False Friends borrows its title from linguistics, words that look identical across languages but carry entirely different meanings. Sakib Saboor uses the idea as a way of looking at photographs: signs that feel instantly familiar, yet shift in meaning the moment they move between cultures.
The first room holds The Dictionary, nearly 200 photographs, all in the same small format, hung close together as one continuous grid. Taken alone, each image is just an everyday sign, a logo, a gesture, a piece of signage. Placed side by side, they start to work like entries in a dictionary, small units of meaning that only make sense in relation to each other. Walking along the wall becomes a kind of reading, one sign leading into the next.
The second room, American Grammar, turns to Vanse, a small town on the south coast of Norway where American cultural symbols show up in the most ordinary places, on buildings, in shop windows, in how people dress. The area carries its own history of migration to and from the United States, and the photographs sit inside that history rather than commenting on it from outside. What looks American at first glance turns out to be something else once you know where it was taken.
The third room, Original Copies, is more enclosed, framed in red to set it apart from the rest of the exhibition. The photographs come from Pakistan and focus on bootleg goods and copied brand logos, the kind of objects usually dismissed as fake or lesser. Saboor treats them instead as cultural objects in their own right, worth the same close attention as the originals they imitate. The room asks what gets lost, and what gets added, when a symbol is copied rather than owned.
This is Saboor’s first solo exhibition, on view at Hamar Kunstforening from 22 August to 6 September 2026.
