Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir is an artist, musician and composer based in Amsterdam and Reykjavík. She’s interested in storytelling and creating engulfing experiences within spaces, often inspired by the mundanity of everyday life. In her works, she uses relational aesthetics and institutional critique methods to interrupt and criticise normative narrative and show her subjects from a new angle.

Through a variety of media - performance, moving image, installation and music -  Hildur Elísa employs normalised human behaviours and experiences in a critical way, displacing them into an artistic context. By placing these mundane, everyday happenings in unconventional and absurd scenes, she aims to challenge our understanding of our heavily constructed social reality, reflecting on our own ability to create new meaning and to forge our own reality - always asking ‘why’ and ‘what if’.

Hildur Elísa’s creative process is a balance between caprice and compulsive research. She is particularly interested in how we experience everything that happens around us, what of those experiences we have in common and where we differ and strives to create works that force the viewer to create their own meaning.

Hildur Elísa holds a diploma in classical clarinet from the Reykjavík College of Music and a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art from the Iceland University of the Arts. During her studies at the IUA she went on exchange in the Kunst und Vermittlung department at Hochschule Luzern in Switzerland, where her work Konzert für Spielzeug und Schwimmbad was chosen by curator Michael Sutter to be exhibited at the HSLU exemplary exhibition, K+. After graduating, she interned with artist, musician and composer Lina Lapelytė in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her works have been selected for festivals such as LungA, Plan-B Art Festival, Platform Nord, Tokyo Biennale and Ung Nordisk Musik, and have been performed by, among others, K!art - Ensemble for New Music and Performance Art, Jónas Ásgeir Ásgeirsson and Antti Tolvi. Hildur Elísa is currently enrolled in Re:master Opera, a temporary master’s program at Sandberg Institute supported by the Dutch National Opera and Opera Forward Festival.