June 14, 2018, 19-22h

The event is an enhanced screening of selected episodes of the slow moving Cryptopia One series by artist Kolbeinn Hugi. Q&A included. 
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Within the steaming mists of the Black Meadow the air is thick with dualities.

Industry vs. leisure.
Natural vs. man-made.
Energy vs. tourism.
Technology vs. mythology

At the epicentre of this realm of duality lies the curious Blue Lagoon, whose strange water is the source and a product of two different, seemingly unrelated truths.

A technological truth and a mythological truth.

The lagoon itself with its milky silica liquid is a waste product of the energy production process of the Svartsengi Power Station, a large geothermal power plant. This station powers the surrounding cryptomines who use its energy to manufacture the incorruptible technological truth of the blockchain.

This waste material is also what creates the mythological truth of the Blue Lagoon as a crown jewel of Iceland’s exotic nature.

This duality represents the weird reality in which the “natives” live. An exotic heterotopian realm generated by both technological truth and mythological truth.

The natives have long believed that the strange industrial waste has magical healing powers…

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Born in 1979 in Reykjavík, Kolbeinn Hugi is the leading island dwelling artist of a generation that emerged in the wake of the cataclysmic great rift between art and artists in the bleak neo-capitalist Reykjavík of modern times. Taking diverse motifs from 1970s techno-futurism, pseudo-archeology and new-age black metal - his work aims to evoke an alternate model of society and suggests that the world as it is now isn’t necessarily how it has to be. Kolbeinn has recently studied with Edgar Cayce in the informal setting of dream state trances established by the great sleeping medium after his death in 1945. There, he absorbed the acute sensibility to time and space associated with Cayce’s phantom sculptures as set up in his Astral Pavilion. Kolbeinn’s work is simple work that aims for the heart, not for the head. His work has been exhibited widely around the western world from MoMA PS1 to abandoned abodes at the Arctic Circle and is preserved in the collection of the National Gallery of Iceland.