The intersections produced by and within the image in its widest sense, tend towards the possibilities of many things. It is in this space of production, of something being produced that we find ourselves thinking of space and space-making.
When the image enters, it makes apparent an arrival; an assertion of belonging to and in certain spaces. Mappings that seek the fierceness of both remembrance and forgetting—how all of this is inhabited, and how it inhabits us in turn.
Entering is reminiscent of intrusions. Of thresholds crossed. Of audible interfaces, reactivated. Of puncturings, piercings and wounds.
As the image enters, it invites us to consider participation and participatory modes of being; of collectivity and collective space. What does it mean to enter into conversation, and to stay with its shifting tenor? How do we read the textures of collaboration, and the agential in its permutations?
And then, to residue and remnant. The force of traces formulating but not contained as remainders—instead reframed as potent initiators. The remnant perseveres, not just in abstraction but with specific, certain citation. It writes back. It rewords itself in the making of images and worlds. It refuses to adhere to that which it cannot enter.
It carries this refusal as it works to imagine and shape personhoods and worlds.
In Every Force Evolves a Form, Guy Davenport writes, “A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.” How do we think of what propels us, what we make, and the processes that encase the force of intuition in making?
Here, we reflect on how so much of what we make within contemporary art practice is driven by our responses to acts of witnessing, and to our proximities and precarities in the face of uncertainty.
Where the image occurs—in spectral, liminal, solid, inherited, fractured, encased, shadowed, rethought, slowed, emancipated forms—these enquiries and gestures explore how it unspools across notions of representation and challenges to the same.
What is this moment defined by? What does it constitute? The image as site, recalibrates; and the proposition—to be, to act—continues to extend into radical dimensions. How do we gather in and as we make, alongside our making that holds on to the depths of hope, the depths of desire?
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The title is an excerpt from Audre Lorde’s Afterimages (1997), a poem that explores how memories linger and shape our understanding of the world. In its larger thematic array of memory, trauma and violence, the poem performs a close reading of how images embed themselves into our individual and collective psyches, and how the inescapable trace of certain events imprints on us in pervasive ways.
The poem is a timeless example of how the personal and political nature of grief, oppression, community formation and remembrance can stoke the flames of change and upheaval. The “afterimage” extends as a resounding concept and methodology that continues to ground our contemporary experience of crisis, resistance, resilience and rest.