TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes hosts the 18th International Photography Biennial Fotonoviembre until February 22.
Rooms B, C, Lobby and The Videoclub
The Vertigo of Images (El vértigo de las imágenes), an exhibition curated by Marta Dahó Masdemont
Artists: Teresa Arozena, Ismaïl Bahri, Eline Benjaminsen and Dayna Casey, Bleda y Rosa, Patricia Dauder, Erik Estany Tigerström, Max de Esteban, Carla Filipe, Lee Friedlander, Marina Gadonneix, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Linarejos Moreno, Man Ray, Joana Moll, Pilar Monsell, Julia Montilla, Silvia Navarro Martín, Mabel Palacín, Joel Peláez Amador, Pérez y Requena, Aleix Plademunt, Lúcia Prancha, Xavier Ribas, Lotty Rosenfeld, Laia Serra Cribillers, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Damián Ucieda, Oriol Vilapuig, Werker Collective and Tobias Zielony.
At a time that relentlessly announces its own failure and repeats that we have been left without a future, without a stable foundation on which to build a social life or an ecosystem we can inhabit without weakening it, the feeling of standing on the brink of collapse has become an almost structural condition. This state of unease not only permeates our ways of life, but also informs how we relate to images. What place do they occupy today within this complex weave of experiences? What possibilities do they offer for thinking about what is happening, beyond their complicities with new systems of production?
Although in recent years the massive circulation of visual products has intensified through devices that encourage standardization and accelerated consumption, this has not deprived images of their critical potential, their capacity to pose questions or interrupt what is taken for granted. Despite attempts to reduce them to algorithmic flows or vectors of surveillance, images resist being confined to a representational or utilitarian function. They undoubtedly confront us with new challenges, particularly in the field of photography. The proliferation of images generated by computational systems or by generative artificial intelligence models is erasing any clear boundaries between the photographic, the digital, and the simulated. Yet if anything has historically characterized this medium, it is its liminal condition: it has never been the result of a single technology, but an expanded field in constant reformulation. For this reason, rather than asking what the image is, it may be more urgent to investigate what the image does—how it acts, how it implicates us.
This new scenario forces us to reconsider not only our modes of perception and understanding, but also the ways in which images interpellate us, affect us, and bind us to the world. In dialogue with these contemporary shifts, it becomes pertinent to turn our gaze back to the historical structures that have shaped our visual understanding. The canonical narrative of art and photography has traditionally privileged a logic of reading and decoding: the image as something placed before the viewer’s eye to be interpreted. However, over the last two decades, multiple voices from philosophy and artistic practices have agreed on repositioning the notion of the image by freeing it from its reduction to object, representation, or evidence of the visible. From this standpoint, images would define a field of exploration, a process of sensitive and relational thinking whose seismic force overflows any overly restrictive boundaries.
To attend to the vertigo of images, as this exhibition proposes, is not to trace a thematic itinerary. On the contrary, the projects that articulate it activate other ways of looking, imagining, and being with images in order to critically revisit the experience that shapes our relationship with them, without ignoring the complexities that define their current condition. The invitation is therefore to explore how images configure the visible and the thinkable, acknowledging their power to destabilize what is presented as natural or inevitable. In this sense, the curatorial proposal responds to the challenge of continuing to think about photography and the photographic, but without the limitation of restricting itself to a specific modality or focusing exclusively on its most recent technical dimension. Drawing on the connective character of images, and following the arguments developed by philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón[1], the exhibition is organized around a set of works that, from different approaches and areas of interest, contribute to shifting the notion of the image from an objectual dimension to an experiential and performative one. As Soto Calderón notes, we do not see images as we see objects, but through them. Yet the crucial importance of this shift has not been sufficiently recognized.
In this context, the vertigo that lends its title to the exhibition does not refer solely to a subjective sensation, but to a structural condition: that of a visual culture subjected to unsustainable speeds, to an image production designed for machines rather than bodies, whose exponential implementation and growing sophistication are diminishing the agency that can be exercised in relation to their use. Facing this vertigo in turn entails taking a position—not only in the face of its decline, but also in its contingency. If addressing this issue is a priority, it is because it marks the precise point at which the impulse to keep imagining is at stake, to generate new possibilities where they are being denied. Beyond their diversity, each of the projects gathered here sets in motion the formative power of images. They do so through gestures that institute a reclaimed freedom, through reassemblies that alter the usual flow of images, or through scenes that make room for what has not been considered, shifting toward the edges of the visible, where imagination can unfold more freely.
If these perspectives defend the capacity of images to open unforeseen spaces of sensitive attention, the curatorial approach also emphasizes certain underlying aspects of the systems that produce them. Regarding photographic or audiovisual practices, it cannot be ignored that, due to their technical characteristics, as well as the implications of data circulation and storage, they participate in forms of resource exploitation and extractivism whose ecosocial impact is increasingly severe. In this respect, The Vertigo of Images problematizes situations of critical interdependence. Not only to underline that digital media possess their own materialities, but also because their infrastructures impose conditions of life. The symptoms of vertigo—multiple and diverse—are the alert that directs our attention to what is occurring in the vortex of images.
[1] Andrea Soto Calderón, The Performative Nature of Images (Metales pesados, 2020); Material Imagination (Metales pesados, 2022); Images that Resist. Genealogy as a Critical Method (La Virreina. Centre de la Imatge / Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2023); Indisciplines of the Gaze (Kikuyo Editorial, 2025).
