Le supermarché des images copy

“We live in a world increasingly saturated with images”. This is how “Le Supermarché des Images”, a group show featuring Rosângela Rennó at Jeu de Paume, in Paris, defines the exhibition that questions how the images influence our lives in the 21st century. According to the group show release, “(the number of images) is growing so exponentially – today more than three billion images shared every day on social networks – that the visibility space seems to be literally overwhelmed. As if it could no longer contain the images that constitute it.”

The question arises more than ever of their storage, their management, their transport (even electronic) and the routes they follow, their weight, fluidity or the viscosity of their exchanges, their fluctuating values - in short, the question of their economy. In the work from which this exhibition comes, the economic dimension of the life of images takes the name of economy.

Rosângela Rennó, who researches the use of images in the contemporary, participates in the group show with the flea markets private collections of slides used in the middle of the last century that she buys to document journeys, holidays and family events. She superimposes them and projects them in an unending loop that burns them, so that after some time the images fade, unable to withstand the powerful heat of the projector. Rennó takes the pictures of a past world to the point of exhaustion, using an obsolete technique that was once widely used in popular culture. Although we like to think that our images are filtered by algorithms, this exhausting task is largely done by human beings who must analyze photos and videos in a matter of seconds, deciding whether to remove them or not.

PIPA PRIZE (2020). “Le Supermarché des Images”, Featuring Rosangela Rennó. Avaiable in: https://www.pipaprize.com/2020/02/le-supermarche-des-images-featuring-rosangela-renno/