Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir

Rhythm of Labor

Redefining Arctic Narratives

Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir (b. Reykjavík, Iceland, 1973; lives and works in Berlin) creates work across video, photography, performance, installation art, and others. Central to her practice is a conceptual approach that fluidly transitions between various artistic mediums. Her work is deeply influenced by anthropological research methods as well as her own personal experiences. She employs strategies of dislocation and defamiliarization to interrogate narratives about labor, class, and urban development and their entanglements with art.

Guðnadóttir’s first monograph Rhythm of Labor is dedicated to her artistic research project Keep Frozen. The project, which has been ongoing for over fifteen years, analyzes the operation of the global economy in the specific local example of the dynamics of industrialized fishing in Iceland. An extensive essay section sheds light on Guðnadóttir’s exploratory performances and films. Heiða Björk Árnadóttir charts the historical and social contexts of the Keep Frozen series. Elisabeth Brun shows how the artist challenges clichéd visualizations of the Arctic and Subarctic, while Anamaría Garzón Mantilla underscores the need to integrate the Arctic north into a critique of coloniality. Katla Kjartansdóttir discusses Guðnadóttir’s series of works that focus on the puffin, a seabird native to the North Atlantic, which has been co-opted by the booming tourism industry as an Icelandic symbol. With a foreword by Julia Gwendolyn Schneider.