Unimages (2017-)

Unimages are deviations from plausible body states and self-presentations, performative anomalies that affect the automatic readings and perceptions. Representations are not allowed to stabilise, actions withdraw from images, constantly escaping readings, playing tricks with our minds and bodies. The capacity of seeing and understanding, of forming coherent images about what is in front of our eyes, may be questioned and refreshed. Unimages are inserted in contexts where something else is already happening, adding an extra layer to their ordinary function (art spaces, supermarkets, airports…). Meetings are produced between two types of audiences, attentions, situations, performers. We tend to conform to personal and cultural images about ourselves and reality, to the known, becoming images and identities in the process. Unimages explores ways to move outside body images, identities, and outside our minds sometimes. It intervenes in the implicit process of transforming reality into images and certainties.
 
It feels like we're more and more forced to admit that the current images, representations, certainties on which we try to control ourselves and the world, should be changed. Even better might be to exit altogether the mirage of images, to abandon the society of spectacle in which "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation."(Debord) According to Deleuze, for thought to not be anymore "crushed under an image", we need sensible, affective, perplexing encounters that force us to think. This could also mean that we need to explore outside the main territory of images and representation based art. Unimages are affect and presence based – embodied, perplexing experiences that might jolt the bodies out of their image controlled daily choreographies. Unimages can appear uninvited at some venues – Unofficial Unworks.

 
Photo documentation (limited relevance because Unimages are based on affects and presences, impossible to be captured in photos):
 
Unimages at Feminist Futures, Hordaland Kunstsenter Bergen, 2022:















 
Becoming Unimages, sometimes - workshop at USF Bergen, 2022:



Unimages, Art Opening at Home, Bucharest, 2022:


 
Unimages at Seen, Leilei gallery, Bucharest, 2021:





Unimages in Unofficial Unworks at supermarkets:







Unimages in Unofficial Unworks, Berardo Museum, Lisbon, 2020:
 





 
Unimages at Europalia, workspacebrussels, 2019:

"Some visitors are becoming Unimages sometimes."

 
Unimages at Durational Life Theory, Salonul de Proiecte Bucharest, 2018: