Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The process of reading is a continuous creation of coherence. By placing information in a certain order, you create a meaningful line. A pattern is woven by each act of reading, with every reader bringing his or her context to the text and by the layers each text has to offer. In that sense, every reading is a conversation. Not predetermined by either the reader, nor the text. As anthropologist and all-around thinker Tim Ingold has convincingly argued in his book Lines (2007), this process of line-making is omnipresent in our human lives, in many more instances than we recognise at first sight. This exploration will start from Ingold’s ideas, combined with Hanneke Grootenboer’s insights on the pensive image, to expand the concept of reading as the creation of a line of coherence to the story of images. In particular images woven into an exhibition. As a case study, it will focus on Mark Manders as a conversation partner. Manders is an interesting case in point as he builds an oeuvre that he regards to be a selfportrait in the shape of an imaginary expanding building. Let’s try to shake his hand and follow the traces of his images in the controlled environment of one of his solo exhibitions, The Absence of Mark Manders at the museum Bonnefanten (Maastricht, the Netherlands from 4.2.20 until 23.8.20).