Further Information

The Saga of Plan-B Art Festival

Plan-B Art Festival was founded in the year 2016 by four people that are born and raised in the Borgarnes area and work in the creative sector. The founders are Logi Bjarnason artist, Sigþóra Óðinsdóttir artist, Sigursteinn Sigurðsson architect and Inga Björk Margrétar Bjarnadóttir, art theory student and a curator.

We wanted to bring back the skills and the creative forces that art has granted us to our home town and enrich the town with lively cultural experience. Plan-B Art Festival was born. The name is influenced because of Borgarnes’s history as an industrial town. Decades ago the agriculture and industry were flourishing but times have changed and now it’s time for Plan-B — art and culture.

Artwork by Steinunn Gunnlaugsdóttir. B - Be - Bee - By - Bí - BÝ - ??
The Settlement Center. Plan-B Art Festival 2016.

The festival has welcomed 38 artists since the beginning, both Icelandic and from abroad. The exhibitions have been held in unconventional spaces both in Borgarnes and in the area surrounding the town. Plan-B is a grassroots festival and our goal from day one was to create a lively and experimental venue, both for younger and more experienced artist to push the limits of their artistic creations. Try new mediums and challenge themselves with unconventional exhibitions spaces like an old cowshed, a warehouse, an old slaughterhouse and so on and so forth. The result is a great contemporary art festival that has been recognised as a permanent event in the art scene of Iceland.

Because sometimes, when it all boils down at the end of the day, Plan-B proves to be even better than the original plan.

This year the festival’s exhibition spaces will be in Grímshús, that used to be the office of the fishery, in the old potatoe sheds of the town, in the Settlement Center, in the B59 hotel and our annual performance night will be held in Studio Mjólk, an old cowshed.

We kindly ask for your help to keep the wheels of Plan-B Art Festival moving, to pay our great artists for their contribution and to fertilise the rich soil of contemporary art in Iceland.

Guests of Plan-B Art Festival 2017 in Grímhús. Artwork by Giulia Cairone.