Passages de l’image

The Centre Georges Pompidou exhibition Passages de l’image, curated by Christine van Assche, Raymond Bellour, and Catherine David in 1990, marks a key turning point in both the exhibition of moving images in a gallery setting and the reconfiguration of the relationship between art and cinema that has taken place in the last 25 years. Comprised of a gallery exhibition, an extensive film programme, and a viewing room for “synthetic images,” Passages de l’image defied traditional museological practice to stage an investigation of the intermedial “passages” across cinema, photography, video, and digital images. In so doing, it delineated a field of inquiry that would be taken up internationally throughout the 1990s and which remains pressing in our contemporary moment. This conversation between Raymond Bellour, Christine van Assche, and artist David Claerbout, chaired by Erika Balsom, will revisit Passages de l’image in light of the present in an attempt to chart the legacy of this landmark exhibition. The panellists will together consider how its central questions – such as the relationship between stillness and movement, the changing character of analogy in an increasingly digital culture, and the place of cinema in the museum – continue to resonate with us today.