In A State Of Flux: Tumi Magnússon’s Exhibition Is A Meditation On Movement And Change

One sunny Sunday in February, having exhausted the number of times I could do a day trip to Hveragerði, I decided to head southwest to Keflavík. This time, though, I wasn’t going to the airport.

Keflavík is an unusually long town of residential buildings that lives in the shadow of the runway. Let’s be honest: how often do you actually visit of your own will? Most reluctant visitors pass through only when a flight is delayed or cancelled, grabbing snacks, killing time, weighing options.

But it turns out that beyond departures and arrivals, Keflavík has its own attractions to offer: naturally, there’s a pool; then there’s the Icelandic Museum of Rock ‘n’ Roll (the name says it all); Viking World, though technically in Njarðvík, is a must-stop for history buffs, with its impressive replica of a Viking ship; a quirky Giantess Cave, where you can try on the shoes of an actual troll; and the Duus Museum, a cultural hub housing two museums under one roof: the Reykjanes Art Museum and the Reykjanes Heritage Museum. One ticket gets you into both, and it’s hard to think of a better place to spend a rather uneventful Sunday afternoon.

The Heritage Museum currently hosts a delightfully odd exhibition on Icelandic collectables, including collections of pens, hats, and other small objects, like plastic bags, talking about design and consumption (take my word, it’s more fascinating than it sounds). Meanwhile, the Art Museum has long offered a well-curated programme, and its current poetic, sensory exhibition stayed with me long after I left Keflavík. A few weeks later, I called the artist and the curator.

Change is constant

Herefrom Thereto Therefrom Hereto (or Héðan þangað þaðan hingað in Icelandic) is an exhibition by contemporary artist Tumi Magnússon, curated by Gavin Morrison, curator, writer, and former director of the Skaftfell Art Center in Seyðisfjörður. Both are not particularly easy to catch in Keflavík — Tumi has been living in Copenhagen for the past 20 years and Gavin has spent the last five in the U.S. The two first met in early 2000s, have collaborated a few times since, and maintain a continued relationship with Iceland, which Gavin admits, “kind of saved my sanity,” he laughs.

Tumi Magnússon and Gavin Morrison

Tumi’s career has transitioned from early post-conceptual paintings to video, sound, and digital images that preoccupy him now. The exhibition features mainly Tumi’s new works but is interspersed with a few key earlier pieces, the oldest dating back to the late 1990s.

The name of the exhibition gives viewers a hint of what to expect. The four words, herefrom, thereto, therefrom, hereto are distinct from one another but share the basic idea — moving from one place to another and back. This reflects the motif connecting the works in the exhibition, which, as Tumi sees it, is simple: everything is always changing.

“In my works, there’s this common thread that has something to do with movement and time and change,” he explains.

This thread can be seen in both newer and older works and, more broadly, reflects Tumi’s view on life, echoing Heraclitus’ metaphor: “things being in [a state of] change all the time, in flux and movement, not being static.”

“It was important for me that even though it’s a change of medium, it’s the same thought that runs through everything.”

He explains, “There’s always incorporated that degree of change. Whatever you look at today, you know that in 20 years or 100 years, it’s going to be totally different. We are in this physical form today, but in 100 years, we will all be dead, and then our bodies… maybe will still exist in some form, but not there anymore as we are now.”

Tumi often uses repetition and sound to highlight the underlying sense that everything is short-lived and temporary, giving the exhibition a poetic continuity throughout.

“It was also quite important for me to have this mixture of old and new because I used to paint, and people tend to think that if you paint, and then you stop painting and start working in another medium, you’re changing — you are dropping something in favour of something else,” Tumi says. “It was important for me that even though it’s a change of medium, it’s the same thought that runs through everything.”

Gavin agrees that including both recent works and key pieces from the past allows viewers to understand the full scope of Tumi’s practice and even offers insight into his thought process.

“One of the things that I was very excited to work on this exhibition, and I hope that people pick up on this, is that Tumi has had this very long and distinguished career. This exhibition is a real opportunity to see the consistency of idea, the core of a practice evolving and being articulated in a variety of ways over this period of time,” Gavin explains. “It feels kind of a really rich and generous way to view how an artist thinks. Walking through the exhibition, you really feel that you can engage with someone who’s looking at the world in a very particular way.”

Bending reality

The work that greets you at the entrance is Peninsula Walk, a two-channel video installation, filmed by attaching a small camera to the artist’s ankle on two different seaside walks, and in fact, in two different countries — Iceland and Denmark. The two videos play side by side, showing the sea and horizon changing, each accompanied by the sound recorded on the respective walk.

“You have this view of the sea on both sides, which means that you must be on a peninsula,” Tumi explains. “But it is in different places. You have the video synchronised, so it’s one walk — except the footsteps sound slightly different, because it’s not the same ground that you’re walking on — it’s mostly sand in one place and more rocky on the other one.”

The work is rather involving, even activating your senses — after a few minutes of craning my head, trying to follow the camera through its repetitive movements and loud, distracting sound, I admit I felt a little dizzy. “It’s not really my intention when I start working on something, but this seems to occur sometimes that what I do has kind of a direct physical effect on people,” Tumi says. He has heard such feedback before, particularly with Swing, another work exploring the capture of movement, which shows multiplied steps of a sneaker and a pink Crocs shoe. “Each picture shows just one step — a swing of one foot from when it stopped until the next one,” Tumi explains. Originally recorded as a video, each frame is printed out as a photograph and mounted on a 10-millimetre transparent acrylic plate, giving it a sculptural physicality and thickness. The series is conceptually linked to Peninsula Walk and references the early motion experiments of pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge.

In the next room, a series of videos takes over the entire space, each showing footage captured from public transport — “sometimes a bus, sometimes a tram, sometimes a train, in 10 different cities,” as Tumi explains. The work has been edited so that trips synchronise, stopping and starting at the same time and always moving in the same directions. The cities, though different, begin to look alike; the vehicles become difficult to distinguish, and, as Tumi emphasises, that barely matters — the only constant is their movement.

A dialogue across time and space

In a room hidden behind a thick black curtain (which I admit I almost missed) is one of Tumi’s earlier, and perhaps most well-known, works on display: Coffee and Piss. It’s a series of eight monochrome canvases that progress from black coffee to yellow urine, creating “an illusion of that bodily process,” as Gavin puts it. “Each of those canvases individually becomes a kind of slice of time,” he adds. Yet while this series captures distinct moments in time, the idea of everything in the world being in a constant state of transformation is evident even here.

At the opposite ends of the same room is Monochromes — two screens, each showing a single colour. Suddenly, you hear a loud sound, and the colour on the screen changes with a splash. It’s a continuous loop, at first intriguing and even mysterious to the viewer, yet the underlying idea remains the same. “It’s the same movement through the room — in an old work and the newer work,” Tumi says.

According to Gavin, this idea was central to how the exhibition was conceived — building an awareness of how you experience the work, and how, as you move through the space, older and newer pieces begin to nod to each other.

When I ask what he hopes visitors take away, Tumi offers a humble reply. “Hopefully not the works, at least,” he smiles. “I just like it if it makes people feel… happy, creative, it sounds a bit cliché,” he laughs, searching for a word. “If it opens something up for people, if it inspires people. That’s what I like.”

You still have a few weeks to make your way to Keflavík to catch Herefrom Thereto Therefrom Hereto. In the meantime, Tumi and Gavin are already planning their next trip to Iceland. This summer, both are working on exhibitions at Skaftfell Art Center in Seyðisfjörður, with Tumi participating in a group show and Gavin curating Roman Signer’s exhibition. For anyone looking for museums off the beaten track, that one, too, is well worth the trip.

Herefrom Thereto Therefrom Hereto is on view at Listasafn Reykjanesbæjar until April 19.