It is 9pm, snow is falling outside Reykjavik’s Mengi, and the audience is queuing for imaginary soup. No, the audience is queueing to become soup, gathering onstage to be stirred with a giant, imaginary spoon. This will be the closing act in a night of performances by the Icelandic artist Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir, featuring numerous friends and collaborators from her hometown, including the musician Jófríður Ákadóttir (JFDR), Lindy Lin, and a mysterious male figure in a trilby hat, sunglasses, and a raincoat, who arrives in a cloud of vape-smoke. Some of these performers were only asked to participate earlier the same day, after a chance meeting in the city, and there’s a sense that everyone is making it up as they go along. The audience can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be funny or serious – at least until Ásta herself breaks down in laughter, during an autotuned duet with the “unknown man”.

Born and based in Reykjavik, Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir is as hard to pin down as her performances. Not that the artist is closed off, or ungenerous with her thoughts (our interview mutates from a quick coffee in the Icelandic capital into a car ride to the mountains, to soak in the hot springs and dip in the freezing sea at Hvammsvík – about six hours have passed when we return to the city). It’s just that she resists all attempts at definition or categorisation, moving fluidly between different ideas and mediums, including visual art, performance, music, poetry and filmmaking. 

“I have a hard time putting myself into context,” Ásta explains, when asked about the artists she relates to in terms of her work, or who she considers a part of the same lineage. This question is made even harder by her flexible relationship with time. “Time doesn’t exist,” she adds matter-of-factly. “The past is also now, and the future is also now, and it also doesn’t exist. And possibly there’s multiple versions of time, like timelines that are endless and go in a loop. Or time is like a sphere, or like a ball, which contains all possibilities.” All of this makes it hard to trace a ‘family tree’ of creative influences, although she professes her admiration for other artists including Meredith Monk and Laurie Anderson, whose work she finds “so brilliant that you have to whisper it”.

If Ásta finds it difficult to place herself in a broader historical context, she has a much easier time describing the influence of her hometown. Alongside the artists at Mengi, she’s keen to highlight local hotspots including the artist-run bookstore Bókumbók, the workshop at the Reykjavik Association of Sculptors, and the back garden-gallery Glerhúsið – also run by artists and poets – where artists congregate, collaborate, and distribute their work. “It’s really a privileged precision to be in,” she says, on being surrounded by this tight-knit community, noting that it reflects the creative ecosystem in Iceland as a whole. “A lovely soup.”

“The art world here is quite young,” adds Unnar Örn, curator of the Icelandic Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, alongside Margrét Áskelsdóttir. “You go 50 years back, and there was always this need within the art community to try and grasp what was going on.” As a result, many of the nation’s cultural institutions were formed from the bottom up, by artists themselves. “Nobody was validating you from above,” he says. “This spirit is still around, in some ways.”

Having said all this, Ásta will spend the next several weeks some 3,000 kilometres (as the crow flies) from Reykjavik, with her latest project Pocket Universe representing Iceland in Venice. Taking over a former shipyard, the show encapsulates every aspect of her creative practice – sometimes described as “spiritual fluxus” – weaving together cosmic myths from various cultures, alongside encounters with esoteric artefacts and talismans, charged by the artist’s own performances. At its centre lies a character who could have stepped straight out of the snowy mountains at Iceland’s far north: named Creature Zero, we follow their journey to find the “original rock” that initiated the creation of Earth. 

“I travelled to Japan to find this rock,” explains Ásta, who wears the Creature Zero costume designed by Sól Hansdóttir. “It was tricky. I had to take like 700 buses and ferries to this island where the sky was covered in birds, like 300 black kites. Then came this guy on a bicycle, who was 91 or something – I feel like I’m telling you a fairy tale, it felt a bit that way as well – and he asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ We said, ‘Oh, we’re looking for the original rock,’ and he was like, ‘Come with me. I’ll show you where to go.’” That night, having located the rock, she was researching the birds that circled the island and found that they too were tangled up in myth: “There’s one tale that says when the birds gather in the sky, it’s because the deity is present, like a gateway for the gods. I was like, ‘No way, they came to greet us!’ Holy smokes.”

Ásta wants to make it clear that she’s not a historian or anthropologist; her work is based on her own understanding of the myths she reads, which is subject to change or revisions. She carries this spirit through to the Icelandic Pavilion in Venice. “Of course, you want to do your best,” she says. “But it’s also about allowing yourself to exist as yourself. Playfulness, spontaneousness and improvisation.” And this can shine brightest – or fail most spectacularly – when placed on a huge public stage. Here, she has some experience, recalling a piece she performed at Reykjavik’s Harpa concert hall, home to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. Standing alone on the stage, she says, brings out the beauty in mistakes and imperfections, “blowing it up, putting a spotlight on it”.

“Of course, you want to do your best, but it’s also about allowing yourself to exist as yourself. Playfulness, spontaneousness and improvisation.”

“Wiggly” is a word that comes up often in conversations with Ásta . The cross-pollination and spontaneous collaboration that goes down in Reykjavik’s art scene? “It’s wiggly.” Her improvised performances? “Wiggly squiggly.” For the Venice Biennale – the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind, with all kinds of rules and traditions – this intuitive, iconoclastic approach isn’t exactly an easy fit. You’re not supposed to go there and make mistakes. So how does the artist stay true to herself and her work, while navigating the pressures and demands of the exhibition? The answer: even more “wiggling”.

“There’s been a lot of maneuvering, within what the work can be, how it can be, what form it takes,” says Unnar. “It’s fascinating. I enjoy the stuff that makes us think or move in a different way.”

This openness to the possibilities of what art (and life) can be is a recurring theme throughout the Reykjavik community that’s helped bring Pocket Universe to life. Sigurður Ámundason, a playwright and artist who specialises in large-scale pencil drawings of industrial landscapes, scattered with corporate logos, even remembers dreaming about the creative life – specifically, being a filmmaker – when he attended school with Ásta Fanney. And his admiration for the arts hasn’t faded since. “It’s like being an alchemist,” he says. “We change shit into gold.”

Now that Ásta Fanney is in Venice, what kind of wisdom or ideas is she bringing from this community, to share with the wider world? “I wanna go as far away from preaching as possible,” she says, resisting a straightforward answer once again. But she circles back to something we were talking about earlier: the belief in deities and their representations here on Earth, via animals, ancient rocks, or elves (particularly popular in Iceland, where they’re known as “hidden people”). “These charged places and objects, talismans or amulets, even things you can have in your pocket, they have meaning or energy because you say so,” she says. “The stories that we tell become a reality. So retelling a story, changing it from within, is like witches when they’re reweaving destiny. I think it’s a very good idea to reweave the world now. It’s time. It feels right.”

The Icelandic Art Center presents Pocket Universe at the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia from May 9 to November 22.