Only in their visible manifestations do socially relevant demands receive the attention of the media, for even images reflect, document and influence politics. The political and social ideas inscribed in them create collective imaginative spaces of a different future, and sometimes even new realities. An inspection of political iconography shows, in particular, how forms of protest develop their own visual language and combine gestures and symbols to make significant clusters of meaning with a high recognition factor.
Anna Jermolaewa has long been interested in such aesthetics and the mediatization of resistance in the appropriation of artistic strategies. Her photographs, video works and installations address and analyze visual symbolic languages, which occur in both democratic and totalitarian structures of power. But the question also arises of the social structures that bring these about and the reasons for this visual rhetoric being accepted. [?]
The full version of this article by Vanessa Joan Müller is published in EIKON, issue 101 and will be available from March 8, 2018. Vanessa Joan Müller is an art historian and curator. She heads the Dramaturgy Department of Kunsthalle Wien.