Images as Agents of the Political

Concept: Uwe Fleckner, Benjamin Fellmann

Nowadays, images surround us everywhere and at all times. In works of art, media and networks, in advertising and on platforms, they convey factual information as well as polemic-critical statements, and have a direct or indirect effect on their addressees. In the age of the mobile Internet, augmented reality, and the algorithmic control, generation, and evaluation of images, their significance for active and future coexistence in societies is constantly increasing across the globe. Political iconography is a visual phenomenon that has evolved historically, but it is also the scientific method of its study: in art and visual studies, it provides an understanding of complex visual contexts of life in the modern as well as post-modern world and of the potential for political impact that images have in a spectrum ranging from information to propaganda. It was Aby Warburg who laid the foundation for its scholarly study at his Hamburg library of cultural studies when he not only included it in his epoch- and genre-spanning research on images, but also created an archive on the political propaganda of mass media warfare already during the First World War, which attempted to preserve and analyze the mobilizing forces of agitation on the basis of historical research. This led to an awareness of images as agents of the political that develops, to this day, an enduring international impact.

With its focus topic »Images as Agents of the Political«, the Warburg-Haus aims to provide the space for taking a closer look at political visual phenomena and for discussing questions of the current significance of political images in a global context: From current iconoclasms and propagandistic warfare, visual strategies of targeted information and disinformation, the role of images in crises and pandemics, but also in successful coexistence and social progress, to strategies of conscious and unconscious visual argumentation in political practice and artistic production.