Image-material-media - A philo-curatorial interrogation

Abstract

Considering intersections of materiality, imageness and objecthood in contemporary art , with works of artists like Shilpa Gupta, Raqs Media Collective and others as instances, the paper will look at contemporary new media art and its ‘Imageness’ interrogating what exactly an ‘image material’ can be over and beyond the visual. The image, often given precedence in anything concerned with artistic experience, is under welcome threat and re­consideration in the contemporary artistic vocabulary. The literal image confronts the viewer with a blatant challenge to misread it. The paper would explore the conscious need to slip away from the first available and most widely circulated reading of the work and explore tangential experiences of new media works. Ranciere, in ‘The future of the image talks’ of the alterity of Images. The Image , he says, refers to nothing else ; it is not a function of a certain technical medium but a system of operations. ‘Imageness’ is a regime of relations between elements and functions. Extending the question of ‘What does it mean when we say there is no longer any reality but only images?’, the paper shall construct few through the artists’ oeuvre, looking at concepts such as the ‘De(i)mage’ , the ‘shuffle’ mode ­ art on loop, ‘sentencing the image’ and the potent ‘literal’ image, which constitute the ‘Image Material’ of new media art. The paper shall inhabit the curatorial as a structural framework of looking at and addressing these issues vis a vis the academic structure of discourse making.