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For as long as pictures have been among us, they have generated an uneasy mix of suspicion and awe. Perhaps nowhere is that as much the case as with journalism, where pictures are implicated in the larger truth-claims associated with the news. Aligned with a certain version of modernity, pictures are expected to establish and maintain journalism as the legitimate platform for giving shape to events of the real world. Consider how public response to acts of terror, war and natural disaster is affected by decisions not to depict them. Without pictures to show the news, journalism’s capacity to render the real and make it accessible is compromised.

I think we’re very confused about the subject of heroism. I began to get interested in the subject when I realised that we are actually at a historical cesure since the end of the Second World War. It used to be the case although there were many different conceptions of heroism. It used to be unquestioned that everyone wanted to be a hero, and everybody wanted to be a better hero than the next person. What has happened in the last fifty years or so is that the notion of the hero has in many ways been replaced by the notion of the victim.

Now that we’re living most of our lives online, all of us are vulnerable to the internet. The difficulty with young people is that they may not have experienced the dangers of not being able to escape your past until it’s too late. I like to tell the story of Stacy Sneider, the young 22 year old teacher in training who posted a picture of herself on Myspace wearing a pirate’s hat and drinking from a plastic cup that said drunken pirate. Her supervisor at the school said she was promoting drinking and she was fired. She sued and was unable to get her job back and she had to pick an entirely different career. That’s a very dramatic example on how vulnerable all of us are to being judged out of context by a single image or ill chosen picture and once you do that it may be very hard to escape your past.

Les arts visuels, la mode et les médias ont largement contribué à la transformation de la notion de beauté au cours des dernières générations - la beauté ayant été traditionnellement perçue comme une extension de la féminité jusqu'à la fin du XXe siècle. Le féminisme et les mouvements gay, lesbien et queer ont brouillé les définitions de ce qui (et qui) est beau et ou ce qui (et qui) ne l'est pas. Les intervenants exploreront les réflexions et pratiques émancipatrices ayant contribué à révéler les structures cachées de la répression dans les domaines du genre, de la race et de l'âge, et ébranlé certains préjugés iconographiques obsolètes. Visual arts, fashion and media have strongly contributed to the transformation of the notion of beauty over the last few generations. Widely perceived of as an extension of femininity until the late 20th century, feminism and the gay, lesbian and queer movements have eroded clear definitions of who and what is beautiful - and who and what is not. French historian, dancer and choreographer François Chaignaud, American author of The Man in the Grey Flannel Skirt Jon-Jon Goulian, Austrian dancer and choreographer Silke Grabinger, and Salette Gressett, curatorial advisor for the exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum, will discuss how emancipatory artistic reflection and practice has fought to reveal the hidden structures of repression toward gender, race, and age and shake off antiquated visual preconceptions.