Pre-opening artists’ talks »The Militant Image«
Infos
Pre-opening artists’ talks
September 25, 2014, 5 pm
With Jayce Salloum (CA), Paola Yacoub (LB), Urban Subjects (AT/CA)
Intro
Images of the eruption of revolutions, the momentum of particular liberation struggles, the concatenation of social movements as well as heroic or overlooked individual moments of resistance and refusal—and even acts of courage and love—have historically built an archive of militant images. Yet, as powerful as images of militancy remain—from militant cinema to movement posters to images grabbed in the heat of the moment—their impact within a contemporary media landscape saturated with images of social unrest is not guaranteed. In the political and media terrain of the present, what makes an image militant?
The militant image of any period is in dialogue with its historical present at the same time as it contests the shape of the present. Kodwo Eshun and Ros Gray convincingly argue that bringing past moments of struggle, as they are pictured in the militant image, into the present can ignite “a revision of the historiographies of the present” by making an “afterlife” for the militant image through recirculation.1 This complex temporality of the militant image opens the past through historical, affective, and profoundly political conjunctures. Sparking off of the conditions of our present as “a thing that is sensed and under constant revision,”2 the militant image gives a political and affective weight to the imagination of future acts of militancy. Yet, despite a productive and poetic hope in the ability of the militant image to both represent and produce acts of militancy—to be the image of a condition and to create that condition—the militant image is not self-identical to militancy but agitates the expectation of representation and builds a visual politics.