When Images Collide

Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, Feb 29 - September 13, 2020

Part of the Biennale für aktuelle Fotografie – The Lives and Loves of Images, 2020, curated by David Campany

Photography has always given rise to striking individual images, but in general it has been a medium of combination. Photographs are brought together to form larger and more complex propositions about the world. Series, archives, collections, albums, suites, sequences, stories, narratives.

When visual culture was dominated by the printed page, the relations between images could be fixed. In the era of the electronic screen and the Internet, the daily experience of images often feels more like montage and collage: fragmentary, multi-directional and deferred. It is an environment suggestive of possible meanings but also one that distracts from resolution or conclusion.

When Images Collide brings together a range of current and recent practices that explore image combination. At the core is the diptych form, which is perhaps the building block of all editing, all image assembly. From here, the exhibition moves in several directions, toward complex collage in analogue and digital forms, toward the uses of the still image in film and video and toward 3D image sculpture and installation.

You will find the room list for download here.