BEASTQUEST
Kolbeinn Hugi
14. June – 1. August

Gallery Gudmundsdottir is pleased to present BeastQuest, a solo exhibition by Icelandic artist Kolbeinn Hugi. 

Opening on June 13, the exhibition features the premiere of his latest film, BeastQuest, a new chapter in his exploration of the Animal Internet, a speculative networked ecology that reimagines agency, sentience, and communication beyond the human.

Set beyond the mists, in an ecotopian future world; BeastQuest follows a novice Hive Cluster Manager on the margins of the Animal Internet as they enter the sacred GAIANET simulation.

Their task: connect an unnetworked Earth region to the Zoocratic Wild Web, a multi-species data network designed and built by animals.
Through poetic visuals, colorful music and video game storytelling, the film unfolds into a warm fictional world, born of data, merging the ecological and technological.

Inspired by works such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Quest for Fire; The 30 minute sci-fi film is shot entirely in the Azores island cluster and stars Jules* Elting and the Young Boy Dancing Group and features a prominent synth score by Kolbeinn Hugi and Icelandic synth legend Hermigervill.

Kolbeinn Hugi’s interdisciplinary practice spans film, installation, and performance, often fusing ecological thinking with absurdist systems design. His ongoing Animal Internet project imagines future infrastructures shaped not by extraction, but by interdependence. With BeastQuest, he offers a vision of the internet not as a tool of control, but as an emergent ecology, one where life itself logs on.

Kolbeinn Hugi's work explores speculative ecologies, posthuman futures, and nonhuman agency through film, installation, and immersive storytelling.