Wishbone
Jo Pawlowska
Work is currently on view in a group exhibition Nina, dearest Nina at the Reykjanes Art Museum, on view from September 3 to November 29, 2026. Exhibition curated by Ynda Eldborg and Viktoria Guðnadóttir.
A hanging textile, covered with photographs and suspended by colourful straps printed with portraits, converses with other images displayed on the wall. They form a fragmented archive of vulnerability, intimacy, and hope: depicting private moments in a person’s life. This flurry of photos queers our senses of proximity and distance. Approaching them, one notices more details. Images printed onto velour, blurred, colored, some superimposed onto larger ones. Whether shot by the artist, sent by others, or taken by people close to them over the course of some months, these images have circulated over vast geographic distances. Their arrangement recreates this play of proximity and distance in miniature.
Soft textiles and vivid colors offer the hopeful suggestion that connection with others is possible. At the same time, the fabric veils the photos, creating the hazy feeling that, though we can come closer, we can never fully see everything. This artwork’s staging traverses emotional landscapes: confusion, gratitude, uncertainty, longing, and the hope of closeness with other people. Alongside photographs of subjects, friends and lovers, appear text messages, screenshots, memes, nude photos: traces of the telecommunication infrastructure of our lived experience in relation to others.
On the level of factual subject, Wishbone attempts to document the artist’s experience of undergoing a medical transition with the support of their loved ones. The grand constellation of images testifies to their helplessness and pain, while other images depict discrete moments of joys, care, sensuality, and love. The entire artwork serves as an ekphrasis of Nína Sæmundsson’s 1955 oil painting Boy, offering a queer reading of this portrait and asking: who can claim authorship over images in circulation, and to what end?
This work queers the archive: while official procedures have documented only the thinnest slices of queer history, Wishbone takes the labor of documentation itself as its subject. The ways these images converse, and the singular path taken by the viewer’s gaze among them, echoes the faint traces of queer and trans life embedded in documents and material culture. These have more recently become the subject of scholarly historical research: this artwork insists that documenting queer life, a project often undertaken by queer people themselves, has only just begun.
Mixed media installation: velour, heavy-weight velour, hook and loop Velcro, photographs, heat-transferred photographs.
Textile elements created in collaboration with Pawel Wlodarski.
The work is an ongoing project.
Project partially facilitated through Icelandic Artists’ Salary Fund, Listamannalaun 2026.