Everything I Want to Tell You
by Sadie Cook & Jo Pawlowska
This project can be seen this year at Circulation(s), which takes place from March 21 to May 17 in Paris, France.
The full program is available here.
“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 imposed concrete definitions, we turned to images as a means to both record and fantasize.
In the past two years, we built an expanding archive of hundreds of thousands of images. Each is a record of the abrasions that form when desires and dreams rub against the reality of a precarious life.
We use these images and videos to build large-scale installations of thousands of pictures, swirling explosions and clumps. We want for entering one of our installations to feel like entering our minds in the moments before we fall asleep. We want an audience to feel the whirl of emotions as fantasies, memories from years ago, and memories from earlier that day all seem equally real and present. At the same time, the chaos of bodies echoes a common refrain of disidentification as the constant process of taking oneself apart and putting oneself together.
Photography is our primary medium, and new media is our secondary medium. Both are spaces occupied with truth and fantasy. Both are dialogues strongly present within the immigrant and queer communities in Iceland. And, finally, both are forms of image-making that most people engage with in the universal struggle with how one is seen and sees oneself.
We believe that this project can only come from a duo. The crucial subject of intersectional identities in Iceland should be approached as a conversation rather than a monologue. As individual artists, both of our practices rely on collaboration and are deeply concerned with groups described by Jose Esteban Muñoz as “counterpublics, ” and, therefore with supporting and uplifting voices that are often absent within the Icelandic scene (Muñoz, 2009). This project is no different. Our web contains images, works, and voices gathered from the communities close to us.
Our installations pull from both our growing archives of pictures, and from the architectural/contextual of the given exhibition space. Our first installation in D-Salur in the Reykjavik Art Museum used the binaries of public/private and hold/throw as a framework. Our installation within Festival Circulations focuses on the binaries inside/outside, float/fall and peel/encase.”
