Neither Visible Nor Hidden: The Structuring of the Sensible

Abstract

After the unsettling and tragic image of Alan Kurdi on the beach exploded into public consciousness through news channels, it was modified many times through various kinds of media by people around the world. This chapter reflects on how the outpouring of subsequent Kurdi images sourced from the original photograph are inter-linked with each other and engaged in a visual dialog that no one fragment is entirely privy to, yet gestures towards. These iterations invisibly agitate and inform other images, such as that of Ai Weiwei who inhabits the child’s position through a gesture in another photograph. The invisible space of tension created by showing one thing to work through something else creates a parallelism on a basis of elective affinities that enables the structuring of the sensible.