The group exhibition After Images proposes a recalibration of our relationship to seeing and to contemporary image culture. Departing from image-based practices like film and video, for which the Julia Stoschek Foundation is best known, the exhibition expands the visual realm to encompass the haptic and the multisensorial, and moves from the space of the screen to the embodied and experiential path of the visitor. The featured works introduce a broad definition of time-based art, to include kinetic sculptures, sound and light installations, film-based installations, olfactory interventions, scores, and extended reality.

Predominant systems of knowledge have elevated sight above hearing, smell, touch, and taste, despite how seeing is constituted from an amalgam of sensory feedback from the entire body. To question this hierarchy of sight over the other senses, After Images gathers works that rely on materiality, texture, movement, and immersive experiences to convey meaning. The exhibition invites visitors to understand images as just one of the many ways we make sense of the world.

Whether through bubble machines, point clouds, or olfactory notes, different sensorial approaches lead us to alternate forms of representation, including works dealing with constructs of identity and memory. In other works, artists test the limits of light-sensitive film, projectors, or TVs, or withdraw from image-based representation altogether, obscuring mirrors and screens. In times when images at once seem to prevail and to lose their effect due to our over-exposure to them, what forms of agency, empathy, and respite lie in such a recalibration of the senses? Can we imagine what comes after images?