Lukas Bury & Weronika Balcerak

Austur-Íslendingar is an artist duo founded by Weronika Balcerak and Lukas Gregor Bury, based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Their collaborative name is a poetic inversion of Vestur-Íslendingar (Western Icelanders), a term historically used to describe 19th-century Icelandic emigrants to North and South America. Austur- Íslendingar instead evokes a reversed migration—an eastward return and reflection on displacement, belonging, and the complexity of cultural identity. Working across video, performance, ready-mades, and installation, the duo explores themes of migration, memory, loss, and the fragile constructs of home and nationhood. Their practice is rooted in shared experiences of living between cultures, languages, and landscapes—shaped by the layered inheritances of post-socialist and post-colonial Europe. Weronika Balcerak (b. 1996, Łódź, Poland) creates spatial installations using textile, moving image, and found materials. Her work investigates ideas of non- existence, immanence, and transcendence, often crafting ephemeral environments that invite presence, absence, and perception into tension. She holds a BA in Fine Art from the Iceland University of the Arts (2023). Weronika has exhibited at the Reykjavík Art Museum and is currently preparing her first institutional duo exhibition as Austur-Íslendingar at Hafnarborg, scheduled for 2026. Her works are held in private collections in Iceland, and she has received several recognitions, including support from the Student Innovation Fund (2021) and the Icelandic Visual Arts Fund (2025). Lukas Gregor Bury (b. 1991, Bonn, Germany) is a visual artist of Polish descent. Born in Germany to Polish parents and currently based in Reykjavík, Lukas examines his inherited Polish identity through the lens of second- generation migration. With a background in painting, he approaches the medium as a conceptual site—interrogating image culture, historical residue, and the constructed myth of the artist persona. Lukas holds a Diploma from Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (2019) and an MA from the Iceland University of the Arts (2020). He was a board member of The Living Art Museum (2021–2025) and has exhibited widely across Iceland, Germany, and Poland. His works are part of private and institutional collections in both Iceland and Germany. Together, Balcerak and Bury position their practice as a space for dialogue—between past and present, East and West, self and other.