What is here, what is home, what is our environment or our community? These are all relative concepts that revolve around a specific site or the individual’s relationship with the outside world. We place a pin on a map, we put down our roots and make a home, creating connections and seeing ourselves as part of a greater whole. But this viewpoint – like anything else – may shift, either temporarily when we travel or permanently when we move to a new place, for example.

In this exhibition, we present artworks from the collection of Uppsala kommun, but Uppsala is a twin town of Hafnarfjörður, being located at a distance of 2085 kilometres from here, as written on a signpost outside the local town hall, pointing to all 10 sister cities of our hometown of Hafnarfjörður. The exhibited works offer insights into life in Uppsala, the surrounding area and the history of the people, allowing us a glimpse of things that may resonate with our own experiences. Indeed, we can find many things that we have in common, living so far North: similar climate and cold nights, the flora and the fauna, values and character, as well as our shared cultural heritage.

The aim of the exhibition, coming from Uppsala to Hafnarfjörður, is to take a look at the relationship between the people living in these twin towns, thus inviting guests to travel to another place through the power of imagination. We come face-to-face with our similar or dissimilar realities, from a relative perspective that exists only within ourselves, in the mind of the viewer. For there is nothing that brings people together like placing oneself in another person’s shoes – imagining and understanding life through art.