Vegetation
At the edge of growth, where apple-trees are like crippled bonsais in an over-ambitious garden- at the sore marge of the covering verdure, at the beginning of the desert, the open wound addresses us. Violet, pink, yellow, and green war-herbs challenge the desolation....
A songbird, caged
Cuba is a country cloaked in an intriguing mystery, a place of cultural richness and political restriction. Its history is complex, and the isolation entwined in that history is equally compelling. When contemplating the confinement surrounding Cuba, the image of a...
Space-Time Continuum
English below Katrín Elvarsdóttir birtir ómstrítt samband tíma og staðar í verkinu Space-Time Continuum. Hvernig minning okkar um stað er í senn hliðstæða og andstæða við reynsluna að koma þangað aftur. Allt er eins en þó öðruvísi. Staðurinn er sá sami og við þekkjum...
The Search For Truth
Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir Photography is Katrín Elvarsdóttir’s chosen medium for addressing pressing questions about our experience in time and space, about memories and the indistinct boundary between the imagined and the real. In the last fifteen years, Katrín has...
Katrín Elvarsdóttir’s Photo-Visions as Alloys of Reality, Light and Fiction
Lucas Gehrmann If we are to accept Katrín Elvarsdóttir’s own explanations, in the beginning there was a TV room—at least in the beginning of her series of photos Equivocal, started in 2007.1 At the same time, this TV Room was more than just the beginning of a new...
Heimþrá / Longing
Sigrún Alba Sigurðardóttir Reykjavík, júlí 2005 Það er kaldur sumardagur í íslenskri sveit. Ég finn lykt af gömlum blúndugardínum. Rykkorn kitlar mig í nefið....
Mórar-nærvídd / Revenants-Proximal Dimension
Reykjavík 2004 Directions The two of them walk on the potholed road, away from here, towards the bottom of the image that appears to us. It has been raining and the rain has left us a different image of this area than the one we had before; we...
Sporlaust / Without a trace
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir Paris, Feb. 2007Katrín Elvarsdóttir setur hér á svið litla sögu þar sem við fylgjumst með nokkrum börnum sem virðast ein á ferð úti í skógi. «Hugmyndin kom frá málverki sem ég var með í herberginu mínu þegar ég var lítil en það...
Af þessum heimi / Of this world
Parma ham, salami, red wine, laughter, jalapeno, bread, crying, pesto, mozzarella, chatter, Pellegrino, pasta, olives, demand, attention, happiness, discussion, dog, tiredness, chaos, and finally a child that gets up and runs away. Dream, nightmare, narrative or...
Margsaga / Equivocal
Reykjavik, Apr. 2011 All events are ruled by the laws of narrative. Some events we incorporate into our own story, reflecting on them again and again as memories and retelling them in the context of a particular time and point of view. Repetition registers events, so...
Vanished Summer
Harpa Árnadóttir Reykjavik, Sept. 2013 To be an Icelander is perhaps in sum an endless wait. To wait for spring, wait for summer. Eternal optimism despite frozen ground and mounds of ice that seem rooted deep in the bowels of the earth, so firmly...
Double Happiness
Katrín Elvarsdóttir Reykjavík, 2005 The photographs in this book were made in Beijing and Pingyao over a period of four years on three separate trips, the longest lasting a month. When, in 2010, my husband and I went to China for the first time to...