Snæbjörnsdóttir / Wilson

Artist collective Snæbjörnsdóttir / Wilson investigates the complications of human and nonhuman relations through the study of polar bear arrivals in Iceland.

Since the late 1880s, polar bears have arrived in Iceland by swimming and by riding packed ice or drifting icebergs, especially during springtime. Over a decade ago, the artists witnessed the arrival and subsequent shooting of a polar bear at Hraun, a coastal farmstead in northern Iceland. A polar bear’s arrival on land is an event that can be considered from various angles: as cohabitant and foreigner; in a context of global warming and rising sea levels; with regard to migration, voyages, preservation, and extinction; and even in terms of geopolitics, since Greenland is a part of Denmark’s realm.

To create this work on view, Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson tracked down and scanned the bones of the Hraun polar bear—now in a national scientific collection—and presented its skeletal remains as a set of 15 prints. Grouped according to how they are stored in a museum’s crate, each traced bone is reproduced to scale. A phrase relating to boat construction and thus to sea voyaging accompanies each print, paying homage to the bear’s arduous journey.

Arranged anatomically, the prints possess a kinship to the polar bear’s physicality through its absence. The polar bear, the largest bear in the world and the Arctic’s apex predator, is a powerful symbol—originally one of strength and endurance but more recently of the broader fragility of the Arctic and the environment. Essential to its ecosystem, polar bears are part of the food web for Indigenous peoples who have hunted them sustainably for millennia. In many ways, these prints are a visual and poignant reminder that the Arctic region is facing significant ice loss in the coming decades—with potentially serious consequences for polar bears.

Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson (Iceland and United Kingdom, born 1954 and 1955), The Edge of the World, from the project Visitations: Polar Bears Out of Place, 2021. Fifteen silk screen prints, 30 x 22 inches each. Courtesy of the artists. © Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson.

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