The lecture will cover several of Rúrí’s artworks from different periods of her career, featuring visual examples and video. She will also briefly discuss her perspective on visual art.
Rúrí is a visual artist whose art focuses on the humankind and its relation to the Earth and the Cosmos. Since 1999 many of her works raise questions about water, shortage of safe water for consumption, but also the possible effects of icecaps melting on shorelines of continents and countries. These works are based on scientific information. Her works have been exhibited widely around the world. Rúrí has received a number of awards for her art, and was recently awarded the Icelandic Visual Arts Council´s Honorary Award 2026. Over a career spanning more than five decades, Rúrí, has centered her artistic practice on moral and existential questions that confront inhumanity, imperialism, capitalism, social injustice, and environmental destruction. A pioneer of performance art in Iceland, she has worked across a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, multimedia installation, writing, and performance. Her groundbreaking perfor-mance Golden Car (1974) was among the first works in Iceland to engage explicitly with political activism. She represented Iceland at the 2003 Venice Biennale with Archive –Endangered Waters, an interactive multimedia installation presenting visual and acoustic data from 52 waterfalls threatened by dam construction in the Icelandic Highlands — a work that brought her international recognition.
*Text: Professor Maria Luna Nobili.
This is the second lecture in a lecture series held each semester at the Department of Fine Arts at IUA. In seven lectures during the semester, experts in the field of visual art discuss their own research, experiments, and artistic practice.
The lecture will take place in the lecture hall at IUA Laugarnes, Laugarnesvegur 91, 105 Reykjavík and is open across departments and to the public.
Language: English.