Images That Move (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series)

Images play a significant part in projects of “poetic world-making” and political transformation. They participate in the production of commensuration or of incommensurability, enact moments of prophecy or exposure, and attract or repel spectators’ attention. But any examination of images in motion must also recognize the blockages and breakdowns that prevent their movement, as well as the enframings or “stickinesses” that trap them in particular places and prevent them from reaching others. Images That Move explores topics ranging from high art to mass media, religious iconography to pornography, and popular photography to political cartoons in a range of contexts and media including photography in early twentieth-century China, art and literature in contemporary South Africa, upscale real estate development in India, occult media images and the aesthetic of appearance in urban Indonesia, and film censorship in Nigeria.