Bjarki Bragason, Before Present

Bjarki Bragason, Before Present

Before Present, video, 00:28:30, 2021

In his work, Before Present, Bjarki reflects on the aspect of time as it appears in an eroded area in the highlands around Lake Mývatn in North Iceland. During an expedition to the area in the summer of 2021, Bjarki accompanied earth scientists in their research on tephra deposited by volcanic eruptions of Mount Hekla. The area surveyed is characterized by landscapes of eroded heaths with large pockets of vegetation.

Hekla has erupted more than twenty times in the last thousand years. Tephra, the fragmental material produced by a volcanic eruption, is read like a calendar of Earth’s history, as it appears in layers of earth, one laid on top of another.

In the middle of the heath stands a large mound of remaining soil and plants, about three meters high, in otherwise desolate surroundings. On windy days, a dust storm further disintegrates the vegetation cover.

In his observations of the area, Bjarki brought the perspective down to the roots of the vegetation at the bottom of the mound, shrinking the field of vision so that the smallest fragments become discernible. During the dust storm, particles of soil formed over the last thousand or more years are combined with tephra from various layers of the earth and are blown vast distances in an entropic cloud. The fragmented view, created by bringing the eye down to the ground, changes the body’s perception of space and at the same time attempts to understand the complex interplay of timescales which occurs when geological information from different millennia is mixed and the earth layers from the current geological epochs are disintegrated and disappear – a collision indicative of the multi-layered reality which shapes the experience of nature.

Credits: Editing and sound Sabine Fischer, special thanks to Anna Líndal, Magnús Tumi Guðmundsson, and Guðrún Larsen.

Bjarki Bragason lives and works in Reykjavík. His practice investigates how human and geological time scales intersect. In his recent work, Bjarki has focused on individual trees and how they bear witness to the history which unfolds around and on them. He studied fine art at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin, and completed his MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2010. Since 2016, Bjarki is an assistant professor and BA program director at the Fine Arts department at the Iceland University of the Arts.