Discussion club: The visual turn — how we learn to see

We are back with a new club format. This time it is 36 pages: enough to read the text and join the conversation.

We will talk about the contexts in which public ideas about visual art were formed and changed. When and why did the idea of a “visual turn” appear? What place does the study of visuality have in Ukrainian education today? How did we learn to see and understand visual culture in the first place?

The starting point is Olha Briukhovetska’s article “The Visual Turn in Culture and Cultural Studies” (2018).

Our way of seeing is not neutral: the metaphors we use to describe the world of images reflect their time and its values. But who has the knowledge and tools to analyze this? If we all deal with images constantly — in everyday life, in moments of crisis and celebration, in different social roles — what might visual literacy look like today?

The discussion will follow three lines suggested by the article itself:
• The visual turn as a crisis of language.
• Who “speaks” for the visual today?
• What do images help us see, and what do they leave out of the frame?

Where the conversation goes will also depend on what participants are looking for and interested in. The meeting is open to everyone: practitioners and theorists, people who work with images every day and those just beginning to discover them.

Moderated by Mariia Varlyhina @remarks_mv, a researcher of contemporary Ukrainian and Polish art and PhD candidate at the Jagiellonian University.