María Kristín H. Antonsdóttir

From the article "Som forsinkede stråler fra stjernerne", Christine Almlund writes about Family Album

Read the whole article here:

https://bruunrasmussenfoto.blog/2018/10/29/som-forsinkede-straaler-fra-stjernerne/?fbclid=IwAR19YWmQg6zIkifKF98ZX6pkWXXBlL70YHER9hkv-gkbcHt5ZWZFjPB1tgw

(English) The project of the Icelandic-born artist María Kristín Hassing Antonsdóttir(b. 1990), Family Album consists of a series of photo graphic collages and hand-coloured photographs created from black-and-white family photos from the farm of her great grandfather and later her grandmother in Iceland from the 1940s to the 1960s. The discarded photographs of children playing and family life are interlaced with summer flowers and horsehair from Iceland. They are sewn together into new narratives and narrative fragments – with María Kristín Hassing Antonsdóttir’s own hair. The sense of missing the Icelandic landscape, of belong ing to the family and their shared history is woven in and out of the photo graphs’ usually indistinct black-and-white narratives from a bygone time. The artist has manipulated the pictures – but not digitally. She has made cuts in them, scratched below the surface ‘varnish’ of the photographs and painted over them. A physical manoeuvre – as if trying to get beneath the skin of the past and the shared memory of the family. There are both the classic posed pictures of the children dressed up in their Sunday best in front of the street door, but now drawn-over and anonymized by the artist, fuzzy-soft memory images of children in a wild, fleeting game in the grass, and a layer-upon-layer collage where the faces of the family members have been cut out, while Maria Kristin Hassing Antonsdottir’s own face can be glimpsed at the bottom. The pictures were originally photographed with a camera which was once left behind by an English guest at the farm as thanks for being allowed to spend the night there. Later the camera was used by the great grandfather and handed down to the grandmother, whose pictures are today sewn into their great grandchild’s and grand child’s own memories and are now an important part of her identity narrative.

(Dansk) Den islandsk fødte kunstner Maria Kristin Hassing Antonsdóttirs (f. 1990) projekt, Family Album, består af en serie fotografiske collager og bemalede fotografier skabt af sort/hvide familiefotos fra hendes oldefars og senere hendes farmors gård i Island i 1940’erne til 1960’erne. De kasserede fotografier med legende børn og familieliv flettes sammen af sommerblomster og hestehår fra Island. De syes til nye fortællinger og narrative fragmenter – med María Kristín H. Antonsdóttirs eget hår. Savnet til den islandske natur, samhørigheden med familien og deres fælles historie væver sig ind og ud af fotografiernes oftest uskarpe, sort/hvide fortællinger fra en svunden tid. Kunstneren har manipuleret med billederne – men ikke digitalt. Hun har klippet i dem, krattet ned under fotografiets øverste ”fernis” og malet dem over. En fysisk manøvre – som for at komme under huden på fortiden og familiens fælles hukommelse. Der er både de klassiske opstillingsbilleder af børnene i stiveste puds foran hoveddøren, men nu overtegnet og anonymiseret af kunstneren, fuzzy-bløde erindringsbilleder af børn i en vild, flygtig leg i græsset og en lag-på-lag-collage, hvor familiemedlemmernes ansigter er klippet ud, mens María Kristín Hassing Antonsdóttirs eget ansigt skimtes nederst. Billederne er oprindeligt fotograferet med et kamera, som engang blev efterladt af en engelsk gæst på gården som tak for overnatning. Siden blev kameraet brugt af oldefaren og overleveret til farmoren, hvis billeder i dag er indsyet i deres olde- og barnebarns egne erindringer og en vigtig del af hendes identitetsfortælling.