What happens to a photograph when no one is left to name it?
Over the years, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson has collected photographs found on the street — images slipped out of custody, detached from their context. Images unmoored: couples posing together, a shoreline, a bare Christmas tree. The categories are familiar, but the coordinates are gone. Someone’s birthday, someone’s summer. The space between familiarity and unknowing is where the work begins.
What moves me is not only the melancholy of these lost images, but what their condition exposes. A photograph does not carry meaning inside itself. It carries the potential for meaning, which depends on framing, on someone naming context into it — a caption, a conversation, a memory, a face that recognises another face. Without that anchoring gesture, the image drifts, revealing how much of seeing is projection: how actively the viewer constructs coherence, reaches toward narrative, fills in what the image withholds.
Verso / Recto
In Verso / Recto, the photographs appear translucent. Photographs of the backs of the found images are shot so that the recto — the front — faintly shines through. Something is present but not available. We are positioned at the threshold of the image.
The prints have a soft, velvety surface — archival, considered. The backs carry logos and commercial marks, rendered in rich vintage colours, which become part of the image. The description of the paper and its origins sits alongside the image of the person, the shoreline, the Christmas tree. Back and front flatten into a single surface. What was commercial becomes intimate. The textual evidence of the photograph's material life reads as strongly as the image it was made to carry.
Alongside these translucent surfaces, a sound work plays, drawn from Jóhannsson's long-running conversations with clairvoyants. From time to time over the years, he has asked these readers what they see within the photographs — what they imagine unfolding within the frame, what a picture might hold that a viewer cannot access through looking alone. This verso/recto formal structure emerged from a recurring theme in those interpretations: the relationship between light and darkness, between what is hidden and what insists on being seen. These interpretations have been shaped into a multi-voiced sound work, read aloud by different performers. Both artist and clairvoyant name meaning into an image that cannot confirm or deny their readings.
In the exhibition, we encounter the back of the photograph at the same moment we encounter someone else's reading of it. The work places us inside the act of projection itself. Looking and listening unfold together, and the usual order of perception — see first, understand after — becomes unsettled. All looking, Jóhannsson seems to suggest, involves this: the projection of a coherent scene onto incomplete data. The clairvoyant only names aloud what every viewer does silently.
By turning the photograph over, Jóhannsson activates our learned desire to read images — and makes us aware of that desire in the moment of its operation. The detail remains out of reach, but the outline persists. We lean in, strain slightly for understanding.
Recent Works and Other Myths
Recent Works and Other Myths approaches context from another direction, through a different kind of found material and a different distribution system.
Over the years, Jóhannsson has photographed discarded objects encountered in urban space — a glove on a wall, a crushed cup, the underside of a shelf — and shared them on Instagram. Each image carries as its title a sentence underlined by an anonymous reader from a used copy of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by Rosalind Krauss.
The works are physically dense. Each is a collage of several layers —museum board, iBond, self-adhesive film, book page, and inkjet print — built up into something with real material weight. You are looking at a constructed object, its components bonded together, the image inseparable from its support.
Krauss famously dismantled the modernist myth of originality, tracing how repetition and citation were systematically disavowed in order to preserve the fiction of the singular genius. Her argument has become foundational, and in becoming foundational it has circulated widely, been underlined by countless readers, absorbed into the bloodstream of critical thinking. The anonymous underliner in Jóhannsson's copy is one such reader, now invisible — their attention legible only as a mark.
Here, Krauss's words migrate into the logic of the feed. The underlined sentence, already marked by another hand, becomes a readymade caption. Authorship fractures gently, in multiple directions at once: Krauss wrote the sentence; the anonymous reader selected it; Jóhannsson appropriates it; the algorithm recirculates it. The caption does not explain the image, nor does the image illustrate the text. They lean against one another, neither fully authoritative, each qualifying the other without resolving into unified meaning.
What does originality mean in a system built on reposting? What does authorship mean when language circulates endlessly, detached from its first utterance? Jóhannsson works inside this logic rather than against it, extending the argument about repetition and citation that Krauss was already making into a landscape she could not have anticipated. The discarded objects he photographs are themselves things that have been decirculated — removed from use, awaiting either collection or erasure. The image of a discarded object, captioned with a sentence about the myth of originality, circulated through a platform designed for images of things we want others to see: the irony is not cruel but structural. It is simply the condition we are inside.
Condition Reports
A third element joins these two bodies of work: a vinyl text wall piece drawn from condition reports on used books — some, but not all, from copies that appear in Recent Works and Other Myths. The language of these reports is affectionate and precise, describing the physical life of discarded things in a vocabulary that belongs to archivists and antiquarian booksellers: foxing, rubbing wear, a closed tear, a strong musty smell. Tanning to the pages. Previous owner’s name in ink.
This language is fundamentally indexical. It records what happened to an object over time without knowing why — effects without causes, traces without their makers. In this it shares something with the photograph: both are forms of evidence that cannot tell their own story.
Borrowed and enlarged to architectural scale, the condition report becomes a kind of elegy. The bureaucratic register stretches. Words developed to assess damage and determine value take on an unexpected gravity when removed from the catalog entry and placed in the room with you. The attentiveness of that language is moving, its commitment to describing what is actually there, rather than what was intended.
Like the found photographs and the underlined sentences, the condition report asks what a thing carries from its previous life, and what that life leaves behind. These are objects that were used, held, annotated, discarded. They passed through someone’s hands and were changed by the passage. The report names those changes without being able to name their author. In this it mirrors Verso / Recto exactly: the mark is legible; the maker is not.
Binding Threads
What binds these bodies of work together, for me, is their shared insistence that context is material, a substance that shapes what that image or object is. A photograph on the pavement. A sentence in a secondhand book. An image released into a global stream. In each case, displacement is part of the work’s content.
This positions Jóhannsson’s practice in a longer conversation about appropriation and the readymade — one that runs from Duchamp through Warhol through Krauss herself. But what distinguishes his approach is its particular attentiveness to the amateur and the discarded: not the iconic object elevated by the artist’s decision, but the glove on the wall, the photograph from someone’s holiday, the condition report filed and forgotten. What he is doing, I think, is more about attention as ethics: the decision to notice what has been passed over, and to ask what noticing does.
Authorship, across all three works, is something that happens in accumulation — through the anonymous underliner, the clairvoyant reader, the previous owner whose name remains in ink, the algorithm that carries an image further than any intention could. No single author holds the meaning. It disperses, recirculates, accrues. The artist’s role is to frame, to create the conditions under which these dispersals become visible.
Through these works I become more aware of my own habits of looking: how quickly I search for the original source, the stable narrative, the authoritative voice. These works make that reaching visible. The caption doesn’t explain. The source remains anonymous. The verso glows without resolving into the recto.
They also speak to the art world’s enduring myths: the hierarchy between artwork and publication, the fetish of the unique object. By treating artists’ books, captions, and acts of underlining as central gestures, Jóhannsson expands what counts as artistic production.
Certainty loosens. The edges between image, viewer, and author blur. They offer something more useful than resolution: a heightened awareness of the mechanisms by which we make sense of things, and an invitation to inhabit that making more consciously — to hold interpretation lightly, to stay a moment longer in the not-yet-named.
Daría Sól Andrews, 2026
Over the years, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson has collected photographs found on the street — images slipped out of custody, detached from their context. Images unmoored: couples posing together, a shoreline, a bare Christmas tree. The categories are familiar, but the coordinates are gone. Someone’s birthday, someone’s summer. The space between familiarity and unknowing is where the work begins.
What moves me is not only the melancholy of these lost images, but what their condition exposes. A photograph does not carry meaning inside itself. It carries the potential for meaning, which depends on framing, on someone naming context into it — a caption, a conversation, a memory, a face that recognises another face. Without that anchoring gesture, the image drifts, revealing how much of seeing is projection: how actively the viewer constructs coherence, reaches toward narrative, fills in what the image withholds.
Verso / Recto
In Verso / Recto, the photographs appear translucent. Photographs of the backs of the found images are shot so that the recto — the front — faintly shines through. Something is present but not available. We are positioned at the threshold of the image.
The prints have a soft, velvety surface — archival, considered. The backs carry logos and commercial marks, rendered in rich vintage colours, which become part of the image. The description of the paper and its origins sits alongside the image of the person, the shoreline, the Christmas tree. Back and front flatten into a single surface. What was commercial becomes intimate. The textual evidence of the photograph's material life reads as strongly as the image it was made to carry.
Alongside these translucent surfaces, a sound work plays, drawn from Jóhannsson's long-running conversations with clairvoyants. From time to time over the years, he has asked these readers what they see within the photographs — what they imagine unfolding within the frame, what a picture might hold that a viewer cannot access through looking alone. This verso/recto formal structure emerged from a recurring theme in those interpretations: the relationship between light and darkness, between what is hidden and what insists on being seen. These interpretations have been shaped into a multi-voiced sound work, read aloud by different performers. Both artist and clairvoyant name meaning into an image that cannot confirm or deny their readings.
In the exhibition, we encounter the back of the photograph at the same moment we encounter someone else's reading of it. The work places us inside the act of projection itself. Looking and listening unfold together, and the usual order of perception — see first, understand after — becomes unsettled. All looking, Jóhannsson seems to suggest, involves this: the projection of a coherent scene onto incomplete data. The clairvoyant only names aloud what every viewer does silently.
By turning the photograph over, Jóhannsson activates our learned desire to read images — and makes us aware of that desire in the moment of its operation. The detail remains out of reach, but the outline persists. We lean in, strain slightly for understanding.
Recent Works and Other Myths
Recent Works and Other Myths approaches context from another direction, through a different kind of found material and a different distribution system.
Over the years, Jóhannsson has photographed discarded objects encountered in urban space — a glove on a wall, a crushed cup, the underside of a shelf — and shared them on Instagram. Each image carries as its title a sentence underlined by an anonymous reader from a used copy of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths by Rosalind Krauss.
The works are physically dense. Each is a collage of several layers —museum board, iBond, self-adhesive film, book page, and inkjet print — built up into something with real material weight. You are looking at a constructed object, its components bonded together, the image inseparable from its support.
Krauss famously dismantled the modernist myth of originality, tracing how repetition and citation were systematically disavowed in order to preserve the fiction of the singular genius. Her argument has become foundational, and in becoming foundational it has circulated widely, been underlined by countless readers, absorbed into the bloodstream of critical thinking. The anonymous underliner in Jóhannsson's copy is one such reader, now invisible — their attention legible only as a mark.
Here, Krauss's words migrate into the logic of the feed. The underlined sentence, already marked by another hand, becomes a readymade caption. Authorship fractures gently, in multiple directions at once: Krauss wrote the sentence; the anonymous reader selected it; Jóhannsson appropriates it; the algorithm recirculates it. The caption does not explain the image, nor does the image illustrate the text. They lean against one another, neither fully authoritative, each qualifying the other without resolving into unified meaning.
What does originality mean in a system built on reposting? What does authorship mean when language circulates endlessly, detached from its first utterance? Jóhannsson works inside this logic rather than against it, extending the argument about repetition and citation that Krauss was already making into a landscape she could not have anticipated. The discarded objects he photographs are themselves things that have been decirculated — removed from use, awaiting either collection or erasure. The image of a discarded object, captioned with a sentence about the myth of originality, circulated through a platform designed for images of things we want others to see: the irony is not cruel but structural. It is simply the condition we are inside.
Condition Reports
A third element joins these two bodies of work: a vinyl text wall piece drawn from condition reports on used books — some, but not all, from copies that appear in Recent Works and Other Myths. The language of these reports is affectionate and precise, describing the physical life of discarded things in a vocabulary that belongs to archivists and antiquarian booksellers: foxing, rubbing wear, a closed tear, a strong musty smell. Tanning to the pages. Previous owner’s name in ink.
This language is fundamentally indexical. It records what happened to an object over time without knowing why — effects without causes, traces without their makers. In this it shares something with the photograph: both are forms of evidence that cannot tell their own story.
Borrowed and enlarged to architectural scale, the condition report becomes a kind of elegy. The bureaucratic register stretches. Words developed to assess damage and determine value take on an unexpected gravity when removed from the catalog entry and placed in the room with you. The attentiveness of that language is moving, its commitment to describing what is actually there, rather than what was intended.
Like the found photographs and the underlined sentences, the condition report asks what a thing carries from its previous life, and what that life leaves behind. These are objects that were used, held, annotated, discarded. They passed through someone’s hands and were changed by the passage. The report names those changes without being able to name their author. In this it mirrors Verso / Recto exactly: the mark is legible; the maker is not.
Binding Threads
What binds these bodies of work together, for me, is their shared insistence that context is material, a substance that shapes what that image or object is. A photograph on the pavement. A sentence in a secondhand book. An image released into a global stream. In each case, displacement is part of the work’s content.
This positions Jóhannsson’s practice in a longer conversation about appropriation and the readymade — one that runs from Duchamp through Warhol through Krauss herself. But what distinguishes his approach is its particular attentiveness to the amateur and the discarded: not the iconic object elevated by the artist’s decision, but the glove on the wall, the photograph from someone’s holiday, the condition report filed and forgotten. What he is doing, I think, is more about attention as ethics: the decision to notice what has been passed over, and to ask what noticing does.
Authorship, across all three works, is something that happens in accumulation — through the anonymous underliner, the clairvoyant reader, the previous owner whose name remains in ink, the algorithm that carries an image further than any intention could. No single author holds the meaning. It disperses, recirculates, accrues. The artist’s role is to frame, to create the conditions under which these dispersals become visible.
Through these works I become more aware of my own habits of looking: how quickly I search for the original source, the stable narrative, the authoritative voice. These works make that reaching visible. The caption doesn’t explain. The source remains anonymous. The verso glows without resolving into the recto.
They also speak to the art world’s enduring myths: the hierarchy between artwork and publication, the fetish of the unique object. By treating artists’ books, captions, and acts of underlining as central gestures, Jóhannsson expands what counts as artistic production.
Certainty loosens. The edges between image, viewer, and author blur. They offer something more useful than resolution: a heightened awareness of the mechanisms by which we make sense of things, and an invitation to inhabit that making more consciously — to hold interpretation lightly, to stay a moment longer in the not-yet-named.
Daría Sól Andrews, 2026