Everything I Want to Tell You
Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska
2025Reykjavik Art Museum Hafnarhús
At the 51st D-Gallery exhibition you are greeted by thousands of still and moving images. They span staged dream sequences, glitched videos, screenshots of late-night conversations, pixelated selfies, and medical documentation. Each work is a facet of the artists’ exploration of the limits of their own bodies as surfaces on which experiences are traced. Allow yourself to flow, merge and dissolve into a space where the dichotomies remain unresolved, and balance is found in chaos and disorder.
Our lives are shaped by endless binaries. We tend to frame things in terms of opposites. Good or evil, light or dark, past or present, rich or poor, sick or healthy, pain or pleasure, digital or physical, male or female. In each pair, we can often sense an inherent dominance of one side over the other. Sometimes clearly, other times more ambiguously.
The exhibition is based around the possibility of existing beyond the constructed binaries. This collaborative practice thrives in the abrasions that form when desire rubs against a precarious life. Sadie and Jo push at the infinite possibilities, some fantastical, some mundane, that exist in these cracks.
The installation forms two diagonal binary axes, running from motion to stillness and from public to private. The image clusters form a swirling record based on scale, placement and point of view. Playing with textures, low resolutions, archival photographs and videos, the artists create a space to share their vulnerability.
Sadie Cook and Jo's collaboration began due to their identical buzzcuts. Their work germinated in long conversations around hair, image, self, a-linearity, and the internet. However, the project itself truly began on a sunny afternoon in May 2024. That day, Jo took their first testosterone dose, and Sadie dipped their foot in slime and snapped a picture with a plastic pink camera. Everything I want to tell you is the culmination of a year long collaboration where each work is co-authored by both artists.
Curator: Björk Hrafnsdóttir
Exhibition supported by Icelandic Visual Arts Fund