Icelandic Music Awards 2021, as the Hafnarborg Songfest has been nominated as “Music Event of the Year – Festivals” and Stuart Skelton‘s concert, The Modern Romantic, which took place at the Songfest, has been nominated as “Music Event of the Year – Concerts”, both in the field of classic and contemporary music.

We also congratulate Andrés Þór Gunnlaugsson, the artistic director of the Hafnarborg Afternoon Concert series, on the nomination of this new series as “Music Event of the Year – Concerts”, in the field of jazz and blues music, as well as congratulating Andrés Þór on his personal nomination as “Performer of the Year”, in the same field.

We would then like to congratulate all of the nominees, many of whom have performed at the Hafnarborg Songfest, at our Afternoon and Midday Concerts, as well as at the concert series Phonemes, and we would especially like to give our good wishes to violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, who is nominated as “Performer of the Year”, in the field of classic and contemporary music”, but Halla Steinunn played a special role in engaging with Davíð Brynjar Franzson’s exhibition, An Urban Archive as an English Garden, on view at the museum last year.

We thank all of you for enriching the programme of Hafnarborg with your music and your art and express our gratitude to the judges and affiliates of The Icelandic Music Awards for the honour shown to the institution with the nominations.

The Art Council of Hafnarborg has selected Community of Sentient Beings, curated by Wiola Ujazdowska and Hubert Gromny, as the autumn exhibition of the year 2021. By inviting various professionals – artists, academics, performers – to participate in the exhibition, the aim of the curators is to create a space for multiple voices to come together, while reflecting on different ways of voicing, hearing and sensing. In this way, the exhibition will offer a space for various kinds of engagement, with an emphasis on the project’s processual and performative nature, by activating the space and exploring different ways of inhabiting it, transforming the museum into a space of connectivity.

Looking at our connection to the world as a community of sentient beings will allow us to open various paths of investigation, whether it be the relationship between human and nature, human and culture, or human and human. The term sentient being allows us to abandon historically charged definitions, to think of personhood and humans more broadly. At the core of the concept, is an interrogation of the historical and social usage of a category of human, which concerns whom and what we consider part of a community. Hafnarborg and its history also provide an interesting context for such investigation, as changing the function from a pharmacy and chemist laboratory can be seen as a symbolic shift from healing practices based on science, namely chemistry, towards the spiritual and cultural agency of art.

This calls into question the tension between art and science, as approaching art as a cognitive capacity may allow us to comprehend that which cannot be captured by scientific reason – connections between worlds known and unknown. Extending our perception, the exhibition invites guests to sense a place or presence, pondering the importance of memories and different modes of communication, such as those mediated by technology, and bringing to mind the changes in Icelandic society, which is becoming more and more diverse. This diversity brings connection with other places, other traditions and different spiritual practices. Each newcomer arrives with embodied knowledge, a memory, which is a basis to encounter new, unknown land. Thinking of art as a vehicle to understand the invisible, to listen to undercurrents and reflect on them may then allow us to engage with various dimensions of what we perceive as a sentient being.

Hubert Gromny is an artist, researcher, curator and writer, based in Reykjavík, Iceland. He graduated with an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland, in 2015. He also holds a BA from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he studied at the department of philosophy. In his practice, Gromny investigates the intersections between art, theory and popular culture, in order to unfold the sociopolitical significance of aesthetics and culture.

Wiola Ujazdowska is an artist, performer and art researcher based in Reykjavík, Iceland. She holds an MA in art theory from Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, where she also studied painting at the department of fine arts. In the years 2012-2013, she studied at CICS in Cologne, Germany. Ujazdowska’s work mostly focuses on body and gender in the context of politics, migration movements, class, borders and beliefs, as well as dealing with social and cultural constructions in philosophical, cultural and anthropological context.

Participants and details about the programming will be announced at a later date.

This will be the eleventh exhibition in Hafnarborg’s Autumn Exhibition Series, where the objective is to collaborate with different curators, who get the chance to submit their own proposals, allowing new voices be heard. The Director and Art Council of Hafnarborg then review the submissions and select the winning proposal each year.

Hafnarborg in collaboration with the Hafnarfjörður Library offers an outdoor artwalk in the town centre. Scanning a smart code with your phone, brings you information in Icelandic about each work displayed along with a short entry from the realm of literature. The walk takes approximately 40 minutes, in order to visit all the works and listen to each piece separately.

Here is a map showing the location of the artworks:

An interactive map showing the location of all the public artworks in the Hafnarborg Collection is available at publicart.hafnarborg.is.

As part of extended programming for The Wildflower, we are honoured to share the short film Three Thousand by Inuk artist Asinnajaq, but the film can be viewed here below, being accompanied by a short introduction by the artist in the above player. Produced with archival material from The National Film Board of Canada, Asinnajaq’s sublime imaginary universe “recast[s] the present, past and future of her people in a radiant new light.” Both historical footage and original animation, the short film dives into a complicated history retold with imaginative hope and beauty, and new possibility.

Asinnajaq ᐊᓯᓐᓇᐃᔭᖅ is an Inuk artist from Inukjuak, Nunavik. Her most recent film, Three Thousand (2017), blends archival footage with animation to imagine her home community of Inukjuak in the future. It won Best Experimental Film at the 2017 imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and was nominated for Best Short Documentary at the 2018 Canadian Screen Awards. Exhibiting work in Canada and abroad, she is the recipient of numerous awards, including Toronto Film Critics Association’s Technicolour Clyde Gilmour Award. She is co-creator of Tillitarniit, a festival celebrating Inuit culture in Montréal. Asinnajaq is one of four curators working on the inaugural exhibition of the new Inuit Art Center in Winnipeg, Canada, opening this year.

Asinnajaq’s work Where You Go, I Follow (2020) is exhibited for the first time in The Wildflower.

Three Thousand (2017):

Due to the current restrictions on public gatherings, Hanna Þóra Guðbrandsdóttir and Antonía Hevesi’s midday concert will be streamed live online, both on Facebook and here on the website of Hafnarborg, as we can unfortunately not accommodate an audience at this time.

The live stream will start at 12 p.m. on Tuesday, November 3rd, as usual, and the concert will last for approximately half an hour, being accessible through the player here below. This recording will also be available for viewing online, once the concert has ended. A direct link for the stream can be found here.

We hope we will be able to welcome you back at our midday concerts in Hafnarborg before long.