Family Album

Family Album is a body of works that all draw their origin from my own family album of photographs and the home video my father shot during my childhood. After moving from Iceland to Denmark in 2013, I felt a need to hold onto a sense of who I am. As I adapted to Danish society, my identity became blurred. My family photographs therefore became significant, helping me construct a narrative about myself. This power the image possesses is what fascinates me, along with the great value assigned to the photographic narratives: how images maintain certain ideas about who we are and who we’ve been. At the same time, I’ve felt compelled to break with those narratives, which I explore in my works through altering and manipulating. More thematically, I visualise and articulate existential, human questions. My work often revolves around themes of family bonds, attachment, origins, motherhood and childhood. While it’s most accurate to describe my works as collages, the process is central to me – it’s always the photograph or the home video that initiates the conversation. It’s the reaction to them that affects the reading of the work. I believe it’s both a personal journey, while it’s also about challenging rigid power structures, where my approach makes it physically apparent that we play an active part in constructing our own realities and that we use the photographic medium as a tool in doing so.