Could you talk about how the images in the exhibition were selected and organized? What kinds of systems or logics do you work with when dealing with screenshots, archival images, and press materials in your practice?

It spans material from projects developed over the last fifteen years, bringing together bodies of work and events that have shaped this period, both personally and on a broader societal level. The exhibition moves across twenty-one works, including Wikiland, The Last of the Lucky, On This Day, and A Beach, where historical moments and media traces intersect. It is framed by an ongoing crisis of representation in late Western capitalist democracies, understood as a recurring condition, alongside a growing uncertainty surrounding the explanatory capacity of the photographic image. Working with our own photographs, screenshots, press images, and archival materials, the projects attend to how meaning is shaped and how it shifts.

From the series Wikiland, 2017

Over time, we have assembled, revisited, and extended our collection, often focusing on heavily mediated events, such as those explored in Wikiland, which revolved around the media portrayals of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange during the 14 years that the case against him unfolded, raising questions about what is conveyed, what we expect to see, and what is ultimately shown. In the exhibition, conversations within and beyond the individual works are laid out: analogue photographs taken in Cuba, paired with research on early Twitter platforms, are put into dialogue with photographs from Thomas Sauvin’s archive of Chinese vernacular photography, Beijing Silvermine, the online database On This Day, and the largely forgotten story of the bombing of Stockholm in 1944.

The display strategy – A4 sheets, modest prints, and textual annotations – deliberately resists the spectacle often associated with contemporary photography exhibitions. How do you see this anti-spectacular approach functioning critically within today’s image economy?

The exhibition display follows the logic of our archive, presenting the works in the form in which they are stored and handled. Working with A4 sheets, projector enlargements, annotations, and tables covered with media-historical objects, both old and new, is, for us, a means of shifting attention away from the endless number of choices involved in displaying works and instead toward the relations between them. Within an image economy shaped by speed and amplification, this approach may slow down the act of reading. Each individual object contains photographs and texts that connect it to dates and events, entangling it with the very systems of circulation and attention that the exhibition seeks to address.

From the series On this day, 2018-21

In my interpretation, the exhibition engages not only with the role of the image in late (or “too-late”) capitalism, but also with a kind of impossibility: how the flow of history can – or cannot – be grasped through images, especially in light of the fundamental transformation of visuality itself. While modern historiography and philosophy of history – as forms of Enlightenment’s self-reflection – have always grappled with this impossibility, they have nonetheless taken on this seemingly impossible task. At the same time, an exhibition, by placing images side by side, almost inevitably produces some form of rational narrative. What do you think about this somewhat paradoxical situation?

We recognize this tension as part of how images operate today. The relation between image and text, as well as the ability to grasp historical processes, unfolds within conditions shaped by continuous circulation and recontextualization. At the same time, images continue to carry expectations of making sense of events. In our work, this takes the form of an ongoing negotiation. This becomes visible in the use of dates and in the way historical and contemporary images are placed alongside one another within arrangements developed specifically for the spaces in which they are displayed.

Your work connects micro-histories, niche memes, and forms of trivia with large-scale geopolitical processes, larger-than-life pop-cultural and political figures, and some of the most pressing social questions of our time. How do you approach the question of scale when constructing these constellations of images and texts? How do you balance personal, mundane or intimate imagery with large-scale social or political themes?

Registers of large and small proportions coexist without resolving into a clear hierarchy. A lemon can possibly relate to the mythology of an economic crisis, and the story of how Newsweek magazine came to feature the cover Hillary Clinton’s Journey to the White House can be considered through images taken in Cuba on expired film rolls. The fragments remain specific while still being connected to broader structures.

In the exhibition text, figures like Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida among others seem to offer a kind of conceptual navigation through a landscape saturated with images – from everyday photographs, social media’s visual content and app interfaces to AI-generated pictures and other media spectacles. How do you relate to these theoretical references in your practice – are they tools, companions, or something you also push against? And to what extent do you see contemporary image cultures – shaped by platforms, interfaces, and generative tools – as still thinkable through these frameworks, and where do they begin to break down?

Our work often involves collaborations that take the form of thinking together around certain questions, for instance with the writer Johannes Wahlström. These collaborations engage with how situations are presented and understood. Ideas around relationality, language, and the archive inform these processes and have been developed through ongoing exchanges, including in relation to Francesca Lazzarini’s curatorial practice.

From the series Annotation Fever!, 2025

With an increased research interest in the image as information technology, contemporary image cultures shaped by platforms and generative systems can be approached through these frameworks. They help identify structures of classification and circulation when faced with the scale and opacity of current image production. In our collaboration with media theorist Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, these questions have become more central, particularly in relation to how images are processed and interpreted within computational systems, as explored in the workshop series Annotation Fever!.

Returning to the images themselves, what do you think about the makers of everyday photographs, the “democratized” images, people sharing news or fake news on social media, or creators of memes and AI imageries? Where does their agency lie?

Agency moves across image-makers, platforms, and systems of circulation. Everyday photographs, memes, and AI-generated images appear as forms of participation while unfolding within infrastructures that shape how they are classified and interpreted. These images also function as material within larger computational systems, where they circulate as data for models that depend on large-scale image sets.

From the series On this day, 2018-21

In Annotation Fever!, this becomes visible through annotation, where images are labelled and made legible for machine learning. What appears spontaneous enters processes of preparation and stabilization within predictive systems, becoming part of a next-token logic. This shift points to the conditions through which meaning is produced. By foregrounding annotation as a collective act, the workshop makes these operations visible.

The exhibition presents a rather bleak and dark picture of our present. Do you see any possibilities for escape, intervention, or action within or beyond the frameworks your work explores?

The joke – as a construction in which seemingly impossible meetings occur or collide – makes many of these works genuinely funny. Absurd elements open up space for other kinds of images to emerge. At the same time, the works engage, to a large extent, with very serious subjects, yet amid the madness, laughter still finds its way through. Strange and unexpected situations call for attention. The absurdity points toward what has not yet taken shape, gesturing to the possibility that things could unfold differently. That is, we would say, a rather optimistic proposition.