It’s old news that for decades, prominent visual artists and art movements have challenged the limitations and institutional authority of the ubiquitous white wall. But it’s not every day that this is the theme itself of a museum exhibition, and this summer the National Gallery took the leap. “With its typical postmodernistic structure dating from the 1980s,” reads the website, “the National Gallery of Iceland asks for a dialogue with artists brave enough to challenge its difficult structure.” A contribution to the 2008 Reykjavík Arts Festival, the exhibition Art Against Architecture featured the work of Icelandic artists Elín Hansdóttir, Finnbogi Pétursson, and Steina (Vasulka) as well as Franz West, who lives and works in Vienna, and Monica Bonvicini, born in Venice and working in Berlin.

Elín Hansdóttir’s work in Art Against Architecture, Path (2008), is ambitious in its design and impressive in its execution. Only one person at a time is allowed passage into the exhibition hall, which Elín has transformed into a dimly lit labyrinth that – for anyone previously familiar with the size of the room – seems to snake around an improbable amount of space. Once inside, there is no going back; the visitor must wend her way through narrow floor-to-ceiling corridors that offer no options save for going forward. But with nearly every turn, the little light there is fools the eye, suggesting a passage when in fact there is a corner or vice versa. Fortunately there is no Minotaur to contend with at the heart of the labyrinth but rather a dead end, and, turning back, the eye is deceived as much on the way out as it was on the way in.

Path, which takes approximately ten minutes to walk through, defies architecture by transforming the simple rectangular footprint of the gallery into what seems to be an enormous intestinal network. But further, the work – like so many of Elín’s architectural installations and interventions – skews viewers sensory perceptions of and bodily relationships with the spaces around them. It is architecture that disorients and deceives, and in doing so, it demands a self-conscious fine-tuning of one’s sense of space, a heightened awareness of one’s position within the corridor’s constraints.

Flame (2008), Finnbogi Pétursson’s installation, is as simple as Elín’s labyrinth is complex. On a slender museum pedestal in the middle of the exhibition space stands one lit candle, the only light source in the room; four round glass lenses on thin metal stands face the candle from each side of the pedestal. With their convex sides outward, the flame of the candle passes through each lens, reflected on the inside, but magnified and projected, upside-down, onto the surrounding walls. Though the dispersal of the light and resultant reversal of the candle is far from an unfamiliar principle of physics and optics, Finnbogi’s installation is nonetheless striking and surprising – surprising in the sense that such a simple assemblage of familiar objects in an otherwise empty room could be so mesmerizing.

The atmosphere Finnbogi creates is one of sacred meditation, an invocation of the mystical, an appeal to quiet humility. The same could be said of a great number of Finnbogi’s works, as his sound and multimedia installations, so often minimalistic in their presentation but profound in one’s experience of them, tend to evoke primal sensations through a calculated combination of technology and basic elements like water, fire, and pure sound. From monumental works like Diabolus, his formidable sound sculpture created for the 2001 Venice Biennale, to smaller installations like Sphere (2006), in which the acoustic reverberations in a bowl of water are made visible in the form of projected light, Finnbogi demonstrates his ability to combine scientific understanding with an acute artistic sensibility that has gained him wide acclaim. As for how the work Flame works “against architecture”, there is room for interpretation. Perhaps the candle’s projection, insofar that it is inverted, is a subtle statement about the authority of gallery walls on which art is validated by virtue of presentation alone; what Finnbogi has “hung” on the walls is not only an ephemeral image, it is also upside down.

Steina’s video installation, Of the North (2001), confronts the architecture of the National Gallery by using it to her direct advantage. The arched windows of the museum are the building’s most distinctive feature – and, for someone working within this space, the most challenging. Steina screens these from the inside and darkens the room further with black vinyl flooring. Circular videos are projected onto the five blocked windows, fitting seamlessly within the arches’ contours. Each video consists of nature imagery, mostly filmed in Iceland – oceans and tides, lava rocks and floes, microscopic plants – computer processed to appear spherical. Rotating on an axis one minute, rolling erratically the next, the spheres pull the morphing and abstracted images into their poles or allow them to stream out; regardless, there is constant motion in these orbs that could be marble-sized containers or entire enormous planets of their own. The flat reflections of the videos on the vinyl floor, however, keep us from losing ourselves in these worlds. In reminding us that we are not looking through telescopes or microscopes, Steina calls for a deeper contemplation of our relationship with what this natural imagery represents.

The title of Steina’s video environment refers to Canadian pianist Glenn Gould’s 1967 radio documentary, The Idea of North. Speaking of the northern regions of his mother country, Gould said: “The North has remained, for me, a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.” Could many residents of Iceland admit to the same as regards the most remote stretches of this island, the glaciers and the highlands? We spend most of our time indoors, where nature is excluded. But Steina, a pioneer of video art in the 1970s who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has repeatedly brought nature inside through her art. “It is like a duty,” she says, “to show what cannot be seen except with the eye of media: water flowing uphill or sideways, upside down rolling seas or a weather beaten drop of a glacier melt…perhaps the audience could feel a part of this creative trance, living for a moment in a mental world where they have never been.”

The exhibition Art Against Architecture ran from May 16 to June 29; Steina’s video installation Of the North and Elín Hansdóttir’s installation Path will remain on exhibit through September 28.