Curating can make wishes real
Benevolentia stems from the Latin bene (well) and velle (to wish): to wish well.
When I curated an exhibition with fourteen artists around what I came to call Unknown Benevolence, I imagined it as an exercise in cosmic force. Something invisible yet abundant, intimate but vast all at once. Only in hindsight do I see how the show, in one way or another, was a return to the act of setting intentions and attempting to manifest them, or in other words, making wishes real.
Rather than summarising the exhibition or its catalogue, which became a personal diary, curatorial manifesto and partial record of conversations, I want to reflect on what this exhibition revealed to me and what I have taken and integrated into my curatorial practice. I hope to also situate it in relation to the Icelandic art scene and international discourse. I want to attempt to position the meaning of this exhibition within my own life, career and creative methodology.
I long to call the exhibition something other than an exhibition. The term feels limiting in this specific case; just as calling the catalogue a catalogue does. Instead, I prefer to think of this “exhibition project” as the making of a coven or a gathering. The roster of artists and the others who joined this journey became a coven, and the catalogue, in my mind, our book of spells. Yes, just like in Charmed, a TV show I grew up with in the early naughties.
I am aware of the trend of witchy-aesthetic and esoteric themes, and I consciously leaned into that tendency in 2023 when the idea for Unknown benevolence started brewing. I am an avid collector of occult and mystical materials, not in a fashionable sense, but in the sense of uncovering old books in strange antique shops in Iceland, finding magic in everyday life, embracing the unknown, letting it linger unbothered and making wishes an ordinary part of my life and work. Since then, this interest has only grown in significance. Looking back, I can see the profound impact the project has had on me. The coven continues to grow. It includes many different people, yet our individual journeys intersect in gatherings around curatorial projects. In my experience, curating and art more broadly can become a way of searching for spiritual reassurance. Art makes room for uncertainty, for intuition, for things we cannot fully explain. While the connection between art and spirituality is nothing new, it has felt especially urgent to me in recent years. In a Western context where many shared belief systems have loosened their hold, it is easy to feel unanchored. Curating can then become about more than display; it can function as a kind of ritual ground, a circle drawn in uncertain times where intention, grief and desire are given form, a place to gather around what feels unresolved and to ask for something to change. I did not fully understand this when I began Unknown Benevolence, but looking back, I can see that I was searching for exactly that kind of space.
What I am trying to articulate is how this specific gathering supported me more than I realised at the time, and more than I acknowledge in writing the catalogue printed for the occasion. It is difficult to understand the impact an exhibition has on those involved while it is still in the making. Let me set the scene.
I was in a state of emotional turmoil when the idea began to brew—the kind that creeps up slowly but becomes increasingly present, particularly during studio visits. I had been working on the idea since 2023. Various challenges and traumas had led me to withdraw from some of my closest friends, driven by a slow-burning sense of shame. On top of that, I was struggling with insecurity about my self-worth, feeling emotionally depleted. The reasons were many, but primarily stemmed from a past emotionally abusive relationship that ended violently a few years earlier; from the state of the world and the escalating genocide; from confronting the unspeakable fear of infertility with my partner and multiple failed attempts to become pregnant; and from an impending burnout, as too much work distracted me from my true passions: curating and writing. Together, these circumstances left me afraid, socially anxious and powerless on three levels: personal, societal and global. Where was it all heading?
Heavy, unexpressed grief loomed over me. I needed to talk about these experiences to process them, to move through them and to rediscover a sense of hopeful wonder. Yet, as many of us experience in the current hyper-capitalistic world we inhabit, there is little room to properly grieve personal losses or global tragedies.
I turned to what has always brought hope and wonder into my life. Art.
Looking back at what I wrote in the curatorial statement before the installation and before finalising all the commissioned works, I now realise that gathering the coven of Unknown Benevolence strengthened me in ways I am still learning from. It also coincided with one of my deepest wishes coming true, and I now have a nine month old child who was conceived during the period of installation for the exhibition.
In a world that demands everything be neatly categorised and explained, I will not attempt to rationalise how curating may have made my wishes come true. I prefer to let that remain in the realm of faith.
The artists gave so much, and I wanted to give back to them intellectually, emotionally and physically. They became, in a sense, guardian figures. Believing in them helped me believe in myself again and being close to them brought me closer to my own feelings. Our conversations were healing. We spoke of pain, trauma and atrocities. We moved through them together, grieved so we could dream up new ways of living and surviving. Although the works themselves spoke to the themes of Unknown Benevolence, this entry alone cannot do them justice. I will instead return to one artist and work later to illustrate the power and spell-making quality of the gathering.
On a curatorial level, this project has become the backbone of my curating. Of course, not every project can be so emotionally charged or yield so much personal transformation. Yet through it I learned to communicate, set soft boundaries, how to give and to receive, in ways that are not always central to conventional curatorial methodologies.
By taking pressure off myself, I relieved pressure from the artists. That shift allowed the gathering to become genuinely enjoyable for all of us. Deadlines were flexible, and I tried not to let our exchanges focus too narrowly on aesthetics or practicalities. I trusted the artists’ instincts, trusting that they had been developing their practices long before this collaboration, knowing they each had their own processes delivering work for exhibitions. I encouraged them to create new work, to experiment on their own terms, and to push themselves toward surprise. My role often became one of emotional support and intellectual feedback without avoiding discussions of aesthetics, but allowing our exchanges to remain rooted in the philosophical and existential.
What I began to understand is that curating does not need to function as a system of control and authorship. It can operate as a space of respect and release. Instead of focusing solely on the outcomes from artists, it can cultivate conditions in which something unforeseen can occur. In that sense, curating became less about producing a visually striking exhibition and more about holding a space where vulnerability, the process of grief, and sincerity were not only allowed but structurally supported.
Care and community have become buzzwords, and I was aware of the risks in invoking such ways of working. Calling us a coven helped release some of that pressure. It emphasised our shared spirit despite our differences and diverse life stories. I saw us as colleagues convening and conjuring new visions of the world, collectively exorcising demons. All of this remained rooted in professionalism, mutual respect and sincerity. Within the Icelandic art scene and beyond, I believe this was a powerful gesture. In an era of endless doomscrolling and irony poisoning, the power of this exhibition lay not only in its cathartic effect for those involved but in its regenerative potential for visitors. The show addressed heavy themes such as childhood trauma, collective unforgetting of specific histories and the alienation felt in contemporary life. Yet it was bustling with energy, joyful at times and most importantly generated hope.
Visually the exhibition was colourful to some it felt slightly messy, and, to some it felt too personal. Artists worked across mediums like wood carving, photography, found textiles, epoxy, cement, plaster, sound and video. I had to let go of hierarchical curatorial structures and position myself within the coven rather than outside of it looking in. That is why the writing for the exhibition became so personal. I did not want to analyse or explain the artists’ practices from a distance. I wanted to participate in the rituals they were already practicing and find my own.
There were no formal performances included in the show. Not because of disinterest in live performances, rather, the act of curating and covening was, in itself, a ritual.
We have grown accustomed to exhibitions that address heavy topics through documentary photography or research-based video work exploring environmental or political atrocities. I value such practices deeply, yet they can begin to mirror the endless apocalyptic feeds predicting societal or environmental collapse on our devices and in the media. The strength of this exhibition lay in how the artists confronted our suffocating present marked by a sense of no escape, no hope, or no belief in the unknown. The artists confronted these feelings by reintroducing wonder, awe and possibility. Now that we are entrenched in such discourses, it feels empowering to cultivate hope and to allow the curatorial process itself to become regenerative and to grieve in order to imagine ways out of what can feel like a doomed existence. This aligns with the broader turn among contemporary artists toward religious world-building and esoteric knowledge systems.
The elder of the group, Hildur Hákonardóttir, created a new work, The Actualisation of the Wish, (perhaps better described as a powerful spell) and wrote an article of the same name for the catalogue. I want to keep this reflection concise and raw, in the spirit of KOK. Her article argues that we must stop demonising darkness and instead surrender to it in order to rediscover empathy. She writes:
“The sun itself … is not inhabitable. Too much light or too constant brightness is harmful. Every day we need to rest, close our eyes and retreat into earthly oblivion, seeking shelter in the darkness to keep our sanity. If we are sad, we need to look inward, close our eyes, find the cause of our grief and either accept our destiny or decide to change it.”
It is within that inner darkness that spells are formed. What this gathering ultimately taught me is that hope is not the opposite of darkness. It is something formed within it. To step into the circle Hildur describes below is not to deny grief or be blind to atrocities, but to acknowledge them and still choose intention and repair over hopelessness and despair. Perhaps that is what curating can do at its most potent: create temporary spaces where we are allowed to face the unknown, the indescribable, and still formulate a wish for something better. Perhaps contemporary art, when the intentions are true and the conditions in which it is displayed are right, can become that space where we slow down, rest and surrender to our fears in order to grieve them so that something else may grow from them. This gathering reminded me that the act of wishing, when combined with intention and collective belief, is not naive. Rather, it is a radical and necessary practice, quietly powerful even in a world that often dismisses mysticism and the unseen. Hildur captured this beautifully in both her work and her accompanying text. I would like to include her full article here, but copyright prevents me from doing so.
Instead, I will end with an excerpt from her spell, as an invitation:
“Likewise, I invite you, dear visitors, to step into the wishing circle on the floor here, stand there facing the wall, close your eyes and formulate ‘The Wish’ that keeps you going. With our mind we can thus change our attitude towards life. What am I here for? We do not know where we come from or where we go, and at most we can guess the purpose of our existence.
This is an old circle, perhaps ancient, one of many magical symbols. We have lost the knowledge of how these symbols came into being. Plato’s predecessors and role models discovered that letters might represent sounds which could then be divided into units and reassembled, thereby putting thoughts in writing on a ‘sheet,’ most likely made from birch bark, wet clay, or sand. But can these old magical carvings bring forth magic? As with many things, it is not enough simply to look at them or scrawl them down—even if the feather is dipped in raven’s bile or virgin’s blood. You must take in the magic—become what you wish to be.
Thus, at this vanishing point in time, we step into the circle and discover the actualisation of our wish—not by observing a rune in a book, but by claiming the power of the circle for ourselves, so that our wish may be granted. Then we open our eyes and step carefully out of the circle, having become one with the wish.”
Þórhildur Tinna Sigurðardóttir
