Nacht & Träume: Anna Júlía Fridbjörnsdóttir

Gallery Gudmundsdottir presents Nacht, a solo exhibition by Anna Júlía Friðbjörnsdóttir, unfolding across the gallery space at Joachimst.  and in dialogue with Träume an extension of the exhibition at the Bunker in Linienstrasse.

NACHT
Nacht exhibits new works that continue Anna Júlia Friöbjörnsdóttir's enquiry into materiality, form and transformation, examining how systems and language become embedded in matter. Rooted in star atlases and astronomical diagrams, the exhibition centres on the material qualities of carbon paper, extending into works on paper and plaster reliefs. Its conceptual horizon is informed by the nineteenth-century poem Nacht und Träume by Matthäus Casimir von Collin, set to music by Franz Schubert, whose atmosphere of suspension and inward attention resonates throughout. 

At the centre of the exhibition hangs a suspended sheet of assembled carbon paper, a material of intermediacy. Responsive to the slightest movement of air, the fragile, semi- transparent surface gathers grids and perforations into a single plane. Two lines from the poem are transcribed into the material using a paper-tape technique associated with Morse telegraphy. Light pierces the dark blue surface, turning text into signal and signal into a shifting constellation. 

The surrounding works unfold from this matrix, carrying its movements, translucency and impressions outward. Parts of the carbon sheet are captured through rubbing and transfer in works on paper, leaving traces of pressure and displacement, where fragments of the encoded text surface only as interruptions, dissolving into whispers and faint echoes. The punched apertures migrate across the page, shifting from technical notation to stellar suggestion and lending the surface a subtle depth. Material contrasts play a decisive role. As a counterpoint to the ephemeral paper, plaster reliefs abstract elements from the celestial grid and reposition them in pairs, liberated from their original diagrammatic order. These reliefs lend weight to the imagined matrix, implying isolated entities and constellations loosening and reforming as structures held in tension or undergoing realignment. 
Throughout Nacht, darkness operates both metaphorically and materially: a threshold where boundaries soften, hierarchies dim and attention turns inward in a moment of uncertain political, ecological and personal orientation. Meaning, dispersed and reconfigured, flickers here not through certainty but through the soft pulse of transmission moving "through the silent hearts of men."

TRÄUME
In dialogue with the exhibition Nacht, Friöbjörnsdottir presents new works at the
galleries bunker. At its centre stands a sculptural reconstruction of a whale scapula in silver, engraved with diagrams derived from a medieval astrolabe. Suspended between specimen and device, relic and tool, the bone merges celestial measurement with vulnerable anatomy. A system once used to locate fixed stars and regulate time is inscribed into a body drawn from a species on the edge of disappearance. Systems of navigation are thus embedded in a structure marked by precarity. Where a Pole Star might anchor the diagram, a conch shell occupies the centre. The fixed celestial point is replaced by a spiral form associated with resonance and echo. A sheet of black carbon paper hangs against the wall, punctured with irregular constellations. Here the logic of Nacht reverses: scattered marks precede the system. In two works on paper, these fragments are gathered into tentative grids recalling strategic charts or game boards. Order emerges from dispersion, provisional rather than given. Within the bunker's enclosed architecture, Träume proposes a condition of post-polar navigation. Coordinates persist, yet their authority is no longer absolute. Orientation becomes a matter of negotiation between body and diagram, relic and instrument, chaos and structure.