Virtual Exhibition: SÍM Residency - Latent Energies

SÍM Residency presents Latent Energies — a group exhibition by artists-in-residence originally on view at SÍM Hlöðuloftið in May 2025, the exhibition is now available as a virtual experience until August 31st.

🔗 Follow the link to enter the virtual exhibition https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=TnF8MNeDLaj

What forces live beneath the surface - quietly shaping, silently waiting, yet constantly in motion?

Latent Energies brings together a diverse constellation of international artists who participated in the SÍM Residency’s artists-in-residence programme May 2025 cycle, gathering in Reykjavík from across the globe. This pop-up exhibition is a convergence of distinct practices and voices, each responding to the unique temporal, geographic landscape of Iceland.

The title refers to the unseen forces that lie dormant or simmering - psychological tensions, ecological shifts, inherited memory, or unexpressed longing. These energies are made visible through experimental forms: ephemeral installations, time-based media, digital simulations, speculative artifacts, ritualistic performances, and poetic interventions.

Some works trace inner topographies of grief, displacement, hybridity, or imagined ancestries. Others channel the raw matter of the land: wind becomes sculpture, sound, and symbol. Geological and atmospheric rhythms echo through visual and sonic textures, reflecting Iceland’s constant, fragile transformation. Technological mediations offer new ways of seeing, often shaped by tension - between permanence and decay, memory and data, machine and myth.

The artists here transform their research into material poetics. Whether invoking the soft body of a seal-human hybrid, constructing speculative ecologies of the future, navigating the “ghost kingdoms” of adoptee memory, or performing with wind and time, each project uncovers what often remains hidden or unspoken. Together, they illuminate a world in flux-charged with undercurrents of vulnerability, care, resistance, and wonder.

Latent Energies invites viewers to listen closely, to what trembles beneath the surface, to what is about to become. It is a snapshot of artistic urgency and imaginative resilience, shaped in dialogue with the environment, each other, and the many layers of being-in-place.

Participating artists:

Takashi Hokoi he/him - JP

Sabina Otelea she/them - RO/UK

Alex Raja Ven they/she - CA

Joan Calsina Tornil he/him - ES

Moozhan Ahmadzadegan he/him - CA

Hanqi Li she/her - CH

Yufei Lin CH

Kiley Brandt she/her - USA

Sammakko Teresa Kari they/them - FI​​​

Reija Meriläinen she/them - FI

Iceylithe Bintong Wang she/her - CH