High Concept in Hafnartorg

Chapter 21 of Search For a Dancer, a memoir of a week spent in Iceland in November 2022

Hafnartorg Gallery is billed as a new lifestyle destination for shopping, food, wine and culture on banks of the old harbour in Reykjavik, Iceland. Part of the harbour area renewal, it is suitably forbidding in its mien. The design firm karlssonwilker collaborated with my old ‘pal’ musician/composer Högni Egilsson to create The Orator, a multi-sensory art project.

This was the first installation presented in the gallery’s multi-purpose food/wine hall. It was extremely dark, with people (families with small children even!) eating while seated next to large video screens that played creepy imagery triggered by Högni’s ominous music:

This bartender was not impressed:

Högni was introduced in a very low key way and the whole affair was quite informal. It was hard at first to make any sense of it; after a while I got the distinct sense of being in a cave full of prehistoric art—if computer graphics had been around 20,000 years ago.

I later learned that I was featured in a video of the installation on the karlssonwilker website:

The Orator was an interesting concept, but I have to admit that I felt as if a burden had lifted when I went out in the still-light late afternoon. The traffic on Geirsgata was heavy, but the ships shown below were actually in dry dock and not part of the congestion:

My next destination would be more lively.


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