Looking at the 45 iris prints you have the impression of encountering an airy succession of images extending, even stretching themselves along the walls, enveloping the viewer. Loose links at the same level that our perception easily ties together because of their rhythmic arrangement, locking them in a continuity without beginning nor end. They are placed slightly above eye level. Seen from the distance of a few meters, they create the impression that we, the viewers, are immersing ourselves in a room circumscribed by this series of images like a horizon line. The eye breezily jumps from one representation of the horizon to the other, some of them loosely repeated, reappearing as single images or as pairs in the series.

Beginning and end of the work are not predetermined, they don't exist. Hence, the viewer comes into play from the first second as a joint responsible. He chooses himself his point of access into the endless succession of images and follows his own path, backward or forward, clockwise or counterclockwise. For instance, he can "enter" starting with the numerous images of the sea that from afar seem like graphic diagrams, with their division in sea and sky. The different color saturation of sky and sea draws our gaze to the center of the image, into its depth, to the horizon. However, it doesn't lead us into their expanse as these photographs of horizons are in an upright format, like portraits. Their width seems truncated. Only repetition and addition create a sense of their expanse. The gaze of viewer, following its habits, then turns right to look into the face, the eyes of Björn, an older man who is staring through one or two windows, mirrored in his eyes, onto the expanse of the sea; at the same time, he seems to listen inward, and hence remains in a state of suspension. Then our gaze encounters a very austere room flooded with light. It is almost empty and yet it does not appear uninhabited. Everything is well-worn—the walls, the ceiling, and the dull, scrubbed down wooden floor—and seems to tell a story. From the vast, wide expanse of the sea the gaze drifts into the mental space of this man and finally into the space of everyday use, the interior of a house—a loose correspondence is evolving. Had the gaze of the viewer traveled to the left, however, his/her perception would not have been shaped by spatial transformation, but by the passing of time. A second image of the horizon follows the first one. Once again, sea and sky are almost symmetrically divided, but time has passed (or, as we are looking counterclockwise, it may have been turned back). The light in the second image is more muted; the colors are turning gray; darkness is creeping up in the foreground of the image. The third photograph offers a view from a room, through two windows with crossbars, onto the glistening sea. The room appears dark in the back light, black even, a (two-eyed) camera obscura almost. This image is followed by a video still from an American soap opera, the photograph of a luminous TV-screen.

          The calm archetype of a landscape image—water, air, horizon—as point of access demands searching, investigating, contemplative viewers. But the series of images, once you take up its offer, comprises a number of points of access. For instance, the serene, timeworn face of Hildur, Björns wife, whose soft, slightly questioning eyes lead to the piercing eyes of an owl; and then, in a jump, to the dark eyes of an arctic fox; on to the anthropomorphic appeal of a seal's face and its expectant, "faithful" eyes; and, finally, to Cassie from the soap opera and the feigned sadness of her eyes. This point of access would result in a much more active, dialogic, demanding relationship of the images and the viewer. Hopping from one pair of eyes to the other would correspond to a perception that is drawn to the strongest stimuli, following the second central point of reference (besides landscape): human beings, the other. This thought may sound a bit daring considering the austere and precisely conceived works of Roni Horn, but in "Pi" this seems intended. Everyone can circle around this work, almost like doves circling over the ocean. And if you circle long and attentively enough, you will encounter other viewer's circles (of meaning), the intersections of the fields of meaning hidden in the work. The work does not rigidly guide the viewer's gaze, but rather interrupts any suggestion of a narrative flow after three or four images, only to resurface after four or five images on the next wall. There are formal analogies to be found in the work. Cassie's shaggy, open, blond hair, for instance, leads the eye to the nest of the eider duck or to the field of eider down; eyes lead to other eyes; horizon to horizon. But these similarities of appearance only cause a slight stir, and then, once again, a light, equanimous breeze carries you further along in the series of images, in their linear arrangement of three different formats—horizontal and vertical oblong and square. This arrangement guides you from image to image in a quiet, agile manner, without clusters, without screaming, almost like baroque music. A theme appears, alternates with another, only to reappear later on—strings that become apparent, only to disappear again. The gaze of the viewer dances along the sequence of images around an imaginary central line.

The work in its most basic form was created in the area of Melraakasletta, in the northernmost part of Iceland, where the arctic circle—that separates on a map the arctic north, with its complete darkness in winter and its never-ending daylight in summer, from more temperate climates—touches the northern tip of Iceland like a tangent. A lonely, hard, exposed area whose few inhabitants have to live in accord with nature. Like this, for example: The eider duck plucks its own softest down feathers to build a nest with them. Humans steal them and put straw in their place. The eider duck continues to pluck its feathers until there are none left, and the drake has to leave his feathers. As these are considerably less soft, the humans loose interest and the animal comes to a rest. A process that as parasitic way of living together has taken place forever in nature, just like this one has probably gone on for a long time. This cycle plays an important role in "Pi," signs of it—a frontal view of the nest's feathers, the eggs in the nest, the view of the piled-up eider down, left-over feathers swaying across the otherwise empty wooden floor—keep reappearing throughout the work. A mimetic approach to nature that shows itself in the stuffed animals in yet another way. A mimesis that almost weaves itself into natural processes, that is married to nature's conditions.

The longer you look, the more such traces you can discover, the denser, the more interwoven the work seems, in spite of its composed appearance. All of these signs, loosely ordered and grouped by perception, condense themselves in a complex field of meaning, a net in which every component co-determines the others. The photograph of the fading wallpaper with its net-like pattern could be read as a metaphor for  this. Just as hardly an image could be removed from the sequence, the images as whole seem to "talk" about this net and this equilibrium, about coming and going, about a perpetual, recurring process. Time visualizes itself in the images—swiftly passing time in the alternation of day and night and the tides, slowly passing time in birth and aging, in blossom and decay, time so slow that it is almost imperceptible in the changes of geology. Spaces, places of different dimensions visualize themselves: the nest, the room, the rocks, the sea, the sky. There is an encounter of abstract and real geographies. Micro-, macro-, and mediacosm are interwoven: Eider down becomes the star-studded sky; wild, blond hair seen on TV is transformed in landscape, in a precipitating rock, dotted with the doves' white droppings; a light breeze transforms the sea in white noise on a TV-screen. There are parallel characters to Björn and Hildur in the soap opera. Eggs can be read as seed and eider down as harvest. All of them signs of a continuous, eternal process and of mutual implication.

The naming, the definition of these signs causes a slight disruption as the ease, the diversity, the calm, subdued tone of the work get lost and the images are sharpened, even charged. The carefully balanced equilibirium of the work is in jeopardy. The work functions like DNA. Its components are functional and have no meaning beyond their function; as a whole, however, they carry the genetic hereditary information and encircle life in a spiral. The number π, an abstract mathematical quantity determining the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, becomes intelligible in "Pi" and its circular forms and cyclical processes in the circular shape of the nest, in the eyes, in the circling of the birds, in the return of the tides, the days, the waves, in the rhythm of birth and death. "Pi" suggests the constant factors of life, the passing of time, the return and the connection of the different elements, our way of inscribing ourselves into nature, in a way that unifies place and time and identity. They grow together in a process of realities. There is a sublime aspect to "Pi," its net of images suggests an element that defies representation. And yet, in "Pi" the sublime is shown without theatrical horrors, without drama. On the contrary, it is dry and rigorous. To lighten the burden of meaning and to situate the work in the present, the sublime even appears to be flippantly linked to the kitsch of a soap opera that is regularly broadcast on Iceland. It is called "Guiding Light." A title that assumes an ironic meaning in the context of this work.

The sublime  in Horn's work shows itself in the precariousness and the narrow condition and determination of  existence setting off every single being, every process. This austerity is mirrored by the austerity and discipline of her works. The doubling of biological and aesthetical austerity are the key to this work.