Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson

Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson works with photography, sculpture, curating, and the production of artists’ books.
In two different projects at Künstlerhaus Bethanien he is staging archival materials from internet sources. He presents Untitled (Newspaper), a piece that the visitors can touch, dismantle, and even take home, as well as Untitled (Holes), an installation in which photographs of so-called “sink holes” – sudden fissures in the ground that appear all over the world for a variety of reasons and are therefore frequently documented in the media – are presented in the context of filigree-like, silver-coloured grid-based sculptures.
Jóhannsson develops his works starting from the premise that photographs in the digital age have no material quality initially but are pure data, saved and constantly retrievable. He transforms these data into a physical situation, his aim being to slow down their consumption by the recipient and, in doing so, allow fresh links to emerge between the photographs, the audience, and the artwork.
Overall, Jóhannsson’s installation can be understood as the staging of a situation that thematizes contemporary handling of photography as a medium highly dependent upon context, and so visualizes the way in which we comprehend and interpret it.