In Resonance

SÍM Residency – In Resonance

Group exhibition by international artists at SÍM Residency

Opening day – 26.03.2026 4:00-8:00 PM

Additional day – 27.03.2026 2:00 – 6:00 PM

SÍM Residency Project Space

Seljavegur 32 101 Reykjavík Iceland

In Resonance brings together five artists who participated in the international SÍM Residency from January to March 2026, culminating in an exhibition at SÍM Residency Project Space in Reykjavík. Emerging from a shared yet deeply individual period of research and experimentation, the exhibition reflects on resonance as both a method and a condition - acoustic, bodily, symbolic, and ecological.

Across their practices, resonance unfolds as a space of encounter: between movement and notation, voice and geology, body and environment, intuition and structure. The residency became a site for testing these relationships - where ritual gestures, sonic experimentation, and symbolic languages intersect and expand. Works developed during this time engage with processes of listening and translation, attuning to frequencies that exist beneath and beyond immediate perception.

Opening as part of Fimmtudagurinn Langi (The Long Thursday), the exhibition contributes to Reykjavík’s vibrant cultural landscape, highlighting the role of international artists in shaping a diverse and evolving artistic community. IN Resonance invites audiences to listen closely - to what vibrates, emerges, and connects across different scales of experience.

Igor Schiller – RS/NL

Schiller’s artistic practice is grounded in constructing scenes that draw from childhood experiences, Balkan traditions and a theatrical visual language, often blending the personal with the imagined. During his residency, he continued his exploration of memory and folklore by working within an Icelandic environment where myth feels inseparable from the land. His research moved through local legends, beliefs and ways of relating to landscape.

Within this context, Schiller focused on the troll as a central figure. In Icelandic mythology, they belong to rocks, mountains and hidden places, existing on the threshold between the visible and the unseen. They appear across stories in shifting forms that can be both threatening and whimsical. This ambiguity allowed Schiller to approach the troll not as a fixed image, but as an open figure within his visual language. The presented work, Trollhouse, takes the form of a staged environment in which these figures inhabit a constructed, imagined setting. They exist between sculpture and character, forming part of an evolving personal mythology. Rather than functioning as defined characters, they operate as presences that suggest a narrative without fixing it, leaving space for the viewer to extend and complete it through their own imagination. By bringing his own cultural background into contact with Northern folklore, Schiller explored what emerged through this encounter, observing how different visual traditions meet, overlap and reshape one another.

Heesoo Agnes Kim - KR

Heesoo Agnes Kim imagines the body as a notated body - a transient note inscribed within the folds of time, light, and the Earth’s surface. Traversing Icelandic landscapes, her body appears as a moving note, aligning with mountains, glaciers, and planetary rhythms.

The horizon becomes a score where appearance and disappearance unfold, and the body emerges as a note on the Earth’s surface, continuously folding and unfolding within geological time.

Debbie Chen - USA

Geothermal Culture is a project that examines Iceland's outdoor swimming culture through the lens of architectural design and climate resiliency. Grounded in an appreciation for geothermal hot water, the project highlights the practice of bathing as an overlap of both technical and social aspects of infrastructural care. The country's development of geothermal energy stems from humble beginnings, located in cultural traditions: ways to stay warm, maintain hygiene, and cultivate food. In fostering ways of geothermal living, Iceland serves as a unique site of inspiration for how renewable energy infrastructure can integrate more seamlessly into a decarbonized future that is often only considered through the lens of science and technology.

Using bathing as a specific geothermal subculture, this project presents observations from twelve outdoor pools around the country, mostly located in rural locations. These observations inform the design of a collection of speculative “bathing infrastructures” that use recreation and social benefit as points of desire in a larger imagining of how renewable energy infrastructures can manifest at different scales.

Luna van der Straaten - BE

During her residency in Iceland, Luna van der Straaten further developed an ongoing theme within her practice: the human attempt to structure and understand a world that ultimately remains vast, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Approaching the residency with an open attitude, she allowed the landscape, light, and local cultural narratives to interact with ideas already present in her work.

The Icelandic environment strongly influenced the atmosphere of her paintings. The landscape is both intense and quiet - colours appear muted yet luminous, and nature feels simultaneously powerful and serene. This contrast between overwhelming intensity and stillness shaped the tone of her work.

She was particularly inspired by Icelandic folk dances, especially the hringdansar. These dances combine communal movement with repetitive, almost ritualistic structures. Alongside this embodied experience, she encountered notations used to record the dances. The contrast between lived movement and its almost geometrical representation resonated with her interest in how humans attempt to organise experience through systems, symbols, and language.

Another influence came from stories of the huldufólk, the hidden people. These narratives reveal how supernatural elements can coexist with everyday life, and how landscapes themselves become sites of meaning and belief.

Throughout the residency, van der Straaten experimented with translating these observations into painting, often incorporating asemic writing. This form of writing resembles language but resists fixed meaning, functioning instead as a visual structure that invites interpretation. The residency became a space of exploration, allowing her to test how ritual movement, notation, and symbolic language might intersect within her practice in new ways.

Sunny Ely - CA

This project is an ecological investigation into the resonance of testosterone - HRT transitioned voices with the shifting earth. The sounds gathered in this work emerged through a series of visitations to geothermal pools in southern Iceland. Recording with a geophone in hot spots along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, I have been developing subfrequency vocal techniques in conversation with the tones, moans and harmonic rumbling heard from listening to each of the pools.

Often used in strohbass and throat singing practices, this technique utilized vocal fry to express tones 1-2 octaves below the fundamental melody. The samples I created for the score ebb and flow between composed tones and vocal fry which breaks into uncontrolled texture and chaotic harmonies, releasing some of the brassy qualities of the T-influenced throat.

Layering these two on top of geothermal recordings, I composed the score by intuitively shifting between moments of resonance found between these active and passive bodies in conversation. In this process, I have treated pool as a verb - to reciprocate substance and vibration in a harboured space between two bodies or forces. As delicate, energetic, surfacing expressions of deep earth movement, geothermal pools house an interaction between minerals and life, as well as large intervals of time.

Politically we are struggling with the parallel ignorance of the warming earth, whose changes are significantly visible in Iceland, and a growing denaturalization of transness which exploits the adoption of modern science into gender affirming care. With these pools, I am focusing on both the tension and balance between my T-vocal characteristics and the geophone recordings as a way of thinking about the duality of artifice and intimacy in our contemporary relationship with the earth.