Museum Night 2026
Fri
6. Feb
5pm—11pm
Museum Night at the National Gallery of Iceland’s museum buildings: National Gallery on Fríkirkjuvegur, House of Collections on Hverfisgata, and the Einar Jónsson Museum.
Free admission to all our museum buildings after 5 pm
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ICELAND, Fríkirkjuvegur 7
Happy Hour 5PM-8PM
Kaktus Espressobar café offers happy hour on wine and beer.
Short Guided Tours 5:30 pm - 7 pm
Pari Stave, Head Curator at the National Gallery of Iceland will lead a short tour on four exhibitions in the Gallery. The tours will be held in English.
5:30 pm Innocent bodies – Agniezska Polska
6:00 pm Seas‘ Blue Yonder – Bryndís Snæbjörnsd. & Mark Wilson
6:30 pm Affinities of form: Artistic Convergences in Iceland since 1970
7:00 pm Architecture of Place – Donald Judd & Hörður Ágústsson
Gin Bar 8 pm
Spirits of Iceland present MÓA GIN.
This is not just any gin… here, the untouched wilderness of Icelandic nature has been distilled and bottled.
DJ Dóra Júlía 8 pm – 10 pm
Come dance! We’re doing it again and inviting Museum Night guests to dance with us, as the vibrant DJ Dóra Júlía keeps our spirits high!
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HOUSE OF COLLECTIONS, Hverfisgata 15
The Rat Choir 7:30 pm
Live performance at the Culture House!
Rats make sixteen different sounds to express joy at a frequency that the human ear cannot detect. They give each other names and play social games according to rules they communicate with sounds, as they live mostly in darkness. Gunnhildur Hauksdóttir arranges and conducts a choral piece for human voices based on these sixteen sounds. On Museum Night, a group of women will perform the arrangement in the reading room of the House of Collections.
Reading 8:30 pm
Crossroads – An Anthology of Art-inspired Writing
Visual artist and poet Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, together with writer María Elísabet Bragadóttir, will read from literary texts in the book Crossroads, published by the National Gallery of Iceland last year. The book brings together visual art and literature through the work of selected writers who drew inspiration for their writing from artworks in the exhibition Resistance at the House of Collections. The event will be in Icelandic.
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THE EINAR JÓNSSON MUSEUM, Hallgrímstorg 3
Guided Tour 6 pm
A guided tour of Einar Jónsson’s works in words and sound.
Þóra Sigurbjörnsdóttir and Silja Pálmarsdóttir, specialists at the Einar Jónsson Museum, will guide visitors through selected works in the exhibition Spirit and Materiality. Joining them is flutist Hildur Arna Hrafnsdóttir, who will perform music inspired by the artworks. The tour will be in Icelandic.
Guided tour 19:00
On Museum Night, the art collective Mercury Maze Studio—comprised of Owen Hindley, Katerina Blahutova, and Þorsteinn Eyfjörð—welcomes guests on a guided tour of their work Synergy (2.0).
The work is an interactive video, light, and sound installation that will be projected onto Hnitbjörg, the building that houses the Einar Jónsson Museum. In this multilayered piece, visitors can explore the building’s architecture and the surrounding soundscape through the transformation of matter and spirit.
In direct interaction with the work, the viewer activates the connection between the physical and the spiritual, traveling through the building via digital mapping technology. The structure of the house is brought to life: walls appear to rotate, and the sculptures inside seem to come alive.