Kristín Anna

“I’ve always liked darkness”, Kristín Anna admits, thinking back about her childhood days in a remote valley surrounded by nature and animals. After a lot of touring and living in New York City for a while, the artist returned to Iceland: “It took me a while to realize how much nature cleanses my soul.” In a self-built hut facing the sea and the mountains Krístin Anna leads a modest life, but with plenty of time to think, write, play music, do handicraft or other things valuable to her. Thinking about darkness in a wider sense, namely “the darkness of the human soul”, Kristín Anna chooses to play an old Icelandic lullaby that a mother sings to her child before throwing it off a waterfall. The practice of “bera út”, abandoning a child in nature to die of exposure, sounds extremly brutal today. But it was not so uncommon on this remote island with its harsh living conditions back in the days. By now the battle of survival might feel like an old fairytale, yet Kristín Anna takes the folk song as a starting point to reflect on the darkness within us. And maybe that’s how one leads to another: “befriending” our own darkness, as Krístin Anna puts it, might help us find peace with “nature’s darkness”.