Virtual Exhibition: SÍM Residency - Earthliness. Sensing the Fragile Real

Earthliness. Sensing the Fragile Real

SÍM Residency presents Earthliness. Sensing the Fragile Real — a group exhibition by artists-in-residence originally on view at SÍM Hlöðuloftið in June 2025, the exhibition is now available as a virtual experience until October 9th.

SÍM Residency warmly invites you to the opening of Earthliness. Sensing the Fragile Real, a group exhibition showcasing the recent work of international artists who have taken part in the artist-in-residence programme at SÍM Residency.

The exhibition brings together a series of experimental and interdisciplinary practices that emerged during the artists' time in Iceland. Through tactile installations, poetic video works, aromatic scores, hybrid documentaries, and sonic landscapes, the artists investigate the emotional, ecological, and political textures of place. Iceland’s volcanic topography, geothermal phenomena, and environmental tensions become both subject and medium, grounding the works in a living dialogue with the land.

Many of the works employ sensation as a method: a soft sculpture embedded with a pressure sensor reveals mossy, steamy inner worlds only when touched; field recordings, composed into immersive audiovisual pieces, echo the ephemeral sonic memory of shifting terrains; and scent is translated into musical composition through a system of olfactory notation. These practices resist traditional narratives in favor of sensory exploration, abstracted documentation, and poetic presence.

In Spaces of Wonder, artists reflect on the entanglement of beauty, environmental change, and extractive tourism. Drawing from shared experiences between Iceland and their homelands, they pose critical questions about the cost of wonder in a time of climate crisis. Through photography, video, eco-printed textiles, and poetic writing, the projects trace fragile interconnections between industry, landscape, and cultural desire.

Other collaborative projects reimagine environmental fieldwork through sound. Extracted and manipulated field recordings are layered with composed music to produce an evolving audiovisual encounter. Rather than presenting a linear narrative, the work proposes an unfinished, unfolding process, a resonance between body, sound, and space.

Together, the artists of Earthliness present works that resonate with the fragile real, that which is slipping, melting, disappearing, yet still felt viscerally. These lines across moss, stone, steam, and songs become pathways for sensing an Earth in flux, an Earth in need of care, curiosity, and kinship.

Join us at SÍM Hlöðuloftið to meet the artists in person and explore the resonant worlds they have created during their residency.

Participating artists:

Reija Meriläinen she/them - FI // Florence Cats she/her - BE // Joseph Hogan he/him - BE // Majella Clarke she/her - AU/FI // Jessie Stainton she/her - CA // Francesco de Gallo he/him - CA // Éva Freund she/her - HU // Inari Sandel they/them - FI // Jussi Hertz they/them - FI