Kolbeinn Hugi Iceland, b. 1979

Kolbeinn Hugi is an Icelandic artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans film, installation, performance, and sound. His work explores speculative ecologies, posthuman futures, and nonhuman agency, often through immersive storytelling and worldbuilding strategies that fuse ecological thinking with absurdist systems design.

At the core of Kolbeinn’s practice lies the Animal Internet—an ongoing, evolving project that imagines a future in which animals participate in a networked digital ecology of their own making. Through this speculative framework, Kolbeinn constructs playful yet critical narratives that question the extractive logic of contemporary technologies and propose alternative, multispecies infrastructures grounded in interdependence and communication beyond the human.

Kolbeinn frequently draws on tropes from science fiction, early computer aesthetics, video games, and experimental cinema to create environments that blur the line between myth and simulation, nature and network. His works are often inhabited by avatars, altered states, and collaborative agents, inviting viewers into complex ecosystems where agency is decentralized and meaning is co-constructed.

Based in Berlin and educated at the Iceland University of the Arts, Kolbeinn has exhibited widely across Europe and North America. His solo presentations include Animal Internet at Vaga (Azores), Leifar at NÝLÓ (Reykjavík), and TOP TIER at Gallery Gudmundsdottir (Berlin). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and festivals, including Kunsthalle Wien, Reykjavik Art Museum, MoMA PS1, and Documenta 14. Collaborations with performance groups such as the Young Boy Dancing Group and his own sound work—often in dialogue with other musicians—form a vital part of his expanded artistic language.

Kolbeinn Hugi’s practice is both deeply imaginative and structurally inquisitive: a search for possible worlds shaped not by domination, but by shared presence and wild connection.