Everything I Want to Tell You
Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska, Everything I want to tell you, Reykjavik Art Museum Hafnarhús, 2025
Everything I want to Tell You is an ongoing collaboration between Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska. The project began with conversations around the relationship of our bodies and the mundane fragments of our lives with the nebulous cages of class, illness, immigration, gender and sexuality. As we talked about the ripple effects of our efforts to escape these concrete definitions imposed on us, we turned to images as a means to both record and fantasize.
Photography became our base medium as a form of image-making that most of us engage with in the universal struggle with how one is seen and sees oneself. In the past two years, we built an expanding archive of hundreds of thousands of images. Each is a record of the abrasions that from when desires and dreams rub against the reality of a precarious life.
The first iteration of the project took place in May 2025 at the Reykjavík Art Museum as part of the D-salur series, which focuses on emerging artists in Iceland shaping the local art scene.
At the 51st D-Gallery exhibition, visitors were greeted by thousands of still and moving images. These spanned staged dream sequences, glitched videos, screenshots of late-night conversations, pixelated selfies, and medical documentation. Each work formed a facet of the artists’ exploration of the limits of their own bodies as surfaces on which experiences were traced. The exhibition was based around the possibility of existing beyond constructed binaries. This collaborative practice thrived in the abrasions that formed when desire rubbed against a precarious life. Sadie and Jo pushed at the infinite possibilities–some fantastical, some mundane–that existed within these cracks.