In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.

Realized within the discursive series Wednesday with… the reading circle aims to support the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement. It is organized in cooperation with ARA – Afro Rainbow Austria, and hosted by Faris Cuchi Gezahegn (representative of ARA) and Katja Stecher (studio das weisse haus). No reading beforehand is required, as we will read the selected text together.