About me
Telma Har is an Icelandic artist born in Reykjavík in 1985. She lives and works in the capital area. She studied Photography in the School of Photography in Iceland.
My work explores the self as something constructed, fragmented, and continuously shifting. Through collage, I build and deconstruct identities, using my own image as both material and subject. The works exist in a space between performance and documentation, where the body becomes a site for transformation, staged, manipulated, and multiplied.
Influenced by fashion imagery and artists such as Cindy Sherman, I approach gender as something fluid and performative rather than fixed. I use costumes, pose, and repetition to question how identity is shaped, presented, and perceived. These constructed scenarios are often surreal, where reality is heightened, distorted, and reimagined.
The body appears in parts cut, multiplied, and reassembled into fragments that resist wholeness. These repetitions form patterns that suggest both control and excess. There is a sense of overload in the compositions, where layers of imagery accumulate and compete for attention. This density reflects an inner state as much as a visual strategy.
This contrast between visual pleasure and psychological weight creates a space where humor and discomfort coexist. The uncanny emerges through this balance where something familiar becomes strange, exaggerated, or slightly off.
Materiality is equally important. I work with texture, color, and surface to emphasize both the flatness of the image and its physical presence. The tension between the flat photographic plane and the tactile qualities of the work creates a layered, almost sensory
There is a sharpness in the work both visually and conceptually where contrasts are pushed and forms are exaggerated. Humor acts as a counterbalance, offering distance while also inviting deeper engagement
An interview with me
Each photograph or artwork she creates functions as a site of visual excavation. In this process, personal narrative, cultural memory, and psychological states intersect, revealing identity not as a singular truth but as a palimpsest of experiences, influences, and internal landscapes. Her images become fragments of a larger archaeology of the self, exposing what is often hidden beneath the surface.
By working with mixed media, Telma deliberately moves beyond the two-dimensionality of the photographic frame. This material openness allows her to invoke other registers of perception — tactility, rupture, transformation — which become metaphors for the porousness of identity itself. The experience of viewing her work is therefore not purely optical but sensorial, encouraging the viewer to feel the texture of memory and the instability of the categories by which we define ourselves.
Her practice is a reminder that identity is never complete but always in process: mutable, composite, and in dialogue with the surrounding world. In this way, Telma’s work can be read as both personal and political, a resistance to static representations, and a call to acknowledge the complexity of what it means to be a self in constant becoming.