HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

HD, Single Channel Video Loop, 00:06:28, 16:9, 2014.

Original sound piece by Gudný Gudmundsdottir.

In the video the artist revisits a character he had created already in 2006 or ‘The Artist as a Puffin’ and places him in the harbor where the artist had been conducting socially engaged research for half a decade when the video was shot.

At the time the gentrification process of downtown Reykjavik had become a highly visible process where shops and services downtown that catered to the local population had been replaced by shops and services catering for tourists. What has come to become the symbol for this change was the Puffin or more precisely the phrase 'Puffin shops' referring to overstuffed shop windows where puffins in all shape and sizes and customs had aggressively taken over the sight at eye level. It was timely to let 'The Artist as a Puffin' character resurface as the issue that was being addressed back then had finally surfaced. In 2006 the first puffin teddies souvenirs were passing unnoticed by most. In retrospect the work was thus a prophecy of the process that was about to take course in Reykjavik. In 2014 the Artist as a Puffin was led out to play once again but this time being lost in the gentrified Reykjavik harbour where artists are playing key role in the gentrification process.

The work caught the attention of academic scholars Katla Kjartansdottir and Kristinn Schram that in a 2020 peer-reviewed academic publication tried to answer the question whether the Arctic could be fitted into a suitcase:

‘‘…The puffin is also a central figure in her work Material Puffin (2014) in which she plays with human/animal relations, national imagery, and gender roles. In this work, the artist appears wearing a festive pink gown and a large puffin mask in the harbour area in Reykjavík. As can be seen on one of the stills from the work, shown below, she holds a gas pump in her hand and seems to be spraying gold and glitter into the ocean. In her multi-layered visual narration, the artist gives the masculine harbour area a feminine touch and evokes challenging questions in relation to tourism and urban development, sustainability, ecological awareness, and future visions… In this work, the artist critically explores questions relating to the commodification of ethnic identity (Comoroff and Comoroff 2009) that are linked to the mas-sive growth of tourism in Iceland and the role of the artist (as a puffin) within ongoing social and cultural developments. Again, dressed in pink, she playfully positions, and literally masks herself as a puffin, with a large puffin mask on her head, inviting the viewer to participate in discussions of current socio-economic issues in the country, complex human/animal relations, and their local/global interplay. In Guðnadóttir’s works, the puffin evokes questions of how overexploi-tation can lead to the exhaustion or even complete extinction of natural resources. Along with the snowy owl and the European turtledove, the At-lantic puffin has recently been placed on the BirdLife International list of birds in danger of extinction (BirdLife International 2018). Although the puffin is indeed cute and cuddly, it can also be described as a non-human reminder of the fragile ecosystem of the Arctic, ecological anxieties, and the gloomy ecological prospects for our post-human/post-anthropocentric times, which include climate change, habitat-loss and/or bird extinction…’’ - the book publication can be downloaded as a pdf here