Iconia

We are going through a time when meaning is at once recognized, amplified and eroded by image. The act of creating image questions the double life of symbols: one, as an anchor of collective memory, and the other, as a changing entity, that reshapes desires and aspirations. Images become active and emotive artifacts, which, to paraphrase Aby Warburg, can both reassert and gnaw at the ego.

The name of this exhibition, „Iconia”, stems from the Greek word eikōn, which stands for image or representation. The term icon devirves from the same root and has mainly been used to describe sacred images from Christian traditions.  The town of Iconium (known today as the Turkish town of Konya) and the Greek word eikōn share the same etymological roots. This correspondence, by no means coincidental, is a fertile ground, historically as well as culturally. Both have played significant parts in a regional historical and religious context.

In a larger cultural and social sense, ”an icon” can be a person, an object or a symbol of major significance. In a technological sense, the icon is a tiny image or a pictogram, shown in a user`s graphical interfaces to represent programs, functions, or files. 

By choosing this name, the Iconia exhibition recalls the idea of the image as a core element of the human experience, bringing forth its cultural and historical dimensions, as well as its enduring influence on the interactions pervading contemporary society. 

Iconia does not seek an answer to the question what is an image; rather, it strives to answer what it does: how an image can seduce, divide, and unify. In a world oversaturated with symbols vying for the top spot, the exhibition urges us to question who or what it is that controls the visual lexicon of our age, and what new common chemistry we might conjure up, if we only dared to change the formula.