I see myself in you
2025
Edition 5/5 + 1AP 
The text below is an extract from the curatorial text by Eleni Riga: Winter Nights brings together Norwegian, Greek and Icelandic artists in an exploration of seasonal rituals, animist worldviews and ecological memory. The international exhibition considers the meeting point between nordic and southern animisms, reflecting on climate change and ecological grief. The exhibition was first presented at BO (The Association of Visual Artists Oslo) and at Femidomen in September-October 2025 with the support of Arts and Culture Norway and the Norwegian Embassy in Athens. It takes its title from Vetrnætr, the pre-Christian Nordic ritual marking the transition into winter. Traditionally held after the harvest, the gathering offered a final moment of communal exchange before the darkness and cold winter. It served both practical and spiritual purposes: strengthening social bonds and solidarity, while acknowledging relationships with the land, ancestors and other-than-human forces.
Reflecting on “nordic animism” and historian Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen’s writings, describing it as a means of recognizing animals, plants, rocks, waters and spirits as “persons”, the exhibition seeks to re-establish kinship with the more-than-human world. Looking to traditions bearing this approach can offer us tools for re-entering a responsible, attentive relationship with the world. The participating artists responded to this invitation through works that address seasonal change, power, history, magic, sleep, death and rebirth, drawing on embodied experience, daily practices, family and land ties, as well as political concerns. In Oslo, it was central to shift the perspective away from that of a heliotropic society, one oriented toward light and the promise of perpetual growth, toward an understanding of winter and darkness as conditions to be embraced, inhabited and attuned to. Now, as the exhibition travels to my land, this perspective opens onto a convergence between northern and southern animisms. The exhibition expands beyond winter as a specific season to consider cyclical time, seasonal transformation and our relationship with the more-than-human world. It turns toward traditions, practices, and forms of knowledge shaped through humanity’s repeated encounters with ecological crises, asking what these accumulated ways of relating to nature might offer us in the present.
Eva Ísleifs’ “I See Myself in You” begins with a found stone whose naturally formed features suggest a human face. Its smile appears at the entrance of the exhibition, almost like an apotropaic object: an object believed to ward off harm or unwanted forces through its protective presence, greeting the visitor while turning away whatever might threaten the space.
I see myself in you with the work of Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel “Memory´s Maze” The work emerges from pareidolia, the tendency to recognize familiar forms, particularly faces, in otherwise ambiguous patterns. For Ísleifs, this becomes a way of orienting herself in the world. On walks along the coast of Iceland, she found two such stones and named them sisters. This simple act of naming turns an accidental encounter into a relationship, opening onto questions of kinship, sisterhood, motherhood, and even grandmotherhood, as well as the artist’s own shifting relationship to femininity and masculinity. The stones become relatives through a process that begins with seeing and develops through naming and attention.
The stones resonate with Nordic animist traditions in which natural formations, particularly stones, are understood as carrying an anima, a presence or vitality of their own. Pareidolia introduces another layer: the human impulse to recognize faces and relations in the forms of the natural world, a recurring process in the history of art and a reminder that ways of seeing are never neutral.
Having lived between Greece and Iceland, Ísleifs brings these different cultural landscapes into the same encounter. Placed at the threshold of the exhibition, the smiling stone becomes a point of connection between northern and southern animisms.
Photos Frank Holbein from the exhibition Winter Nights curated by Eleni Riga in Living Room Athens
With works by: Marthe A Andersen, Tasos Gkaintatzis, Úna Hamilton Helle, Miriam Hansen, Eva Ísleifs, Maria Nikiforaki, Viktor Pedersen, Sarah Sikorie, Elektra Stampoulou, Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, produced by A - DASH and Living Room.
With works by: Marthe A Andersen, Tasos Gkaintatzis, Úna Hamilton Helle, Miriam Hansen, Eva Ísleifs, Maria Nikiforaki, Viktor Pedersen, Sarah Sikorie, Elektra Stampoulou, Simon Daniel Tegnander Wenzel, produced by A - DASH and Living Room.