In an Icelandic antiquarian bookshop, Dana Engfer discovers a copy of Hnattferðir – a treatise on interplanetary space travel written by Ary Sternfeld in the late 1950s. By borrowing the title for her exhibition and at the same time enriching the book with her own analogue photographs and Polaroids, the artist expands and overwrites the historical object with personal experiences, layering and interweaving dimensions of time and space.

Engfer’s Hnattferðir is a careful uncovering of layers and an archiving of traces – a process of collecting that resists quick answers and opens up a space for reflection, for questions about what we see and how we see. It approaches historical materials and individual moments of memory in tentative movements, breaking them apart into fragments, reassembling them, and setting them in dialogue with one another. In doing so, Engfer creates a narrative that makes the subjectivity of documentation processes palpable. The result is a form in which past and present are poetically superimposed and coexist.

This poetic quality and the careful interweaving of different realities are profoundly shaped by her connection to Iceland. The works on view reflect the artist’s explorations and research during her two-month stay at the SÍM Residency in Reykjavík in 2024. Among them are historical photographs taken by Icelandic photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, discovered in the archive of the Reykjavik Museum of Photography. Onto these images, Engfer places abandoned snail shells, letting their growth layers become spirals of memory, allowing them to enter into relation with the captured subjects. This composition creates a different kind of testimony, a fabric that can no longer be reduced to its individual parts and yet, carried by the transience inherent to us all, appears questioning, fleeting and fragile.

With this, and with the exhibition itself, Dana Engfer presents an iridescent archive in which past and present, documentation and memory permeate one another and shimmer in ever-changing facets.

Dana Engfer (b.1981) is a Berlin-based multimedia artist. She studied fine arts at UdK Berlin University of the Arts, at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with Christian Boltanski and at Iceland

University of the Arts in Reykjavik, graduating as a Master Student at University of the Arts Berlin in 2007. In each work she incorporate a wide variety of media such as drawing, collage, photography, video and books. Engfer sees herself as a collector of different traces of time, memories and abeyance, representing the atmosphere and story of specific environments by combining memory and fiction with documentary. (Text: Katharina Kiening)

There will be a special exhibition opening on Thursday, August 28th from 18:00-20:00 and everyone is welcome!

Other opening hours

Fri 29th Aug 14:00 - 18:00

Sat 30th Aug 12:00 - 17:00

LG // Litla Gallerý is sponsored by the Culture and Tourism Committee of Hafnarfjörður for this event.