An Invitation to Pause: Inside Iceland’s Sequences Festival of Real-Time Art

Until the very last minute, I wrestled with my sometimes reckless habit of “embracing the flow.” Why take another flight? Why add more stress in the middle of an already demanding art fair marathon between London and Paris? Yet the night before leaving for Iceland, my excitement returned—along with gratitude. I reminded myself to trust the process, to stay open and ready for discovery.

As before, I arrived in the country without fully knowing what or why I was doing it, beyond having been invited to visit and review Sequences, the biennial art festival dedicated to “real-time” art, now in its twelfth edition.

Since its founding, the idea of “real time” has remained central to Sequences, though always open to interpretation. Each curator has approached it differently—sometimes through time-based media like video, sometimes through performance and other times through more conceptual frameworks. Time feels especially urgent today: its ownership, control and reclamation have become among the most precious things anyone can pursue.

The title of this year’s edition, “Pása (Pause),” captivated me from the start. It distills in a single word what the art world—and society at large—so urgently needs after the post-pandemic acceleration of production, the saturation of images, the dominance of algorithms and the relentless demands on our attention. Pause was what the art world needed: a reminder to slow down, to rediscover purpose and meaning amid constant motion.

Every encounter, artwork and conversation during my stay seemed to echo the same message in its own quiet way. Pause became not only a theme but an act of resistance—a way to push back against the alienation of Western capitalism and its endless cycles of productivity and to re-attune to the timeless natural and universal orders we all belong to.

It’s never easy to break from the supposedly rational and “productive” framework we were taught to live within—the categories of good and bad, sane and absurd, sense and nonsense. Yet perhaps that is how life begins to make sense again and how we rise above it. In Iceland, where people live in close dialogue with nature—its rhythms, cycles and unpredictable turns—the awareness of being a small part of a larger whole feels immediate. The natural world follows its own timeline, one that resists our human urge to control or compress it. Transformation, birth and decay unfold on scales we too often forget to notice.

Curating this year’s edition was Daría Sól Andrews, an Icelandic in-betweener with an international sensibility. Raised mostly in California, she studied in Stockholm and returned to Iceland after a period in New York to find her place in the local art scene. Her curatorial voice feels both grounded and expansive, shaped by her experience as a woman of color in the Nordic region and by the recent transformation of becoming a mother. She acknowledges that motherhood profoundly changed her understanding of time and the value we attach to moments. “Since becoming a mother, my relationship with time has shifted radically and with that shift comes a new sense of what is precious,” she writes in her curatorial essay. “The ordinary becomes miraculous.”

Motherhood and curating Sequences became deeply intertwined experiences. “My sense of time slowed down—those early months with a newborn, when you’re just there, doing nothing but being present,” she recalls. “It made me think about care, about how we spend our time and who gets the privilege to rest, to be still, even to be bored.”

That reflection shaped much of this year’s biennial. Sequences became an invitation to pause, to experience art slowly and to reconsider what we devote time and attention to. Many of the works were grounded in that idea—encouraging immersion, contemplation and presence. Slowness, as Sól Andrews describes, becomes a countergesture, an act of quiet resistance in a world addicted to speed. “In the art world especially, there’s always pressure to move on to the next project, the next show, the next opportunity,” she observes. “Even during this festival, people ask, ‘What’s next?’ instead of just being here, in the moment. I found that need to pause very compelling.”

Spanning multiple venues across Reykjavík and featuring more than 40 artists, the festival’s core remains anchored at the Marshall House—a former fish factory turned cultural hub on the city’s harborside, home to the Living Art Museum and Kling & Bang. These two institutions, whose founders launched Sequences in 2006, continue to shape its identity, embodying the festival’s artist-led spirit of experimentation and making this an ideal place to begin our visit.

Sól Andrews’s perspective as a BIPOC curator working to expand narratives within the Nordic context comes through vividly in her exhibition “Aftertime” at the Living Art Museum. Bringing together artists from a range of cultural backgrounds, the show explores the politics of time as it intersects with race, history and power. At its heart lies a question of ownership—how time is politicized, who controls it and who is permitted to rest. Centered on Black and Brown histories, “Aftertime” engages with labor and the archive, questioning whose stories are preserved and whose are erased. The exhibition’s title references Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, in which the scholar describes Black life lived in the “wake” of slavery as an ongoing afterlife—“not yet aftermath”—for the persistence of racialized structures.

Throughout the exhibition, oral traditions and photography emerge as acts of resistance—ways to preserve time and reclaim continuity despite the fractures of colonialism, migration and slavery that have silenced collective histories. Here, the practice of slowing down, observing and safeguarding traces becomes both a healing and political gesture, reclaiming ownership of time and history. Among the most affecting works is the project by Lagos Studio Archives, which revives a lost collection of portraits from 1990s Nigeria. Many of the photographs, found in various states of decay, are being restored and archived before they vanish entirely. Yet the artists also choose to reveal the decay itself—freezing a moment in the chemical transformation of the image, where deterioration becomes inseparable from its meaning.

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1596267" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/10/DSC03458.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="Three framed photographic works hang on a white gallery wall, each depicting surreal compositions—a car mirror reflecting greenery, a hand holding a twisted object casting a shadow, and an arm reaching over a red table with scattered objects—arranged in a minimalist display." width="970" height="647" data-caption='Sheida Soleimani in “Aftertime.” <span class=”media-credit”>Vikram Pradhan</span>’>

Nearby, Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani presents photographs from the same series recently shown at ICP in New York. Using birds as metaphors for displacement, she reflects on fractured storytelling and intergenerational memory disrupted by migration. Her poetic collages reassemble fragments into new narratives—acts of re-telling and reconnection that reclaim both story and time.

Swiss-Haitian-Finnish artist Sasha Huber extends this gesture toward historical repair. Her practice, grounded in decolonial thought, reclaims images from the archive of Louis Agassiz, a Swiss scientist long celebrated despite his legacy of scientific racism. Among the recovered daguerreotypes are portraits of Renty and Delia, an enslaved father and daughter photographed unclothed. With a staple gun, Huber “dresses” their bodies in layers of metallic stitches, transforming a violent archive into one of care and dignity. Each staple becomes an act of healing—an armor of memory and resilience.

Upstairs, the two exhibitions at Kling & Bang shift from social to cosmic temporality—time as lived experience and time as a natural force. One invites us to slow down and attune to presence; the other explores the rhythms of the nonhuman world. “Decay and Field” unfolds as a multisensory journey through microscopic and invisible processes, revealing beauty in what occurs too slowly for human perception. The multidisciplinary collective Fischersund, known for dissolving the boundaries between art, scent and sound, presents installations that explore organic decay as both a natural cycle and a conceptual act. Their sculptural ensemble Enfleurage / Lögur releases evolving fragrances into the space, its blend of organic and synthetic materials locked in continuous transformation. Drawing from the ancient perfumery technique of enfleurage—extracting scent by pressing flowers into wax—the piece captures fragility while celebrating dissolution as a form of renewal.

The exhibition reaches its emotional peak with the five-channel video installation Stages of Decay, which depicts flowers decomposing in slow, hypnotic motion. Each component—from the hand-sculpted 3D flowers projected across the walls to the deteriorating cassette tapes that generate the soundscape—embraces impermanence and gradual change. Decay here is not an end but a transition toward regeneration, as the scent of decomposition transforms into perfume, stirring memory and emotion.

Within this collective and cooperative meditation across media and practices, authorship and individuality dissolve. Fischersund operates as a family-led collective where ideas evolve through fluid exchange across disciplines and contexts. “For us, being artists in Iceland feels like being part of a community,” says Inga Fischersund. “It’s a social practice more than anything—no one’s trying to get rich or famous. We create together, connect through making. That’s how we counter the darkness here—by keeping the light alive through collaboration.”

In the adjoining space, Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðjónsson, who represented the country at the Venice Biennale, presents Field, an immersive one-channel video and sound installation. The work traces how light passes through a fragment of glass, revealing the invisible tension between transparency and solidity, visibility and opacity. Though its imagery appears digital, Field is grounded in the physical—anchored in material perception and physics: the vibration of a piano string, the refracted shimmer of light across a surface, the pulse of energy suspended within glass. The result is a sensorial meditation on scale and perception, expanding listening and seeing beyond human limits while connecting micro and macro dimensions of experience.

After a brief pause at the Italian-curated restaurant Primavera—over a plate of Icelandic lamb and a conversation with Sól Andrews about the festival’s origins—I make my way to the next venue, the Nordic House. Designed by Alvar Aalto, it remains the only building in Iceland by the Finnish architect, a masterpiece of organic modernism that harmonizes wood, light and landscape into a single sculptural continuum.

Here, the festival turns to nature’s time—an invitation to contemplate the cycles that unfold too slowly, too quietly, to register within human perception. “Sediment and Signal,” installed on the building’s ground floor, gathers artists attuned to the Earth’s temporalities: glacial shifts, sedimentation and the gradual transformations that exceed human scale. Featuring Erna Skúladóttir, Pétur Thomsen, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Julie Sjöfn Gasiglia, Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Thomas Pausz and WAUHAUS, the exhibition traces geological memory and the intelligence of materials—ice, salt, glass, mud and fossilized matter—as they record the planet’s layered cycles of change.

WAUHAUS and Jonatan Sundström’s two-channel video Some Unexpected Remnants extends this reflection into a meditation on waste and regeneration, filmed between Helsinki’s reclaimed landfill Vuosaarenhuippu and Kuopio’s active waste center. Here, decay becomes a living process—matter that continues to breathe, shift and remember beneath the soil.

Ragna Róbertsdóttir’s salt and glass installations crystallize before our eyes, their gradual evaporation rendering time visible. Rhoda Ting and Mikkel Bojesen’s Deep Time translates geological duration into layered sculptures of stainless steel and glass that evoke the archaeology of the ocean floor, while their Rhizome reveals the hidden mycelial networks connecting life beneath the ground. Nearby, Julie Sjöfn Gasiglia’s Fossilized Kin imagines speculative evolution, fossilizing organic forms mid-transformation, while Thomas Pausz’s Matrix Lamp turns light into matter, exposing vibration as energy’s most elemental rhythm.

Together, these works recast art as both material memory and a living archive of the planet—recording and reactivating imperceptible shifts in energy and form. They invite us to contemplate nature’s unhurried intelligence and its quiet rejection of linear time. To embrace geological duration today may be the most radical gesture of all: resisting acceleration and attuning instead to the Earth’s deep, patient pulse.

A public program of art in real time

It was through its dynamic program of performances that “Sequences” created space for genuine rituals of contemplation and mediation—practices unfolding before audiences in “real time,” often requiring full presence and awareness. Each performance became an invitation to reconnect with a cosmic order as well as with the essence of human existence itself, grounded in relation and interdependence.

On Friday night, at the National Gallery of Iceland, m a s a took place—a food performance by Hugo Llanes and Catherine Rivadeneyra Bello exploring corn as a cultural and material bridge between their native Mexico and their adopted home in Iceland. Rooted in memory, migration and communal eating, the participatory work unfolded as a ritual of conviviality and authentic human exchange—one of the oldest gestures of connection—centered on the shared act of sitting at the same table and exchanging food and stories, two of life’s most vital forms of nourishment. At its heart lies a pre-Columbian gold corn, a radiant core that establishes an unexpected link between Mexico and Iceland. Through it, histories of maritime trade, colonial legacies and their enduring reverberations—both generative and painful—interlace, celebrating locality and belonging while creating a space where cultural histories and knowledge converge into a single thread of humanity’s shared path.

For Llanes and Rivadeneyra Bello, cooking and sharing recipes far from home with strangers from around the world becomes an act of collective healing, a gesture of cultural reconciliation and a spark for new relationships. “They, us, you, sitting in communion with food. Xochill pilanni—a flower smiling in broken crumbs to laugh, enjoy,” reads one of the fabric banners hanging from the ceiling, embroidered with poetry. Seated among strangers who, after three hours, feel like friends and surrounded by the rhythms of traditional Latin music, participants are gently guided into an experience of shared responsibility. Invited first to prepare a dish for someone else, they extend the performance’s ethos of trust and reciprocity—a quiet social test in care and empathy. The entire event becomes a call to slow down and rediscover the simple yet profound power of communal rituals, those sustaining gestures that have long bound societies together.

In the end, everything about my experience aligned. Missing the festival’s opening proved to be a gift, allowing me to experience the perfect close to its first week—and to my stay—with a participatory performance on Saturday evening at Hvammsvík, a geothermal hot spring resort founded by patron and collector Skúli Mogensen.

The Icelandic entrepreneur—best known as the founder of WOW Air, the budget airline that dominated airports in the early 2000s—conceived Hvammsvík not merely as a luxury wellness retreat but as a place of meditation: an environment where art, nature and personal spirituality converge. Around the fire, he welcomes us into an open-air space he has designed as an energetic and symbolic meeting point of ancient spiritual traditions, reviving forces rooted in Iceland’s landscape while connecting to broader symbols such as the Maltese and Celtic crosses and the elemental forms of rock and sea. For him, this structure serves as a modern sanctuary for reflection and renewal, where visitors encounter both the natural world and the quiet presence of art. As he speaks, the northern lights begin to shimmer across the sky.

Leading us inside, Mogensen shares that his relationship with art began in his teenage years, when he started collecting out of sheer fascination. His collection now includes works by many of Iceland’s foremost artists, several of which greet visitors at the entrance and throughout Hvammsvík’s interiors. Other pieces are integrated directly into the landscape, merging sculpture with nature—each conceived in close collaboration with the artist and the site itself.

After this brief introduction, we move toward the pools, where I’m a Heart Beating in the World unfolds—an emotionally charged performance and concert, or rather, a living sound bath, set within Hvammsvík’s natural hot springs. Conceived by dance and performance artist Maija Mustonen, Hrefna Lind Lárusdóttir and dramaturg Ami Karvonen, with music and visuals by Rusto Myllylahti, the work becomes a ritual. As silence descends over the audience, it invites us to surrender to the movement of water—to experience floating, touch and presence as a live installation—to exist fully within the senses, entirely in the moment.

Suspended between geothermal water and open sky, the performance invites stillness and reconnection. The verses spoken by the performers—walking and drifting through the pools—recall that moment before birth, when the soul hesitated to enter the world, before reality, as defined by Western reason, confined us to physical needs and limitations.

“I am a heart beating in the world. You who are reading me, please help me to be born. Wait—it’s getting dark. Darker. And darker,” one performer intones. “My eyes are shut. I am pure unconsciousness. They already cut the umbilical cord: I am unattached in the universe. I don’t think but feel it,” continues another, a few verses later. “I want thick milk. No one taught me to want. But I already want. I’m lying with my eyes open, looking at the ceiling. Inside is the darkness. An I that pulses already forms,” says a third voice—invoking that suspended instant when the soul remains unbound by time, body, or desire.

In this performance, the artists enact a ritual of rebirth—a reawakening to the cosmic consciousness from which our souls arise and to which they return, as water moves freely between the physical, psychological and mythical realms. It becomes an invitation to relearn how to float, to surrender, to yield to the current without fear or reason, returning to an expanded sensory and human awareness. “What I’m writing to you is not for reading—it’s for being,” a performer whispers toward the end.

Even for those who float easily, the real challenge lies in releasing time-bound concerns and judgment—yielding to something greater than the self. To float is to merge into the cosmic current, to become a vessel rather than an individual. The sea breeze and the smell of salt drifting from the nearby shore remind us of where we came from. Suspended between water and sky, silence settles in. With ears submerged and attuned to another frequency, the world rearranges itself into vibrations that hum just beyond human perception.

In that luminous moment, the performance reveals the essential beauty of being human—temporal, emotional and vibrantly alive within the greater miracle of the universe. Sequences, and Iceland itself, extend the same invitation: to pause, to re-attune and to remember that we are part of something far larger than ourselves, and that the timeless power of art—freed from the rhythms of its industry and market—can help us return to harmony with it.

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