Triumph and Trauma of Images

What humankind consider to be truths does not enter our world naked. Rather, it was and is expressed in symbols, images, archetypes and role models. As an ingredient of emotions of religious, cultic or collective orders, art and artists in particular played an important role in the transformation of our world. To be tainted by the stigma of cult and idolatry, or to enable life and works of art through the incarnation of ideas and visions – such contradictions continue to this day in the dispute over the power of images. Their triumph as a mark of sovereignty goes hand in hand with the trauma they trigger in both individuals and communities. They evoke the horror and the sacred and banish both at the same time. They are attributed a cultic aura and likewise suspected of being a false fetish in a world of globally traded commodities. From antiquity to modernity, these facets and tensions are critically explored in Judaism, Christianity and Islam as well as in philosophical discourses and secular ways of life. Our cultural history refers the viewer to the democratic or authoritarian present. Images of hope and resurrection, the fall into hell of war and the abys of the Holocaust are significant for human memory in art and media today and they require our reflection.

Look inside

• Images of the authentic and betrayal through images - art, image controversy and cult prohibition in cultures since antiquity

• Weighing souls, the Last Judgement and the Resurrection - Jewish, Christian, profane and critical arguments

• Hopes and the plunge into hell in modernity: Crises, catastrophes and the Holocaust in the commemorative cultures of modernity

Jacques Picard, professor emeritus of General and Jewish History and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel.