Couldn’t be in Paris between February and June of 2020? Do not worry! You can enjoy the most amazing recent photography exhibition in a virtual tour!
see it for yourself: https://jeudepaume.org/evenement/le-supermarche-des-images-2/
Presentation of the exhibition, by the curators Peter Szendy, Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa:
“We live in a world increasingly saturated with images. Their number is growing so exponentially – today more than three billion images are shared every day on social networks – that the space of visibility seems to be literally submerged. As if it could no longer contain the images that constitute it. As if there was no more space, no more interstices between them.
One would thus approach the limit that Walter Benjamin, already a century ago, imagined under the shape of “a space to hundred percent held by the image”.
Faced with such an overproduction of images, the question of their storage, their management, their transport (even if electronic) and the routes they follow, their weight, the fluidity or viscosity of their exchanges, their fluctuating values – in short, the question of their economy – arises more than ever. In the book from which this exhibition is derived, the economic dimension of the life of images is called iconomy.
The works chosen for “The Supermarket of Images” take an incisive and vigilant look at such issues. On the one hand, they reflect on the upheavals that affect today’s economy in general, whether it is a question of stocks of unheard-of dimensions, rarefied raw materials, work and its mutations towards immaterial forms, or value and its new expressions, notably in the form of cryptocurrencies. But, on the other hand, these works also question the future of visibility in the era of globalized iconomy: drawn into incessant circulation, the image – any image – appears to us
more and more like a freeze frame, that is to say like a momentary crystallization, like the provisionally stabilized balance of the speeds which constitute it.
In the supermarket that is exposed here, in sum, the images of the economy speak each time of the economy of the image.
And vice versa, as if they formed a recto-verso.”
Peter Szendy, Emmanuel Alloa and Marta Ponsa
curators