FUTURES Talent 2025
MARÍA KRISTÍN ANTONSDÓTTIR
FAMILY ALBUM
‘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.’
– María Kristín Antonsdóttir
Reconstructing lost identity
Project: Family Album by María Kristín Antonsdóttir
María Kristín Antonsdsdóttir’s Family Album is a body of works that all draw their origin from her own family album of photographs and the home video her father shot during her childhood. After moving from Iceland to Denmark in 2013, she felt a need to hold onto a sense of who she is. As she adapted to Danish society, her identity became blurred. Her family photographs therefore became significant, helping her to construct a narrative about her history.
The value of the photographic narrative
This power the image possesses is what fascinates Antonsdsdóttir: how images maintain certain ideas about who we are and who we’ve been. At the same time, she is compelled to break with those narratives through altering and manipulating, articulating existential, human questions. Her work 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.’
– María Kristín Antonsdóttir
ARTIST BIO
María Kristín Antonsdsdóttir is a visual artist from Iceland, living in Møn, Denmark (b.1990). She recently graduated with an MFA from Funen Art Academy and has her studio praxis located at Borre, Denmark. Antonsdóttir has recently received The Danish Arts Foundation’s working grant for visual artists, alongside participating in various exhibitions, such as Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, with a solo exhibition at The Icelandic Embassy in Copenhagen and Ung Dansk Fotografi at Fotografisk Center. She recently participated at Residency Varmahlíð in Iceland, working in guest studio at LÁ Art Museum (Listasafn Árnesinga).
In her praxis, she works interdisciplinary, with a great interest in how images play a role in shaping identity. Manipulation is a vital part of the way she works – a method of altering the material, which becomes a central role in the reading of her works. For the last 8 years, she’s been working with old family photographs and videos from her own family, creating a body of works centering around the theme of family bonds, childhood, origins and identity, as well as the fundamental existential questions of what makes us who we are.
Selected achievements
– 2026 Board Member, LY Contemporary. Møn, DK
– 2025 The Danish Arts Foundation Working Grant
– 2025 Guest Studio at LÁ Art Museum. Hveragerði, IS
– 2025 Residency Varmahlíð, Hveragerði, IS
– 2022 – 2025 Funen Art Academy. Master in Fine Art. Odense, DK
