Thursday, 12 November at 6 p.m. We welcome you to the opening of two new exhibitions at Hafnarborg, introducing *Hugrenningar* by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson and *Vatnsins streymi* by Beili Liu. At the opening, Styrmir Örn will also perform a new piece, which will subsequently be shown as a video work in the exhibition.

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson: Thoughts (12 November to 21 February)
The exhibition brings together two threads that have characterised Styrmir Arnar's artistic practice from the outset: drawing and performance. In his drawings, the artist works like a craftsman, methodically and within the fixed frame of the picture plane. In his performances, however, he is more like a gardener, letting the environment and atmosphere take charge. The exhibition features large drawings created over the last ten years, which hang from the gallery ceiling to form an installation that visitors can move through. The installation also becomes a stage for the artist's performance, and Styrmir thus attempts to unite the different methods of drawing and performance by finding a point of contact between the static and the dynamic.
The curator is Heiðar Kári Rannversson.

Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson (b. 1984) works with performance, drawings, sculpture and music in his artistic practice, where different media and forms are interwoven into a single narrative. What begins as a drawing on paper may even evolve into a sculpture or music, which then becomes the material for a performance. Styrmir Örn studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and completed a postgraduate course at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2012. His work has been exhibited widely in recent years, both at home and abroad.

Beili Liu: The flow of water (12 November to 21 February)
Water runs like a red thread through Beili Liu's work, as she turns her gaze to both rivers and oceans, distant shores and the materials that are carried between them. The exhibition, The Flux of Water, features works based on Liu's ongoing artistic research in the Arctic and its surrounding regions, where she explores how we are interwoven with nature and how fragile our relationship with it is. The exhibition revolves around the artist's eponymous installation, which is composed of fragments of plastic that have been washed up, weathered and eroded by the forces of nature. Ocean currents have carried these fragments great distances, and they also bear witness to the profound impact that human activity has had on the Earth and its ecosystems.
The curator is Hólmar Hólm.

Beili Liu is an American visual artist, born in China and based in Austin, Texas, where she is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, and she has received numerous grants and accolades for her artistic practice. Liu was a guest artist at Hafnarborg from December 2023 to January 2024 as part of her artistic research on the Arctic. She is returning to the museum this year, which marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of Hafnarborg's guest studio, the oldest of its kind in Iceland.