Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture

Bringing together international scholars from various disciplines, Precarious Visualities examines the transformation of our relation to images in contemporary visual culture. Through the study of exemplary media arts works and practices–photography, film, video, performance, installations, webcams, etc.–, these essays call attention to the precarious attachments of contemporary spectatorship. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that keeps oscillating between visibility and invisibility; to be interpellated by screen-images that have ceased to mirror, resemble or refer in that their power lies exclusively on their simulating, hallucinating, blinding or generating function; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed–through surveillance devices–to the gaze of new figures of authority, unanticipated Others: the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity and interrelatedness.Attentive to these precarious attachments, Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship, as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, yet persistently prolific in its cultural, social and political effects.