International Symposium | Image Worlds: Hybridity

International Symposium | Image Worlds: Hybridity
31 July & 1 August

IIC, New Delhi

Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation is one of the supporting partners of the second iteration of Image Worlds.

This international symposium, co-organised by PhotoSouthAsia and the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, and presented in association with ASAP|art, Offset Projects and the Maze Collective Studio, observes the bicentennial of photography by invoking a remarkable journey – from Ibn al-Haytham’s (the father of modern optics) 10th-century conception of the ‘qamra’ (moonlit chamber) to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce’s grainy 19th-century heliotype—a 900-year trajectory. Through an immersive engagement with contemporary cultural producers, we use the conceptual pivot of ‘hybridity’ to reflect on evolving practices, genealogies and paradigms of image cultures as well as scripto-visual landscapes.

As Homi Bhabha has noted: “All forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity… the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges; rather, hybridity is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge.” And it “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.”

Looking outward at the framed world, and inward at the self – artists, curators, writers and theorists will discuss the emergent aesthetic logics, methods, textures and registers offered through a spectrum of cross-media work. We will examine the diverse splittings and doublings, mirrorings and inversions, tensions and torsions, the whispers and silences – as well as the zoom-ins and zoom-outs – that catalyse and redefine what images can be.

OPEN TO ALL. Register here.