A fraction of Contingency Sample

On the occasion of the panel discussions Narrative Sovereignty and the screening ofOrsugiak (The White Gold of Greenland)at the Nordic House, a selection of works fromContingency Sample, an exhibition presented at Verksmiðjan in Hjalteyri in the summer of 2026, will be on view.

The title refers to the Apollo 11 astronauts, who trained in Iceland to read minerals and landscapes before setting off for the Moon. Upon landing, they were instructed to collect a sample of the lunar surface as soon as possible, in case anything went wrong during the mission. Facing an uncertain future, the exhibition asks what a contingency sample of the Earth might be, and seeks answers in aluminium, a material long entwined with ideas of progress and the future.

Kalaallit Nunaat (cryolite), Iceland (energy and smelting) and Jamaica (bauxite) together form a triangle within global aluminium production, each having historically served as a resource frontier for military and industrial interests. Rather than following a logic based on “spot, grab and go,” the works approach the mine not as a hole in the ground but as a living network of relations that binds distant places together. Within this network, the exhibition takes up scholar T. J. Demos’s question of who has the right to shape the future, and asks where that right resides in worlds that are continually dug up to sustain it.

Artists: Contact Point Collective (Bryndís Björnsdóttir, Olando Whyte & Rut Karin Zettergren), Naja Dyrendom Graugaard & Whyte&Zettergren