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Barbara Kruger The Image That Speaks Back

Barbara Kruger does not make images that want to be viewed quietly. Her work speaks back. It interrupts, corrects, accuses, questions, refuses and forces the viewer to take a position. That is the power of her visual language: she uses the tools of advertising, magazines, posters and mass communication not to sell desire, but to expose power. Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey, and is an American conceptual artist and collagist. She is associated with feminism and the Pictures Generation, a group of artists who, from the 1970s and 1980s onward, worked critically with existing images from media, advertising and popular culture. Her work is instantly recognisable: black-and-white photography, forceful text, often in white letters on red...

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Gala Porras-Kim: Who Determines What an Object Means?

Gala Porras-Kim asks one of the most urgent questions of our time: who determines what an object means? Her work investigates museums, archives and heritage institutions as places where objects are preserved, classified and protected, but also redefined. A fragment, label, inventory number, mark or damaged trace can reveal how meaning is shaped by systems of ownership, care, power and interpretation. In the context of Post-Colonial Gold, her value can be described as Marked Evidence: the idea that objects are never neutral. They carry traces of use, displacement, classification and memory. What appears small, broken or incomplete may still expose a larger cultural, historical or political system. For a new generation, Porras-Kim’s work offers a necessary way of looking: slower,...

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