When Venice Comes To Iceland

Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir brings the Venice Biennale home to the National Gallery

Wandering around Venice feels like stepping into a dream. The city’s labyrinth of canals, narrow alleyways and historic bridges creates an atmosphere of timeless beauty. As you stroll past centuries-old buildings with peeling facades and ornate balconies, the scent of the sea mingles with fresh espresso from tiny cafés.

Each turn reveals something magical — a hidden courtyard, a quiet canal with a lone gondola, or a vibrant campo where locals chat animatedly. The sound of lapping water and distant violin music from passing boats adds to the enchantment.

Hildigunnur Birgisdóttir hated it.

“The first time I went there, I kind of hated Venice for being too touristy, too hot and too tiny and too much water and humidity,” she laughs while listing off her many reasons for disliking the typically romanticised Italian city. “Then slowly, just this bizarre fact that people still live there and carry out their everyday there I found astounding and so inspiring.”

The multifaceted artist had ample time to take in La Serenìssima while representing Iceland at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, where her exhibition “That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau” (curated by Dan Byers) was on display from April through November 2024.

“This was like a dream — almost a surreal dream — to be chosen to do this as an artist,” Hildigunnur says of being selected to represent Iceland at the prestigious event. “I also never really thought that I would do it. I do kind of weird art — it’s not popular or the most easy to digest.”

“That’s a Very Large Number” is a commentary on mass produced objects, with Hildigunnur highlighting the bits and pieces that are part and parcel with our consumerist culture.

That’s where the “Commerzbau” comes in. The term is one Hildigunnur coined to categorise the art she was creating for Venice, explaining she was inspired by an art history teacher who introduced her to German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters. He called his collages “merz” and when he ventured into 3D installations, he called them “merzbau” or merz space or merz building.

“Not only was he conceptually using found materials, but making beauty with found materials — this is something that resonates with me,” Hildigunnur explains. “I use found material and I collage them together, but my main drive is always beauty … which may come as a surprise to people who know my work.”

It was when Hildigunnur was working on her installation and realising that all the found objects she was drawn to were from the world of commerce that she thought to reconstruct the “commerz” (commerce in English), from where Schwitters took his “merz” after seeing the word fragment on a newspaper clipping.

“This is where I find my material,” she says. “It’s the things we throw away. It’s the second hand production that comes with this culture of commerce. This capitalistic system produces so many things that fall off the wagon, or we don’t really need. It comes with so much overproduction. That’s the thing that I use in my art. So I understood that I had just reintroduced the com to the merzbau.”

Bringing it home

“The work was, of course, intended for the context of the Biennale,” Hildigunnur says of the exhibition. “But it’s actually quite exciting to get the opportunity to present it in a different way and maybe contextualise it for Iceland this time around.”

“We wanted to keep it alive and not be a documentation of a show that happened in Venice,” she explains of her and Dan’s approach to bringing “That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau” to the National Gallery later this month. “The works just returned last month from Venice, and it was exciting to see them. Some of the sculptures even had a larva on them, or a small cobweb — they’ve aged somewhat, but it was also nice to feel that they still feel fresh and peculiar and odd to me.”

Go to experience “That’s a Very Large Number – A Commerzbau“, on display at the National Gallery of Iceland (Fríkirkjuvegur 7) from February 22 to September 7.