International Symposium

Visual Construction of Culture

The Croatian Writers' Society, the theory, culture and visual arts journal Tvrđa, and the Zagreb Centre for Visual Studies are organizing an international interdisciplinary symposium entitled Visual Construction of Culture, to be held at the Mimara Museum in Zagreb on 26 and 27 October 2007 (Friday and Saturday).

Over the past ten-odd years, the interest for the establishment of Visual Culture/Visual Studies as a new interdisciplinary field of scientific study has surpassed the boundaries of contemporary visual arts. As W. J. T. Mitchell, one of the leading theoreticians of visuality and the image in the media age, puts it, the new way in which images are created in the digital age requires a paradigm shift.

This visual, pictorial and cultural turn marks the liberation of the image from the dominant paradigms in language philosophy and from the prevalent iconology interpretations in art history. Today, the picture is understood as a medium of communication and as a contextual field of autoreferential denotation. It is no longer a "holy" picture or a picture of High Art, but a multiplied and networked world of visuality which demands its own new grammar, syntax, semiotics and hermeneutics.

Culture can no longer be explained by social identity theories. Visual culture is constructed autonomously and in the media age it is a prerequisite for the cognition of reality and its various interpretations. The Symposium will therefore focus especially on the need for a new approach to the concepts of picture, visuality and media in our time.

How do pictures function in the culturally pluralistic and ideologically hybrid postmodern societies? Why can the new picture only be understood in its (cultural policy-, society- and ideology-related) context?