Cunning Appropriations

Abstract: This field-note records observations I made during a supervised visit to Hafnarhús, Reykjavík Art Museum, on 15 September 2023, as part of the course MAN095F (Globalisation/ Hnattvæðing) at the University of Iceland. The visit was organised around Erró: The Power of Images / Cunning Scissors (Listasafn Reykjavíkur 2022–2023). The note documents the iconographic logic of that exhibition, its articulation of a nature–culture divide through the juxtaposition of non-European female bodies and the imagery of Euro-American state modernity, and the curatorial apparatus that held these readings inside the museum rather than destabilising them. It situates both the artwork and the 2023 class visit within a longer institutional arc that begins in 2010, when the same Hafnarhús staged Erró – Portrett: Women from North Africa (18 March – 23 May 2010) and scheduled a public gallery talk on 16 May 2010 given by the anthropologist Kristín Loftsdóttir (Listasafn Reykjavíkur 2010). The 2010 exhibition text, still available on the museum website, describes the painted subjects as “gorgeous young women from North Africa in the nude or lightly swathed”, “silent and anonymous heroines”, and “fair maidens”, and credits Erró with “reawakening” a “possible truth” about them by juxtaposing their bodies with flowers, still-lifes, and war imagery (Listasafn Reykjavíkur 2010). I treat the exhibitions, the works on display in 2023, the curatorial framing, and the pedagogical apparatus of the class visit as a single object of analysis, and deposit the note here for citation as primary observational material.