While the winter in Iceland has been particularly hard this year, with hurricane-force storms arriving almost weekly for most of January and February, the art scene has been relatively calm. Several artists travelled to Brussles to take part in the opening of a major Icelandic festival currently in progress there, covered by Christian Schoen in an article in this issue. Mostly, it seems, people are saving their strenght for the big events to come already in May when we will see the opening of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, now for the second time dedicated primarily to the visual arts. The festival will see some 40 art openings in the space of a few days around the middle of the month. Even before then, though, CIA.IS will be holding a major international conference on urban plannig and public art under the heading Reinventing Harbour Cities. Speakers will include Vito Acconci and Ólafur Elíasson, among many others, and we will cover the programme extensively here in the web magazine and in a special printed issue to be published in May.

In this issue we also highlight three Icelandic artists. Hekla Dögg Jónsdóttir has already been mentioned in recent issues, especially in connection with her nomination for the Icelandic Visual Arts Award in 2007, but readers may be less familiar with Sigurður Árni Sigurðsson (the subject of an essay here by Jón Proppé) or Húbert Nói Jóhannesson (interviewed here by Christian Schoen). Both have, however, contributed extensively to Icelandic art in the last two decades and we hope this introduction will encourage readers to seek out more information on their works.