“No Looking After the Internet,” Feb. 25 at Gallery TPW R&D

HUMAN RIGHTS HUMAN WRONGS
Monday, February 25
7:30 pm
Gallery TPW R&D (1256 Dundas St. West)

In dialogue with the exhibition, HUMAN RIGHTS HUMAN WRONGS, currently on view at the Ryerson Image Centre, the February meeting of No Looking After the Internet will examine a selection of images from the exhibition, made available to visitors as free, miniature postcards placed throughout the gallery. Questioning what it means to not just look at, but to also hold, these difficult images, the February meeting of the looking group will consider the effects of circulation and framing on our understanding of photography’s relationship to human rights.

No Looking After the Internet is a monthly “looking group” that invites participants to look at a photograph (or series of photographs) they are unfamiliar with, and “read” the image out-loud together. Chosen in relation to an exhibition, an artist’s body of work, or an ongoing research project, the looking group will focus on difficult images that present a challenge to practices of looking. If these images ask the viewer to occupy the position of the witness, No Looking offers the space and time to look at these photographs in detail: to return to these difficult scenes in another context where we can look at them slowly and unpack our responses to the image.

Premised on the idea that we don’t always trust our interpretive abilities as viewers, the aim of No Looking is to examine the differences between witnessing and looking. How does a slower form of looking allow us to be self-reflexive about our role as spectators? How do we look at these images differently when we interpret them with a community of others?

No Looking takes its inspiration and name from No Reading After the Internet, an out-loud reading and discussion group facilitated by cheyanne turions and Alexander Muir that meets regularly in Toronto and Vancouver.