HÖRUND – Edda Heiðrún Backman

HÖRUND – Art exhibition in The Nordic House.

The material for Edda Heiðrún Backman´s exhibition HÖRUND is bodies. Unsurprisingly, she uses traditional models whose arms and legs are the same length, but we can also find all kinds of bodies, some of them very unusual indeed. Some are wounded and bear scars, others have something missing, and a third group has been given wings instead of limbs. All of them, though, are beautiful.

We all have a natural protective covering. We usually call it a coat or hide when referring to animals and reserve the word „skin“ for ourselves, often thinking of it as our largest organ. An adult human being´s skin is about two square metres in size and can weigh up to five kilograms. In Old Norse, the word hörund also meant flesh and referred to the tissue that lies between skin and bone, preserved in the idomatic Icelandic expression ” að renna kalt vatn á milli skinns og hörunds” (lit. cold water is running between flesh and bone) which signifies a shudder of fear.

Text by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, Translation by Martin Regal.