Automatic translation by Google Translate.We cannot guarantee that it is accurate.
Skoða vefinn á Íslensku
IN THE MIDDLE OF IT
Artist: Mirjam Maekalle, 2nd year MA Fine Art student
This exhibition is an accumulation of recent reflections on violence — inevitable violence, accidental violence, justified violence, and violence that feels earned. It asks how violence can be understood ethically, and whether it can ever be fully comprehended. Beneath these questions lies an awareness of the inevitability of death, the quiet beauty of stillness, and the tension held within frozen moments.
The works emerge from a struggle between casting blame and accepting reality. They move back and forth between confrontation and resignation, between the desire to assign responsibility and the recognition that some conditions simply exist beyond moral clarity. Structures appear stable yet remain precarious, holding the weight of questions rather than answers.
Rooted in personal experience, the exhibition reflects an ongoing search for some form of absolute truth — a search that repeatedly collapses into doubt. The works oscillate between rejecting meaninglessness and clinging to the hope that ethical understanding is still possible. In this space, uncertainty is not a failure, but a condition — one that asks the viewer to remain present, implicated, and attentive.
Mirjam Maekalle works with material, gesture, and form to explore the human condition as a space of contradiction rather than resolution. Through a process grounded in physical making, their practice investigates how desire, impulse, and doubt shape human behavior — particularly in moments where moral certainty begins to fracture. Their work resists binary frameworks of right and wrong, instead lingering in states of ambiguity, instability, and tension. Drawing on philosophical inquiry and lived experience, Mirjam approaches art-making as a method of slowing down — of staying with discomfort, contradiction, and the unresolved. The resulting works invite viewers into a space where meaning is neither stable nor guaranteed. Mirjam Maekalle lives and works in Reykjavik, and this exhibition is part of her MA studies in fine arts at the Iceland University of the Arts.
Opening: February 13th from 16.00 to 18.00
Other opening times:
17th from 12 to 18
18th from 12 to 18
19th from 12 to 18
20th and 21st by appointment (mirjam24@lhi.is).
Location: Kubburinn, LHÍ, Laugarnesvegur 91, 105 Reykjavík.
