With Yvan Alvarez, Tim Bruggeman, Aline d’Auria, Sixtine de Thé, Lina Geoushy, Mårten Lange, Sebastian Stadler, Sarah Jade Sullivan, Nabil Tazi, Bernard Tullen, Farren van Wyk, Magdalena Wysocka & Claudio Pogo, Yana Wernicke, Yujie Zhou
The Shudder Palace explores some of the ramifications of the inheritance of images, their circulation, appropriation and reinterpretation.
We are all recipients of images and of the narratives they convey, which leave their mark on the construction of our very identity and on the ways in which we experience the world. The links between images, collective history and individual memory are as complex as they are profound. These images include those found in family albums, whose legacy can be a source of emancipation or oppression, as much as images disseminated by mass media, some of which brutally impose themselves as the icons of an era, while some types of image become influential through the sheer force of their repeated appearance. Without us being fully aware of it, diffuse but firmly rooted visual cultures subtly shape part of our identities, our places in society, our values and our worldviews.
At a time of critical re-examination of the imageries that have shaped the world’s imagination, The Shudder Palace offers a collection of works by contemporary artists that open up possibilities for reappropriation, reinterpretation and recirculation of images received as collective or individual heritage.
The exhibition aims to offer a critical, but also poetic examination of the circulation of images, the common visual cultures they inevitably shape, and the individual identities they leave a lasting mark on. What is our agency against the never-ending streams of images we face? What possibility do we have to pause, in order to forge new meanings, to counter dominant narratives that are sometimes as diffuse as they are destructive, but also to welcome and develop connections that bring meaning and emancipation?
