May
Show Signs of Minor Defects accompanies the exhibition of the same title at Hafnarborg—The Hafnarfjörður
Centre of Culture and Fine Art, yet deliberately avoids functioning as its
documentation. No installation views or reproductions of the exhibited works
appear in the publication. Instead, the exhibition is reconstructed through language,
annotation, and the working documents from which it emerged.
At its centre is an essay by curator Daría Sol Andrews describing the works presented in the exhibition. Running alongside the essay are thirty-three footnotes compiled by the artist and set entirely in capital letters. Rather than clarifying the text, these annotations form an autonomous layer composed of sentences incorporated into the exhibited works. The publication unfolds as a dialogue between two parallel readings of the same exhibition: one descriptive, one internal.
The pages are printed directly onto reproductions of the artist's working notes used during the development of the exhibition. Photographed with light coming from behind, each sheet produces a composite image in which recto and verso appear simultaneously, collapsing front and back into a single surface where handwriting, revisions, folds, stains, tape, corrections, and pressure marks remain visible. What began as private working notes becomes the physical substrate of the publication. Printed on opaque 170 g paper, the reproductions preserve the illusion of translucency, collapsing the distinction between the original notes and their printed facsimiles.
Bound with a wire-o spine reminiscent of a notebook, workshop manual, or technical binder, the publication foregrounds process over documentation. Rather than presenting finished works, it exposes the material conditions, provisional decisions, and textual negotiations from which the exhibition emerged. Offset printed in an edition of 333 copies, the publication occupies an uncertain position between artist's book, notebook, and exhibition catalogue without fully resolving into any one of them.
At its centre is an essay by curator Daría Sol Andrews describing the works presented in the exhibition. Running alongside the essay are thirty-three footnotes compiled by the artist and set entirely in capital letters. Rather than clarifying the text, these annotations form an autonomous layer composed of sentences incorporated into the exhibited works. The publication unfolds as a dialogue between two parallel readings of the same exhibition: one descriptive, one internal.
The pages are printed directly onto reproductions of the artist's working notes used during the development of the exhibition. Photographed with light coming from behind, each sheet produces a composite image in which recto and verso appear simultaneously, collapsing front and back into a single surface where handwriting, revisions, folds, stains, tape, corrections, and pressure marks remain visible. What began as private working notes becomes the physical substrate of the publication. Printed on opaque 170 g paper, the reproductions preserve the illusion of translucency, collapsing the distinction between the original notes and their printed facsimiles.
Bound with a wire-o spine reminiscent of a notebook, workshop manual, or technical binder, the publication foregrounds process over documentation. Rather than presenting finished works, it exposes the material conditions, provisional decisions, and textual negotiations from which the exhibition emerged. Offset printed in an edition of 333 copies, the publication occupies an uncertain position between artist's book, notebook, and exhibition catalogue without fully resolving into any one of them.