Making Mischief And Playing, Seriously

Dr. angela snæfellsjökuls rawlings opens an exhibition at Slökkvistöðin exploring colour, climate and much more

Opening on January 10, “Motion to Change Colour Names to Reflect Planetary Boundary Tipping Points” is Dr. angela snæfellsjökuls rawlings’ exhibition exploring exactly what the title tells you. The artist, poet, teacher, researcher and founder of 2024’s collective Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta has taken 55 colours and given them new names to reflect our current world. Some names have been tweaked — for example, sea green becomes rising sea green, glacier blue becoming melting glacier blue — while others have been scrapped and rewritten entirely.

What’s in a name?

“Art making, for me, has a lot to do with subverting conventional systems or making strange or estranging what we know all the time,” angela explains of the project 10 years in the making. “And in particular, we know colours. We grow up knowing colours, and we also grew up having colour names identified for us.”

Curator Daria Testo adds to the point, “colours have been created long before humans existed, and yet we have made them our own and have put names on them.” The two have collaborated before, recently on Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta, and Daria notes that “as long as I knew angela, I have known about this work.”

Much of angela’s work explores serious topics in an unconventional and often imaginative way. If there was unclearness about the seriousness of this exhibition’s intent, angela is ready to address and explain. “We can make mischief, but we’re also deadly serious about this,” she clarifies. “Let’s change the colour names now, because climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, eutrophication, ocean acidification, they’re not fun to joke about. They’re not fun.”

“It makes sense to play, but also be serious,” Daria adds. This is a hard balance to strike, but both artist and curator are completely in tandem.

The Mover motions to

In addition to the exhibition being open to explore the colours, on January 26 there will be a “Deliberative Assembly participatory performance.” Daria explains that “it directly corresponds with the actual normal, traditional way of proposing a motion, because it usually is part written and part performed.” To activate the installation, they will be holding an event, open to all, where the motion of proposed colour names will be discussed and explored by those who join, aided by Mover angela snæfellsjökuls rawlings.

Both artist and curator highlight the diverse accumulation of subjects and mediums in this exhibition. “The new proposed names of the colours specifically are treated here as obvious artworks, but they’re also case studies, a legal look into what could be the new names of those colours” notes Daria.

angela explains that they often get questions from those trying to make sense of their work, sometimes by trying to find the one box it fits in. They’ve been asked, “‘are you serious? Is this a joke? Is this art? Is this activism?’” to which they say, “right. Yes. It’s all of them. Or it’s not, or it may not be in the way that you perceive the convention to be. It’s intentionally subverting it.”

Slökkvistöðin will hold the exhibition from January 10 to February 2, with information on the exhibition on arawlings.is.