Over the years, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson has worked with found photographs, discarded objects and other materials detached from their original context. We encounter couples posing together, a shoreline, a bare Christmas tree. The categories are familiar, but the coordinates are gone. What is so moving is not only the melancholy of these lost images, but what their condition exposes. Their meaning depends on framing, on someone giving them context. Without that anchor, the image drifts, revealing how much of seeing is shaped by the viewer’s projection.

What binds the works in the exhibition together is their shared insistence that context is material. A photograph on the pavement, a sentence in a second-hand book, an image released into a global stream. Meaning emerges through displacement and framing. Through these works we become more aware of our own habits of looking: how quickly we search for the original source, the stable narrative, the authoritative voice. These works make us question that impulse. They remind us that belief, interpretation and memory are collaborative constructions.

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson (b. 1977) is an Icelandic artist based in Oslo, Norway. His practice spans photography, sculpture, publishing and curated projects. Jóhannsson often explores authorship, documentation and the social role of images through books, exhibitions and printed matter. His work examines the relationship between everyday life, the art object and exhibition contexts, frequently combining different media and materials within a single body of work. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 2003 to 2009. Since 2012, he has run the independent small press Multinational Enterprises.

The exhibition is supported by Norske Billedkunstnere, Norsk Fotografisk Fond and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.