HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

Hulda Rós Guðnadóttir defines her artistic approach as "art practice as research", using the process of art-making as a method of inquiry. Over the years, she has developed several long-term research projects through her practice.

An early exploration, Hops Hopsi, resulted in two major solo exhibitions—at Program in Berlin and the Reykjavík Art Museum. Her most extensive investigation to date, Keep Frozen, unfolded over more than a decade and generated a wide body of work, including installations, solo and group exhibitions, a cinema-released film, two published books, and a series of seminars held in various cities around the world. Current research project is titled S-I-L-I-C-A.

2025 Distanz Verlag in Berlin published a monograph of the Keep Frozen research project titled ‘Rhythm of Labor' that includes four essays, thorough introduction and context and pictures of all the works produced. Can be ordered here.

Art practice as research (often called practice-based or practice-led research) is a methodology in which the creation of art itself is a form of inquiry. This means that art practice as research is a certain a mode of inquiry. Rather than separating making from thinking, this approach positions the artistic process—and its outcomes—as a legitimate and generative way of producing new knowledge or understanding. This research - in comparison to text-based research - advocates for more plural, sensory, and embodied ways of knowing and the artistic process, methods, and outputs are central to the knowledge production. The artist-researcher investigates a question or theme not just about art, but through the making of art.

Key characteristic of this artistic position are making as thinking - the creation of art is not illustrative of research—it is the research; reflexivity - critical reflects on ones own process, context, and outcomes; and embodied and situated knowledge - lived experience, material engagement, and context-specific knowledge (specific to a culture, history, or place) not easily accessible by other means, academic or not. The art work aims to extend understanding within and/or beyond the field of art—whether in cultural, political, material, aesthetic, or philosophical terms.

The artistic value of art practice as research lies in its unique ability to produce knowledge, insight, and experience through methods that are sensory, intuitive, embodied, and materially engaged—methods that often lie beyond the reach of traditional academic inquiry. It shows the value of thinking through aesthetics, intuition, and speculation—as valid and vital ways of knowing.

Artistic research generates non-verbal, experiential, and affective knowledge. The act of making—whether through performance, film, installation, sculpture, or sound—can reveal complexities that cannot be fully articulated in language. Examples of this is tacit knowledge - what we know through doing; sensory knowledge - what we understand through bodily experience; and affective knowledge - how art communicates through feeling.

As research art practice becomes a tool for asking and answering questions that are philosophical, political, cultural, or personal—through form, material, and action. It has capacity to provoke thought, reframe questions, or open ethical spaces for dialogue. It gives form to questions we didn’t know how to ask, and language to experiences we didn’t know how to name. An important artistic value of art practice as research is that there is not only artistic value in the final work, but in the process of invention and rethinking—of both art and the world. Artistic research often engages deeply with urgent contemporary issues—ecological, social, political, or technological—and offers a space for critical reflection that is not confined to academic or institutional logic. Artistic research challenges conventions and expands what art can be and how it can function.

Artistic research often intersects with science, philosophy, anthropology, or technology. It creates dialogue across disciplines, bringing new modes of inquiry into play and reconfiguring how knowledge is exchanged.

What is interesting about art practice as research - compared to conventional academic research practices - is that it fosters understanding through multiplicity rather than reduction, ambiguity rather than certainty. It uncovers perspectives that are plural and thus resists universal truths. Art practice as research contributes to the cultural imagination and increased the diversity of artistic production and our shared symbolic life.

Keep Frozen is an art-practice-as-research project with several artistic outcomes that positioned itself outside of academia. Starting as early as in 2010 with a very personal gut feeling and urge for researching childhood memories of the aesthetics of living on the harbour, on the docks and by the sea, the project later developed into having a more broader focus on harbour aesthetics in general and more specifically the heart of those aesthetics: dock labour, movements and materiality.

The Keep Frozen research started by going to sites and conducting research through lived experiences and direct embodied encounter. The visits reached variety of locations along the Atlantic Ocean; to the isolated West fjords of Iceland; to New York City; to North-Africa and to Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland; to a forgotten unloading port; to ancient trade center; to abandoned beaches; mid amongst the dock workers and to a village of 166 inhabitants. One of her key artistic method was not only observation on site but collaboration with its people. This became especially significant in a collaboration with a group of dockworkers in Reykjavik midtown harbors that gave birth to many artworks.

The early research process up to early 2015 is described in The Story, a collaborative text between the artist and German curator Berit Schuck, that was printed in the the publication Keep Frozen: Art-practice-as-research. The artist´s view, a collection of articles and images edited by the artists herself. Up to then public parts of the research project had been Keep Frozen part zero, a single channel video work, Keep Frozen part one, a mixed media installation event in Red-Hook, NYC, that also premiered the Buoy sculpture for the first time, and Keep Frozen part two, also a mixed media exhibition at Reykjavik Art Festival, where the video work Material Puffin and C-print series Artist as a Worker were shown for the first time as an installation.

The following year the symposium Keep Frozen Projects became the high-point of the research project. With symposiums and practical showing of artistic research of other artists both in Leipzig and Reykjavik the approach to the issue of the artist´s view of art practice as research was broadened up to become a discussion that included all artists and artists works.

2016 also included a premier of major Keep Frozen art works such as the 48-hour dock worker performance and Labor Move, a mixed-media video installation at Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig and , Keep Frozen part four a mixed-media installation at ASI art museum in Iceland that showed the Golden Ship sculpture, the Shipyard Paintings and a found Ghostnet sculpture for the first time.

In April 2016 the feature length documentary Keep Frozen premiered in the 'Regard Neuf' competition category at Visions du Réel in Switzerland. The film was later nominated to dozens of prices where it was shown all over the world in contemporary art and cinema contexts. In 2018 the film was shown as a solo exhibition in the 12 x12 program of Berlinische Galerie in Berlin.

Major Keep Frozen exhibitions since then include the solo exhibitions All is Full of Love at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in 2019 and WERK – Labor Move at Reykjavik Art Museum in 2021. In the mixed-media installation on two floors at Künstlerhaus Bethanien the Artist as a Puffin works that predate the Keep Frozen research were given a context within the Keep Frozen research project. A new Puffin work was developed as The Puffin Shop currently in the collection of the Living Art Museum in Reykjavik, Iceland. Another new work premiered in the installation was Thinking like a Mountain. Thinking like a Mall.

Works from the Keep Frozen series was also shown as installations at group exhibition Swimming Pool – Troubled Waters curated by Valerie Schulte Fischedick in 2021 and the Great Patch curated by Weronika Ptak at UFO gallery in Krakow, Poland in 2022.

In 2024 as part of her research and a book publication the following year Guðnadóttir curator an international symposium ‘The Great Defrost’ that recontextualised her Keep Frozen research within the frame of contemporary topics.