Visual Laboratory

Section for Film and Visual Culture at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw and the Artists-in-Residence Laboratory at the Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw invite you to the Visual Laboratory – a series of meetings, workshops and seminars dedicated to visual culture.

The idea of the Visual Laboratory derives from the work of the visual culture research group at the Institute of Polish Culture. The Laboratory seeks to critically analyze the visual dimension of modern culture and discover new, not necessarily verbal, ways of capturing social reality. The Laboratory also employs methods of collaborating with artists developed at the Ujazdowski Castle, methods designed to pose questions about the nature of artist projects in the local context of Warsaw and Poland, as well as the dual role of the visual component of artistic work – both an object of analysis and a medium of expression. We hope that the collaboration between artists and scholars can provide both sides with new perspectives and unexpected discoveries in the practical and theoretical realm.

The meetings will take place every week or two on Wednesdays at 5pm in the Center for Contemporary Art (or elsewhere, if specified). We invite everyone interested in visual culture, media, as well as visual and performative arts. After each seminar a short summary will be published on the blog „mała kultura współczesna” (see menu).

IKP A-I-R

Marianna Dobkowska, Zofia Dworakowska, Iwona Kurz, Anna Ptak, Ika Sienkiewicz-Nowacka, Agnieszka Sosnowska, Magda Szcześniak, Łukasz Zaremba

warszawa.studio@gmail.com

 

 

Part II: Images as Endangered Species

 

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed.

And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy.

If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not of real things, but of images as well.

 Susan Sontag, On Photography

This spring the Visual Laboratory will explore relations between people and images in the times of a ceaseless, continuous and digital proliferation of representations and self-representations. The popular diagnosis of “image overproduction” gives cause for invoking the ecological discourse – images can be recycled, some of them need to be protected, some are a threat to other images, as well as to people. Issues such as – the ethics of image production and dissemination; the symbiotic or parasitical relation of images and people; efforts of maintaining a „healthy” number of images in an urban environment; as well as the fear of the extinction of certain kinds of images (exemplified by the fear of the possible vanishing of analogue photography) – call for analysis.

***

The seminars will take place on Wednesdays at 5pm. The seminar is open to everyone, please register to the events by sending an email to: warszawa.studio@gmail.com.