Visual Literacy

Nowadays, debates on visual culture are so omnipresent that serious theoretical considerations of this term are called for. If large parts of our communication are dependent on images, we need to learn how to “read” them, so that education – on any level – should not solely be text-based.

Visual literacy seeks to provide answers to – among others – the following questions: how do images act and function? How do images reflect on and discuss specific issues? And how does commissioned work rely on distinct rhetorical strategies and which effects do these impart?

As virtual space has enhanced and changed public space, so have images’ spheres of action extended. When images are used and consumed digitally, religiously connotated terms like faith and skepticism often come up. In this context, it is crucial to point out that reception is not solely geared towards categories like “true” or “false”. Instead, the material and medial conditions that put forth pictorial meaning need to be defined alongside the ways in which those conditions and affordances can be analysed.

Visual history and its theory is a genuinely interdisciplinary science and still too weakly institutionalized in Germany. To different effects, the image is considered in several disciplines: as art in art history, as a medium in media studies, as a document in history, and as a social phenomenon in sociology. Still too often, these discourses coexist independently rather than jointly working on shared questions, methods, and concepts.

For these questions, Bildwissenschaft (image-science) is beneficial by focusing on visual literacy and working across disciplines. As an interdisciplinary institution that connects the universities of the UAR as well as artistic institutions and museums, KWI is ideally positioned to organize and actively shape this discourse.

Contact: Dr Anja Schürmann