ou-la-persistance-des-images

La Galerie’s new season is focusing on contemporary image uses in an era of images’ accelerating circulation and rapid disconnection from their points of origin. The aim in trying to monitor their flow, reproducibility and modes of visibility, is to see how images persist and mutate in in the course of transition from one medium to another. This exploration of their uses also raises the issue of subjectivity in our relationships with them. Where art is concerned, permutation of the roles of producer-transmitter and consumer-receiver is tending to redefine the traditional division between creator and spectator. In the wake of last season’s spotlighting of “forms of affects”, we shall be looking into not only images’ affective charge, but also the possibility of considering them as pure events, independent of all relationship with a subject, all intentionality and all perceptual experience.

Cumbrous and unpronounceable in its totality, the season’s title can be simplified down to “or-the-persistence of-images” (although its full version does contain other elements). Its notation makes it look like the Internet address of an image; but in isolation, picked at random from among so many other possibilities, it stands for nothing but itself. More than a reference to any particular image, this title is the medium for an image. As such it points up three things at once: the persistence of images, a specific image and an actual physical medium.