Exploring Our World’s Binaries: Sadie Cook And Jo Pawlowska On Their Upcoming D-Salur Exhibition

Sunk into a couch at The Reykjavík School of Visual Arts, Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska sit side-by-side with their laptops and cups of coffee. It’s one week until their exhibition, Everything I want to tell you, in Hafnarhús opens, and they’re so busy that we meet while their photos are being printed at the school.

The Reykjavík Art Museum at Hafnarhús’s D-Gallery initiative began in 2007, as a chance for emerging local artists to hold their first solo exhibition in a public museum. Everything I want to tell you is the work of artists Sadie Cook and Jo Pawlowska. Sadie, a photographer who has taught at various art institutions in Iceland, co-runs Gallery Kannski. Jo is an artist and curator who co-runs Hamraborg Festival and makes intermedia art, often working with moving images, 3D and installations.

The “everything” in “Everything I want to tell you” is not hyperbole — “we’re working with around 2,000 images,” Sadie states, “which is insane.” The installation combines 900 images printed out at an American department store, phones and tablets scrolling images and showing video, several large-scale images on various surfaces, chains, and more. “[This is] a large-scale mural mounted, printed on normal paper and wheat-pasted to the wall. Can you believe they let us do that?” Sadie laughs.

Dynamic duo

In their artist statement, the two describe that their “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.” Sadie echoes this as I ask the two about their work’s inception, and explains, “We bonded over both dressing in trash styles and being bald. Also that we would just mention theory to the other person, and the other person would know what we were talking about.”
“Can you believe they let us do that?”

“A big part of our conversations was thinking about images and art in the context of class and privilege,” Jo notes. Sadie continues this thought, saying, “We both have practices that are born of finding the conceptual things that are interesting and fun and cool about the material limitations that we find ourselves in.” They cite the example of the 900 Walmart prints Sadie brought to Iceland from the United States, which will be on the walls, floor, and all around the exhibition space. This was the cheapest way for them to get some photos printed. But also, this type of printed photo is an accessible and common way of printing photos.

Non-linear

On Sadie’s computer, they walk me through their exhibition’s layout. I see amalgamations of photos in clusters, scattered and splayed along the wall. Not a straight line of a few photographs that one might typically see in the white cube of an exhibition space. “A straight line implies a start and a finish. So instead, we’re trying to work along all of these exploding diagonals,” Sadie explains.

Their exhibition, broadly, explores breaking binaries: they list pain/pleasure, digital/physical, and male/female as some that they explore throughout the exhibition. Both artists are non-binary, but it’s important to note that their identities are not the show’s focal point. “We’re not making a show about being non-binary, as much as we are using non-binary as a framework to think about what it means to explode a binary, or any binary, and how that has a chain reaction across the ways that humans are naturally inclined to divide the world in half,” Sadie states.

Shot in the dark

The two explain that they applied for the D-Gallery show as a shot in the dark. “We were like, ‘well, what are the chances?’ We are non-Icelandic art university graduates working at the edges of what is happening in Icelandic art, both in our artist-run spaces and also in our practices,” Sadie says. This concept of working at the edges, and seeing where those edges are, is something that they echo later on. “We’re working with photography in a very, very loose definition of the word,” explains Sadie. “We’re working with photography as thinking about all of the forms of image making and taking that happen naturally in people’s lives.”
“There’s a lot of humour in all these intensities.”

Both artists exhibit their personal lives on full display in this show; they show screenshots of texts (a phone on one wall plays a blurred video scrolling through every text message they’ve sent to each other), bedrooms, partners, and candidly show their own bodies. Amidst this vulnerability, they also experiment and play. “There’s a lot of humour in all these intensities, right?” Jo asks, presenting another binary, between seriousness and play, that the two have explored in their exhibition.

Everything I want to tell you, curated by Björk Hrafnsdóttir, opens at The Reykjavík Art Museum (Hafnarhús) on May 29 at 17:00 and will run until July 30.