Our experiences and practices of the image are characterized by an ever-expanding circulation across proliferating and ever more diverse circuits. Scholars, artists, curators, and other practitioners have frequently sought to understand these changes in the name of globalization. Some have focused on technological transformation (new media and network or digital culture). Others have emphasized shifting zones of cultural contact (migration, transnationalism, postcoloniality). Curator Okwui Enwezor thus speaks of a “global image ecology.” Interactive media artist Graham Harwood speaks of the “networked image.” Thanks to these projects, we are working with and thinking about images in new ways, and with a focus on movement, transformation, and rhythms of access.

But images are also lost, forgotten, deleted. Structures of archivization are shifting. With the death of old technologies—and geopolitical inequalities in the distribution of new ones—we find ourselves handling images whose futures are uncertain. There are furthermore whole classes of images whose original contexts are marked by forms of sacredness, consecration, and propriety. These haunt the discourses of global circulation and expose the fantasied openness and access otherwise. The archive is troubled by two ethical and practical imperatives: to maintain and preserve the past while at the same time respecting its own modes of exclusion and memorialization, which may well be at odds with other contemporary drives.

We invite you to reflect on the image archive in transformation. We leave the field open, but we are particularly interested in work that is concerned with, or takes place in, non-Western or non-European space. This project began as an enquiry into an inter-disciplinary distinction between contextualizing practices, such as sociology and ethnography, and formalist approaches—those paying attention to the genesis and problematics of specific images and works. The aim of this workshop is to explore specific tensions between the archive’s singularities and the global contexts of circulation, and, in so doing, to create new frameworks and methods for critical practice in relation to archived bodies of work.