The 2025 International Workshop on Visual History & Theory will take place between October 14-15. 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 RautenstrauchJoest 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 movement towards freedom often starts with a simple gesture. Rising up is a gesture.
Before even attempting to carry out a voluntary and shared ‘action’ we rise up with a simple gesture that suddenly overturns the burden that submission had, until then, placed upon us … To rise up means to throw off the burden weighing down on our shoulders, keeping us from moving. It is to break a certain present …This quotation from Uprisings by Georges Didi-Huberman (2016, 66) suggests many potential openings that workshop participants will consider. They include ‘Temporal’, ‘Movement’, ‘Ethical’, ‘Insubstantial’, and‘Carrying’.
Keynotes
In Black Women’s Hands: A History of Gestures in Photography and Textile
Contemporary Black female artists have reclaimed the everyday labor and domestic motions women have historically performed, as artistic gestures in their own right. For example, the ceramic and bronze sculptures of the African-American artist Simone Leigh have referenced vernacular processes like washing chores and needlework.
An Archive and Forms of Sight: Gestures of Madness
My history of madness in the Belgian Congo will rely on tracking transactional, micro, and urgent documents as gestures. These promise to open “spheres of ethos,” with human riddles, forms of upheaval, and violence (Agamben 1992).