Between Paradise and Apocalypse Adam Geczy

Having visited Iceland on an art residency in 2011, the impressions of rapture and bewilderment were hard to shake off. The nagging feeling led to an application to Hafnarborg, the contemporary art centre in the former fishing town of Hafnarfjördur. On the top floor of a spacious apartment is the artist’s residence, available to artists for a calendar month. September seemed the right time, lodged between the two seasonal extremes, and is also sympathetic to views of the Northern Lights – although in the end I only once saw them from behind a skein of cloud. No matter, there were plenty of consolations.

Then and now, countless people are drawn to Iceland because of the mystique of its remoteness. Many refer, with appreciative squinted eyes, to