A Botanical Future
Katrín Elvarsdóttir
Opening – Thursday, October 23, 18:00–20:00
Exhibition – October 24 – December 7, 2025
Gallery Gudmundsdottir is pleased to present A Botanical Future, the first solo exhibition by Icelandic artist Katrín Elvarsdóttir at the gallery. The exhibition brings together three photographic series created between 2020 and 2025: Fifty Plants for Peace, Tropical Colony, and Living Fossil, each exploring the intersections of nature, history, and human intervention.
At the center of these works are three plant species: the Japanese Cherry blossom, the banana plant, and the dawn redwood. Each carries a layered narrative of cultivation, migration, and endurance, together forming a meditation on belonging and displacement.
The Cherry blossom, cultivated in Japan for over a thousand years, symbolizes both peace and transience, its brief flowering cycle a reminder of life’s impermanence. The banana plant, among the earliest crops cultivated by humankind, raises questions about global movement and adaptation, even appearing in Icelandic greenhouses as a cultivated curiosity. The dawn redwood, long thought extinct until its rediscovery in China in the 1940s, embodies the paradoxes of scientific discovery and reveals the colonial entanglements within Western systems of classification and possession.
Across these photographic series, Elvarsdóttir reflects on how plants, like people, are carried across borders, transplanted, adapted, and redefined. The transfer of living matter, even when guided by care or preservation, often conceals acts of displacement and control. Through her lens, these plants are not passive subjects but living witnesses to histories of migration, exchange, and transformation.
In A Botanical Future, the plants are reimagined in images that hover between documentation and fiction. Rather than fixing or classifying them, Elvarsdóttir creates a world where the familiar becomes estranged and belonging is continually renegotiated. With her precise yet gentle visual language, the works open a quiet space for reflection, on beauty, fragility, and resilience.
Ultimately, A Botanical Future is not only an exhibition about nature, but a meditation on endurance, memory, and what takes root –– even far from its origin.
Katrín Elvarsdóttir (b. 1964) studied fine arts and photography in the United States. Her photographic works tell fragmented narratives of an ambiguous nature, often engaging with ideas of collective memory. They serve as placeholders for enigmatic events in which the viewer inadvertently becomes a participant, a story half-realized, half-imagined.
Her work might best be described as suggestive, residing in a realm of unscripted, imagined timelessness. Employing cinematic methods, soft focus, and chiaroscuro, Elvarsdóttir continues to forgo photography’s conventional documentary use, instead exploring the medium itself, its processes, materiality, and potential for contemporary image-making and aesthetic expression.
Her works have been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Reykjavík Art Museum and the National Gallery of Iceland, Forum Box in Helsinki, the Museum of Photography in Seoul, Martin Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen, and Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt. She has received and been nominated for numerous prestigious awards, including the EIKON Award in Vienna under the patronage of feminist icon Valie Export. In 2008, Elvarsdóttir was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Award, and in 2009 she received the Ridgefield Guild of Artists Award.