Quoting, borrowing and re-using images has always been a gateway to art history, but the appearance of fi lm and photography has particularly encouraged those practices. The itineraries of these new images—the changes in their nature, value and uses—continue to obsessively hold our contemporaries’ attention. This exhibition off ers insight into visual reactivations in the specific field of contemporary art. It pays tribute to a generation of artist-scavengers who collect and awaken forgotten images borrowed from others.

The works are in various media (collage, sculpture, drawing, video, print, etc.), but all of them take photographs or photograms as their starting point, as a way to prompt thinking about how these tools used to capture reality. The guidelines for selecting the works are based not only on the diversity of their approaches and techniques, but also on the strong theoretical and formal dialogue they can bring about when put in the same space. The show’s design doubles the process of reactivating the images by making visitors walk on a physical as well as imaginary floating space. How do images haunt our individual memories and feed our collective imagination? How do they satisfy our scopic drive and our desire to uncover the hidden? How does re-using them allow us to think about the fragmentation and violence of bodies and identities? Why do images vanish and how can the power of their invisibility be understood? What stories do they tell? How can their multiplicity, profusion and abundance be played with?

Since its inception, this project has been conceived and developed on a dialogue and encounters, between pre-existing images reactivated by artists, between an art historian and an artist, and between the works within the exhibition space. For there is an ‘other’ in every one of us.

Agnès Geoffray and Julie Jones