Symposion on Photography XXI

The Violence of Images


Symposium

Dates
5.–6.10.2018

Details
5.10., 16:00–20:00
6.10., 14:00–20:00

Location
Camera Austria
Graz

Production specifics
A collaboration of Camera Austria and steirischer herbst

With Christine Frisinghelli, Marina Gržinić, Ana Hoffner, Tom Holert, Jakub Majmurek, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Ines Schaber, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Ala Younis

We won't be able to do without ugly images,” said Austria’s now-Chancellor Sebastian Kurz back in 2016. He was referring to refugees on the Greek-Macedonian border, pictured as nameless, anonymous, depersonalized, stranded, and stripped of their right to existence. Such violent images today are hardly unique. The state of crisis in which countless societies have long been immersed, at varying intensities and for different reasons, has given rise to a wealth of images rendering violence—some ugly, some beautiful—, images that are implicitly violent themselves. At the same time, the violence of images subsists in an enclosure of visibility and meaning, locked into certain (ideological) conventions, material and symbolic at once, defining how they apportion, split up, inscribe, how they make things invisible and how they lay forth a truth—one that is a truth of violence. These images and their violence stand at the center of the Symposion on Photography XXI, a collaboration between Camera Austria and steirischer herbst. Theoreticians and artists come together to ask how one might comprehend and counteract such violent images against the backdrop of a dysfunctional political realm and a neocolonial world order. Can the indignation these images arouse reveal the violent ruptures in politics itself, which requires a new language, a different meaning, and another approach?

Retrospective
Retrospective
Retrospective