REYKJAVÍK.- When I looked up, the moon had changed shape

All things count time. They measure time in orbits, not hours. The sun. The moon. The Earth. The pull between them. In Birna’s work, time drips, circles, evaporates and returns. It moves like breath: tidally, patiently, repeating itself, yet never quite the same. Looking up, the sky never holds still. When I looked up, the moon had changed shape, and with it the feeling of time.

ég held áfram að telja
til öryggis,
jafnvel þótt ekkert skýrt upphaf sé
og enginn endir í augsýn.

Á. Birna Björnsdóttir works like an emotional scientist who measures not in seconds but in rhythm, not in precision but in persistence. Birna’s laboratory is permeable: ceramic, copper, steel, straps, mirrors, metal, and microcontrollers. Her tools include drip vials, multimeters and vessels. The vessel becomes a form of harnessing, a way of holding without fixing, of receiving without owning. Other tools include the wind brushing her cheeks on a cold, bright day, snail sex, text messages, diary entries, astrology readings, spells and the kisses of lovers far away. She gathers data slowly through attention, exposure and care.

The works in When I looked up, the moon had changed shape are both experiments and confessions. That is to say, they display aspects of the spiritual and the scientific. In Witnesses, two metallic eyes hang in slow rotation, tracing the movements of the sky. One turns with the sun (360° each day), the other with the moon (360° each 29,5 days). Like cosmic clocks, they move softly through the intervals of day and night, months and birthdays. Their gaze hovers across time, in the present and 3,600 years in the past, before meeting our own. It moves between windows and walls, and our insides and out. The moon pulls the tides, and perhaps the tides within us too.

Tears move through the work as both material and metaphor. Birna observes that the first tear is never to be trusted. It comes before the feeling, like distant lightning before thunder, suggesting that emotion unfolds over time and that initial reactions are only part of the story. In her work crying is not a gesture of individual weakness but is rather a bodily catalyst of a shared transcendental motion that moves through and beyond her. one tear is an ocean, and the ocean is a tear; they ebb and flow, reflecting the inseparability of the world around us and the currents inside us. Tears become instruments for weighing and balancing experience, for holding vulnerability, sensation, and action in tension.

The ocean can be read as a system of knowledge, where each drop carries both chemical and emotional weight. Crying shares the anatomy of the sea; both hold salt and memory. In All streams lead to the sea and every tear seeks its mother, seawater slowly seeps through a clay vessel, as if weeping. Each tear marks a change by crystalising on the surfaces, making feelings visible. What the vessel cannot hold is allowed to pass through, leaving only its trace, like a quiet record of time and change.

Birna’s installations feel like language slowed down until it becomes matter (mountain, river, ocean, rain, puddle – tear, snot, slime, goo). Words dissolve into rhythms, punctuation turns into pulse, each drip-drop is a comma, and with each crystal a word takes form again. Meaning, just like time, hovers, shifts, resists conclusion and this very ambiguity becomes a tempo that reminds us that the world is actually turning, that we turn with it, so does everyone we love, along with everything else.

Text: Helena Solveigar Aðalsteinsbur
Text excerpts: Á. Birna Björnsdóttir