The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presents Visual echoes, an exhibition at its Mönchsberg venue with expansive installations by Susan Hiller, Luis Jacob, Arthur Jafa, Mathias Poledna / Karthik Pandian, and Ana Torfs. In videos, films, photographs, and slides, they scrutinize the streams of pictures circulating in our world and respond with forceful counter-images.

The presentation revolves around a twofold question: How does the ubiquitous profusion of images—from television, cinema, the internet, advertising, fashion, or art—influence our perceptions, our emotions, and our collective recollection? And how can art help us understand the ideologies and histories implicit in it and perhaps even help us read them in new ways?

To make their works, the artists tap into the visual repertoire of our time. They work with found footage as well as fictional imagery created for the purpose that ties in with our collective visual memory. By arranging their material in new ways, subjecting it to radical reduction, or iterating or superimposing it, they create alternative visual orders—with their own rhythms, poetic discontinuities, and trenchant political overtones. What emerge are forceful counter-images: critical visual echoes that defy conventional habits of seeing. The works pinpoint and expose the various mechanisms underlying the deluge of media imagery. Meanwhile, they deliberately also speak to our emotions and physical sensations. Visual echoes invites us to take a closer look: Which pictures shape us—and how do we want to see?