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Talking (About) Images
Curated by Francesca Lazzarini and Marta Rovetta
May 29th to June 12th 2018
Opening: Tuesday, May 29th 2018, 6 PM
Kunsthalle Graz, Conrad von Hötzendorf Straße 42A, Graz, Austria

After its first stage at Galerija Kortil in Rijeka, the reflection on the role and power of images in contemporary society proposed by Talking (about) images continues in Graz, at the Kunsthalle, from May 29th to June 12th 2018.
The project, curated by Francesca Lazzarini and Marta Rovetta for Cultural Inventory, with the support of the Region of Styria, develops through four exhibitions and as many inaugural events with eight artists of various nationalities and different means of expression – The Cool Couple, Severin Hirsch, Kate Howlett-Jones, Neža Knez, Maryam Mohammadi, Nika Rukavina, Alessandro Sambini and Christoph Szalay -, exploring the relationship between images and the reality they represent, the mechanisms that regulate their production and diffusion, the ambiguities that they can generate, but also their potential as a universal and shared language.
In fact, unlike words, images do not require translations to be read by people in different part of the world, being apparently a limitless tool for global communication. Nevertheless, their interpretation is anything but objective: images are intrinsically ambiguous. Due to their power of persuasion, images play a key function in the capitalist and globalised system: they are vehicles for ideology and one of the main weapons in the struggle over an arena of strategic importance today, the collective imaginary.
So Talking (about) Images focuses on images as an autonomous language: as in the participatory project and related installation Imag(in)e Ka-mi- ze by Neža Knez, that employs images as a children’s mean to design a better future; the work Lemmigs by Severin Hirsch, that spurs for an independent use of images and texts conceived as equal symbols; Maryam Mohammadi’s Memories Icon, that explores how images shape personal memories as well as their unconscious visual cultural effects. At the same time, the show reflects on the potentialities and limits of this language, or on its interaction with other means of expression. The work Everyday by The Cool Couple assembles meme GIFs underlying the influence on our existences of “secondary visuality”. In Kate Howlett-Jones’s Pocket Dictionary of the world’s Most Iconic Photographs every image-entry is defined by a poetic text resulting from mixed commentaries