Critical Visualities Seminar: Recurring Images. On the Material Conditions of Their Return

Historically, painting, photography and cinema have portrayed the displacement of objects, subjects and scenes caused by a violent colonising tendency of the image to impose its centrality. We need only observe the complex visual economy between background and figure and their dynamics of correspondence to catch a glimpse of the hidden powers that determine what prevails on the surface and what gets relegated to the background; what stays in the frame and what is left out. As a consequence of this displacement, visuality shows a dialectic economy between the visible and the invisible, between “that which is present” and that which is latent but returns in a recurring manner.

With their near-ghostly quality, images travel in time and on occasions become suspended outside temporality. Recurring images overcome the anaesthetic condition imposed on them by the system of capitalist spectacle and, by becoming active again, are capable of surpassing any reality determined to exhaust them. These are active and activating images: they rise, they travel, they move and excite us by altering the commonly accepted narratives. These are images that return again and again.

This seminar focuses on artistic practices that seek the return of objects, subjects, scenes and landscapes that were deprived of visual centrality in the past, but keep returning to the present with a new intentionality. Devices such as cinema, exhibitions, opera or a fall of the tarot cards are used as artistic resources to demonstrate the disappearance and reappearance of images, together with the aesthetic, political and phenomenological consequences of such operations.

Recurring images are witnesses to a destitution in times past and a restitution in the future. As for their effect on the present, we should ask ourselves: what makes them come back? What are the material conditions of their return?

Guest speakers: Roger Bernat and Roberto Fratini, Aurora Fernández Polanco, Rana Hamadeh, Teresa Lanceta, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson, Vincent Meessen and Wendelien van Oldenborgh.

Directed by Leire Vergara and Pablo Martínez.

Programme

Tuesday, September 19
First session
4pm: Presentation by Pablo Martínez, MACBA’s Head of Programming, and Leire Vergara, independent curator and director of Bulegoa, office for art and knowledge based in Bilbao and committed to developing artistic research.
4:30pm: Aurora Fernández Polanco. Professor at the Department of Contemporary Art History of the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. 
5:30pm: Teresa Lanceta. Artist and lecturer at Escola Massana, Barcelona. Her work evolves from textiles and writing. 
6:30pm: Break
7pm: Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson. Artists and filmmakers.

Wednesday, September 20
Second session
10:30am: Roger Bernat and Roberto Fratini. Roger Bernat is a playwright and theatre director. He uses theatre as a laboratory to reflect on creativity. Roberto Fratini is a playwright, dance theoretician and lecturer at the Institut del Teatre, Barcelona. 
11:30am: Break
Noon: Rana Hamadeh. Visual and performance artist from Lebanon based in the Netherlands. 
1pm: Vincent Meessen. Artist. Through the use of various media, Meessen aims to ‘experience the document and document the experience’. 
2pm: Lunch break

Third session 
4:30pm: Wendelien von Oldenbourgh. Artist who develops works, whereby the cinematic format is used as a methodology for production and as the basic language for various forms of presentation. 
5:30pm: Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson. Artists and filmmakers.

Admission to the entire seminar: 15 EUR. Free for Friends of MACBA. Advance booking required. 
Price per session: 5 euros at the box office. Simultaneous translation: English-Spanish. This activity will be streamed live.