The 2025 International Workshop on Visual History & Theory will take place between October 15-16. It takes as its starting point the notion of gesture, which operates across a range of literal and conceptual levels.
Nothing could be more suggestive here than Lebohang Kganye’s emblematic work Under the Influence of a Dream (2023), reproduced here courtesy of the artist. Part of the series ‘Two Stories of (Hi)stories, 2023’ that undertook the cutting, repositioning, reframing and re-illuminating of images from the colonial collections of the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Cologne, it sets many things into motion. It exemplifies the links between gesture, movement and freedom, or the desire for such through the (micro)gestures of care, repair, reclamation.
The workshop organisers now invite proposals that consider the following themes: temporal, movement, ethical, insubstantial, and carrying. Workshop participants are invited to consider these and other openings around notions of the micro-, and gesture, movement and freedom in relation to images and other media.