In this digitally driven world, we are surrounded by images. An illusion prevails that we can get rid of them as soon as we switch off our computers and smartphones. However, images live long after we go offline: they transgress the realm of television and computer screens and enter our everyday world, albeit slightly grazed. The digital image is a tricky inhabitant of our screens and streets, it possesses two major qualities: elasticity (it can be shrunk, enlarged, zipped, cut, pasted, etc.) and profusion (it can be in multiple places simultaneously). It is both strong and weak, visible (visualisation) and invisible (pure data) and in this respect, as described by Boris Groys, the digital image ‘is functioning as a Byzantine icon – as a visible copy of invisible God.’
The artworks in this exhibition are by an international group of artists who are concerned with the very power of the image today. The real task for them is to filter the images, to recognise the systems that images operate within, to follow their paths of circulation in the contemporary (art) world, to predict their abilities and the sociopolitical, aesthetic and ethical dimensions images acquire as they traverse different realms of reality. How does visual circulation mediate the world and how does it reformulate ideas such as political power, culture, and subject? What is the role of a computer-generated image in the anaesthetisation of the real? What are the possibilities and limits of image circulation in a digitally-aware contemporary art world and how does it affect the notions of originality, authenticity and value? Image is not a theme nor is it (only) a motif; one should imagine the image on this occasion as more of a conceptual tool to help us think about the events and phenomena happening in the world today, in which image is entangled in one way or another.
Curated by Inesa Brašiškė
Grazed Images is an international group exhibition at CAC Vilnius on view till the 9th of August. With the participation of Hito Steyerl, Harun Farocki, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Factum Arte, Gintaras Didžiapetris, and Seth Price.
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Harun Farocki, Interface, 1995, video (double projection), color and b/w, sound, 23 min.
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Seth Price, Redistribution (2007- ), video, color, sound, 44:15 min.
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 14 min.
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Factum Arte’s videos: 3D Lucida Scanner at work; flatbed printer printing a small relief in registration; 3D scanning San Petronio, Bologna; panoramic photography, camera head test.
Pierre Huyghe, One Million Kingdoms, 2001, video, color, sound, 6:45 min.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, AnnLee in Anzenzone, 2000, video, color, sound, 3:25 min.
Grazed Images, installation view at CAC Vilnius
Gintaras Didžiapetris, Teapot, 2015, paper mural, dimensions variable.
Seth Price, Digital Video Effect: “Editions”, 2006, video, color, sound, 11 min.
Seth Price, Digital Video Effect: “Editions”, 2006, video, color, sound, 11 min.
Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, 2009-2010, video, color, sound.
Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, 2009-2010, video, color, sound.
Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, 2009-2010, video, color, sound.
Harun Farocki, Serious Games I-IV, 2009-2010, video, color, sound.
Image courtesy CAC Vilnius and Andrej Vasilenko.
