featuring Ed Kashi
February 19 – March 14, 2015
Cambridge University
United Kingdom
Viral: Photography in the Age of Social Media – a group exhibition expanding on the notion of “viral” and its impact on everyday life and our understanding of the world at the University of Cambridge in the UK. In conjunction with the exhibition launch on Feb. 19th, there will be a wine reception and academic colloquium Virulence: Visualizing the African Body as a Vector of Epidemics. Included among the roster of 17 photographers with images in this exhibition is VII Photographer Ed Kashi.
“From Ebola to social media, internet memes, and online videos, what “goes viral” has come to underscore the potentials and dangers of our interconnected world. Both vital and lethal, all things viral are the subject of this new collaboration between United Photo Industries and CRASSH.
Shared, tweeted, liked, appropriated, manipulated: photography and short-form videos have become the undisputed visual language of our generation, a powerful communication tool at a time of shortening attention spans and simmering visual saturation. No longer able to imagine (or care to remember) a time unmediated by the social/digital experience, we have willingly surrendered our understanding of the world to the filtered collective-consciousness of the feed. In the words of conceptual artist Joan Foncuberta,”Images don’t represent the world any longer – images compose the world”.
The result of a collaboration between the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at Cambridge University, and United Photo Industries, Viral: Photography in the Age of Social Media is a juried-competition based photographic exhibition that will be on view through March 14, 2015.”
