This symposium considers how images and texts come into dialogue in the visual and the performing arts. Historically, the interest in the relation of the visual to the textual derives from the philosophical debates around ekphrasis and as to whether painting or poetry is more adequate in expressing thoughts and emotions (cf. Lessing’s Laocoon). Meanwhile, Da Vinci praises both, each medium excelling in its own way.
In modern times, visual and textual juxtapositions become central in artistic movements such as the Russian avant-garde, Dada and surrealism; and are exemplified by conceptual art, which introduced language in a visual art context. Beyond the arts, the interdisciplinary study of image and text relations encompasses other instances of visual culture and communication such as graffiti, comics, newspapers, and advertisement.
This symposium invites discussion on any aspect of image and text relations in the visual and the performing arts, including from a historioraphical, art-critical, philosophical, semiological, communicational, curatorial, scenographic and literary perspective. Emphasis should be given on context—be it cultural, socio-political, historical or (inter)disciplinary—and on how exchanges between images and texts are received, are understood and shift perception. We are equally interested in intermediality and on a critical reflection on its benefits and limitations for creativity, imagination and knowledge production.