“Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change”

The exhibition at the  International Center of Photography  entitled “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change”  shows the importance of visual culture in accelerating social change.  The  internet allowed news and images to spread faster between people and affect a wider audience. All of the sections of the exhibition such  as: climate change, immigration, gender issues, racial turmoil, terrorism and the 2016 election present how the new media influence spread of information.  

The section that was the most powerful to me was entitled The Flood: Refugees and Representation. It’s an  investigation of the European refugee crises. There was one work in particular that I found to be moving. An artist Hakan Topal created a beautiful installation Untitled( Ocean) that combined video, 3-D animation, limestone powder and sound. The depiction of a Syrian child,whose drowned body was photographed on a beach in Turkey in 2015, was a starting point for the footage.  The surface on which the images were projected was the limestone that evoked the Turkish beach.  As images were changing one could hear the sound of the ocean in the background.  According to Topal this work shows the disjunction between lived and virtual experience of despair. Projected images came from the Internet and were an example of the “virtual experience of despair”, however by making them almost three dimensional the artist made them seem more real.

To conclude, the exhibition taken as a whole can be overwhelming. The images shown are often dark and saddening, but all in all it’s a thought-provoking depiction of the world’s condition.