THE __________________IMAGE
"Can art, in fact, mobilize change? And should we be expecting this from art in the first place?"
- Heba Y. Amin
With these questions, visiting artist Heba Y. Amin frames the social possibilities of art to mobilize change, or to disrupt dominant ways of seeing and dwelling in space. Beginning from Amin’s speculation, Images that Take, Images that Give offers a parallel idea: even if art is blocked in its attempts to actualize cultural or political change, art can nonetheless shift the ways we see.
As part of a third-year undergraduate seminar and studio course, Images that Take, Images that Give is the outcome of our collective and individual research-based approaches. The course was structured by the production of a collective glossary of image-types initiated by research on the Operational Image, the Migrant Image, the Militant Image and the Poor Image; from there, we identified other types of images that have forms of agency. Students developed their own terms from their research and in relation to the work they produced for this exhibition. The glossary is also a discursive element in the exhibition: the terms are distributed throughout the space and build relations between the works. The glossary writes across the gaps separating the opacity of research and the exhibition space. Through the glossary, gestures of searching, tracing, and following are manifested as processes of producing, connecting, and creating. We imagine that the glossary can live beyond our own contributions, even after our exhibition is taken down, as it naturally invites more agencies to join its ranks. We hope that our artworks, whether they are viewed in the gallery or onscreen, provoke uncertainty and curiosity about the potential of images to change the ways we see.
