| Summary: | To travel north has always been a challenge for the explorer, the natural scientist, the poet, the cartographer, the photographer, and the artist. Long present in the European imaginary, Iceland’s natural phenomena has functioned to affirm an idea of sublimity, an ahistorical notion that has far surpassed Iceland’s geological and material realities as an island and a nation located in the far North. Icelandicity is not an entirely new cultural signifier. However, recently, Icelandicity has become an asset in the cultural production and advertising of Iceland as a global tourist destination. The importance of national ideologies, governmental nation-branding (including certain artists’ resistance to these forces), has been largely absent from art and cultural historical accounts. In this study, I distinguish between Icelandicness and Icelandicity, demonstrating how a deeply-ingrained Icelandicity, has been embedded in and framed within Icelandic visual culture and contemporary art. There is much to be revealed in such a multidisciplinary approach that integrates current debates around nationalism, postcolonialism and decoloniality, gender, race and ecology expressed in both art practices and in consumer culture. In this context, I will examine to what extent and in what ways the local and the global impacts shape artistic production in Iceland. What forces contribute to the creation of Icelandicity, its maintainence and expansion? How should one position contemporary art with regard to the national? How have artists either contributed to or contested the national branding of Iceland? I thus employ a structuralist distinction between Icelandicness and Icelandicity, that is, on one hand, the distinction between a specific and historically forged national identity and, on the other, Icelandicity, a mythological category now widely employed in discourses of tourism and advertising. In so doing, I demonstrate how national institutions both implement and interpret artistic and cultural expression, often functioning to ...
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