Aesthetics and Crisis in the new “New Iceland”

This contribution asks how Angela Dimitrakaki’s 2017 analysis of the New “New Europe” may be adapted to characterise socio-political developments in Iceland since 2008. Guided by a range of aesthetic practices that respond, enact or engage in some way with the realities of what may succinctly be termed the New “New Iceland,” the article identifies three initial socio-political parameters to qualify this condition, The Populist Challenge and the Nativist Front, New Frontiers in the Dualistic Colonial Experience and The Commoning of Cultural Expression. With reference to recent scholarship in art and cultural theory, political science, decolonial anthropology and feminist literary theory, it combines qualitative, theoretical and historical perspectives to produce a comprehensive discussion with an interdisciplinary relevance for future research on the paradigm of the New “New Europe.”