The Visual, Art, Public History and Social Change

We live in a visual age. The visual has become the language in which ideas are expressed and visual narratives shape both our imagination and the dominant common sense of a society. The visual has also become a venue for public history, the telling of historical stories. This course will explore various forms of the visual – art and cinema and how these forms and their aesthetic practices go beyond imaginaries of representations but are themselves forms of archives and contribute to the field of public history. A critical question in this course will be - can the visual change the consciousness and impulses of human beings? Can it act as a catalyst of social change? There are complex answers to these questions but in the age of visuality and rapid technological shifts which create new grounds for human life,