ANNA RÚN TRYGGVADÓTTIR | Grounding – Navigational Tools for Polarised Times

Grounding – Navigational Tools for Polarised Times is an upcoming solo exhibition by Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir, held at the Dr. Till Richter Museum, a manor-turned-art institution located in a nature reserve on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast.

The exhibition is both materially and thematically anchored in the forces that shape the Earth from within, especially the geomagnetic field—an invisible, planetary-scale phenomenon essential to navigation, orientation, and survival. In a time marked by socio political polarisation and ecological crisis, Grounding reflects on the ways humans have historically relied on natural phenomena—such as magnetism—not just for physical direction, but as symbolic and philosophical guides. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how a renewed sensitivity to the natural world’s rhythms might offer new ways of navigating a fractured contemporary landscape.

Spanning nine rooms (approx. 500 m²), the exhibition features large-scale watercolor paintings and a site-specific sculptural installation. The watercolors, some up to six meters in length, hang from the ceiling and bend toward the floor, creating immersive environments that echo natural processes like erosion, dripping, and sedimentation. Their imagery stems from a close engagement with material transformation—pigment separating like mineral strata, water bleeding into paper as time does into rock.

Central to the show is a dripping installation, in which stones and boulders collected from the surrounding environment are encased and exposed to dripping colored liquids. These forms gradually absorb, respond, and transform, echoing Tryggvadóttir’s earlier work Garden (Reykjavík Art Museum, 2017). This method foregrounds the agency of matter itself, allowing natural processes to shape the visual outcome over time.

Magnetism operates in the exhibition both as a physical force and a conceptual metaphor. The Earth’s magnetic field is an invisible shield that protects life from cosmic radiation, yet it is also unstable: throughout geological history, it has flipped and fluxed in seemingly chaotic cycles. These reversals, far from signaling catastrophe, are part of the Earth’s natural life. In Grounding, this phenomenon becomes a metaphor for our current moment—one in which ideological polarisation threatens coherence, yet may also open up space for reconfiguration and reorientation.

The exhibition critiques the Western cultural narrative that separates humans from nature and privileges static hierarchies over relational, dynamic systems. By placing natural phenomena—not just as symbols but as collaborators—at the center of her work, Tryggvadóttir calls for an aesthetics of kinship, where material,agency and ecological interdependence replace dominance and extraction.

In Grounding – Navigational Tools for Polarised Times, Tryggvadóttir asks how we might find our way through a fragmented world—not by resisting flux, but by learning from it.

The exhibition is part of a broader program titled Chrono-Magnetic, which includes public events co-curated by the artist and Daria Testo, with support from Nordic cultural funds. Together, the exhibition and accompanying program seek to cultivate new forms of perception—ones that can attune us to the unseen butpowerful forces shaping both Earth systems and human societies.