Call for Papers

Dates & Location: 26-28 November, 2026Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre [NiMAC] associated with the Pierides Foundation

Since the 1960s, photography has operated within an expanded field of fluid and intertwined media. More recent discussions on the post-medium condition and the expanded field of photography have situated the photographic image within debates about the collapsing boundaries between media and the emergence of modalities that unfold between image and object, as well as between representation and construction. These shifting boundaries prompt a reconsideration of how different media construct and transform conditions of visibility, particularly in relation to photography’s material conditions as they are reconfigured through emerging processes of (re)production. At the same time, systems of transmission and mediation produce new visual economies that shape contemporary modes of spectatorship. How do such expansions enable practices that restructure visual discourse and our interpretation of material cues? How might we understand the so-called “death of representation” alongside the emergence of new materialities? How can we speak of photographies’ object(hood)?

Contemporary photographic practice often reclaims object(hood) as a contingent and negotiated condition through installation, sculptural display and material manipulations such as folding, layering, embedding or printing on alternative surfaces. These interventions foreground the residual and material qualities of the image, its paper, surface, texture, weight and scale, countering the presumed dematerialisation often associated with the digital. Residue becomes the grounding element through which the image re-enters matter, revealing photography simultaneously as image and as thing. Residue, a crucial aspect of photography, is a concept that extends beyond intrinsic materialities to rethink both object(hood) and the ascendancy of the image as a pervasive cultural surface, a site of lingering traces, and of transformation. Photographic residuality operates across social, cultural and historical dimensions, placing the status (and relationship?) of image and object in a dialectical tension. Residuality does not merely arise from relations between object and image as a mimetic trace; rather, it emerges through a process of ongoing abstraction, a distanced yet permeable capability, capable of reconfiguring perception and redefining the material conditions of visual experience.