The collection explores repetition in relation to intimacy, laughter, technology, familiarity, and fear proposing a new vocabulary for understanding what is at stake in works that repeat.
A diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, considers the interaction of politics and the visual in such topics as the political consequences of a photograph taken by an Israeli soldier in a Palestinian house in Ramallah; AIDS activism; images of social suffering in Iran; the “forensic architecture” of claims to truth; and the “Make Poverty History” campaign. Transcending disciplines, they trace a broader image complex whereby politics is brought to visibility through the mediation of specific cultural forms that mix the legal and the visual, the hermeneutic and the technical, the political and the aesthetic.
Publication based on the symposium held on the occasion of the exhibition at MUMOK, Vienna in 2005.